links for 2007-09-05
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This is pretty friggin cool... and its an idea that I threw around with an entrepreneur at USV like two years ago.
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Lindsay Lohan reads my blog, too!
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Toby and Brooke are my fav couple friends... Perhaps Mere and I should do something like this.
5 Things I'd like to see in Dopplr
So Dopplr got funded and so I feel inclined to spend a little more time thinking about what I'd really like it to do, because it's a great concept.
- Events: Show me, in a structured way, why people are going where they're going. If everyone I know is planning on going to SXSW, tell me, and tell me where everyone who plans to attend SXSW is coming from. People have been trying to nail the relevant events thing for a while and if Dopplr could tell me what out of town conferences people were planning on attending, that would be a great dataset to show everyone--particularly the conference providers themselves. Who's coming for Day One, Day Two, or who's just in the area for other stuff
- Let the people drive the dates. I'm thinking about trips to Boston, Providence, and Toronto in the next month or so, but I'm kind of up in the air about it. Dopplr forces a date on me. Why can't I just say, "Sometime in the next month" and see if other people are planning on going at any time within that. Seeing that kind of data might help me narrow down my trip.
- Show me strangers... like, on every page. When you first join Dopplr, the user interface just doesn't show a heck of a lot of people. It feels like an empty place. I should be able to see who is coming to NYC in the next week, even if I don't know them.
- Combine with other profiles. I'm glad to see Reid Hoffman investing in this, and hopefully, when the LinkedIn API comes out, Dopplr will be one of its first developers. I'd like to see the LinkedIn profiles of people who are coming to NY and at the same time, the Dopplr intentions of everyone in my LinkedIn network.
- Dopplr Autopost: Before you build a widget that most of my RSS hungry audience is never going to see or use, allow autoposting of Dopplr updates to my blog (and yes, my Facebook). When I add a possible trip to Boston, even if I know the dates, I want a post on my blog to automatically appear that says, "I'm thinking about going to Boston soon... find out what dates and subscribe to my updates via my Dopplr feed."
Dopplr to me: Add to me! Add to me! Sigh.
I'll prob be doing a fair bit of traveling for the rest of the year. Toby suggested I join Dopplr, which I did.
And then I sat there and stared at it.
Here's an app desperately in need of a "Find your Gmail friends on Dopplr" tool. It wanted me to add trips, so I added one. Nothing happened. I thought I might find some people going up to Boston on weekend of the 15th. Nope... nothing.
So, um... what's the point?
Don't apps need, um... like, magic or sex or something? Shouldn't you show something to the user to hook them? Keep them engaged?
Perhaps I don't know enough Web2Heads that go to all the same confereces as everyone else.
Yay Path 101 Competition! 5 Ways Yahoo! will mess up Kickstart
I was excited to see that Yahoo! thinks there's an opportunity in the college career space. They're supposedly creating a new social network called Kickstart. From the Path 101 perspective, I say, "Bring it."
Man, I can't wait to see this.
So, when's the last time a big media giant created a really successful social platform from scratch?
[crickets]
It seems like we're not even sure if this is just vaporware, but even if it isn't, I'd say there are at least five things that Yahoo! is inevitably going to trip up on.
- Hell hath no fury like a media company scorned by a social network. They couldn't buy Facebook, so they decided to make their own. But, they needed an angle. What do college students what? A social network about beer? Nope... they're underage. Sex? No, can't do that, not that it wouldn't be successful. Ah! Jobs! Yes, jobs! It seems like Yahoo! is starting out with the idea that what they're building must be a social network, without really considering whether or not the social network approach makes the most sense. This is just bad product development. You don't walk into a problem and say, "Whatever the opportunity is in this space, we're going to solve it with a social network... and a hammer." I actually tend to think that social connecting/friending isn't what students really need... it's content, direction, guidance, tools... Just connecting is like handing students a business card. They don't have any clue what to do with that connection and how to get the most of it, let alone even know who to connect with in the first place.
- Play well with others? Ha! Let's see... 34 million Facebook users. 14 million LinkedIn users. Let's build our own thing and not plug in to the vast networks of existing students and professionals already out there and start completely from scratch because we want to own this category. If you can't bridge the gap to your customers by meeting them in the places they already are, then don't expect them to come to you.
- It's going to be all about jobs and companies. Yahoo! knows how to sell stuff, like jobs and ads. So, they're going to build something that is going to be immediately monetizable, meaning its going to be all about companies, jobs, etc. There are two problems with that. What about companies that aren't on there? What if I don't want to work for some big corporation that can afford to pay Yahoo! to have a presence on Kickstart? Is this going to be a place where art students are going to find jobs? What about drama majors and people looking to work in the non-profit fields? Doctors? What about grad school? Or, most importantly, what if I don't have a clue what I want to be? What then? Am I likely to join a social network based around job recruiting if I'm "undecided"? I highly doubt you'll see any freshmen or sophomores on this site because they haven't chosen a field of interest yet and probably aren't sure where to go. That's the real problem that needs solving... helping them figure out where they want to direct themselves, not connecting kids who already know what company they want to work for (which is how many of them anyway?) Here's the other thing. Because of their HotJobs affiliation, is Yahoo! ever going to tell a student that the best way to get a job is through networking? What they're doing isn't real networking. It's putting a social network around a job posting. There's no way Yahoo! will eat its own lunch and totally disrupt the jobs space. They'll find a way to perpetuate the old business model of charging for posted jobs at a few hundred bucks a pop. In a pure socially networked world, there wouldn't be that kind of opportunity to extract so much value, because the right opportunities would fall into the right laps all the time in a seemless, barrierless way.
- Professionals: Sign up and get spammed by students desperate for jobs. If I'm a professional working at a company, exactly what is my motivation to sign up for a social network based around getting college kids jobs? If I put a profile up and people can contact me, aren't I opening myself up to just getting spammed with resumes? The service has to work for everyone involved and if all these college kids can only find their way to a company by connecting to someone who works there, the last thing I'd want to be is the first Google employee who puts a profile up--especially since the atmosphere here is all about jobs. Professionals love giving advice and helping students away from the recruiting process and such relationships are best built over time. If the whole thing is just focused on jobs, its going to have the feel of one of those really bad "networking mixers".
- Their customer is the company. One of the advantage that startups have over bigger companies is that they can spend a little time purely focused on value to the end user first before figuring out who their customers are. Take Indeed. Indeed could never have gone to job boards day one and said, "We'll crawl all of you, and then you pay us to sponsor your listings and get them to appear in the sidebar results." However, after they proved to be a very compelling consumer service with growing traction, job boards realized the value, especially the smaller ones, and got on board with what they were doing. When you are a big media company, you don't exactly take risks with your clients, but where that leaves you is lacking in the end user value. I mean, would YouTube have become so big if they didn't start out with all sorts of illegal clips? Students want real insider content... and real discussion. Do you think any of these students are going to get into a discussion on the Nike page of whether or not they'd actually like to work for Nike given their history of human rights violations? Have they cleaned up their act? Is this a place I want to work? I wouldn't ask with the recruiter sitting right there in my network, that's for sure.
Look, Alex and I haven't built anything yet and the proof is in the pudding, but seeing these kinds of attempts just gives me that much more confidence that we have the right approach with Path 101 and will succeed. I've been in the classroom with students talking with them not as a corporate focus group, but as a teacher, mentor, recruiter, etc... not asking them, "Hey, if we built this, would you sign up for it" but discussing their real struggles. They don't know where to start and this isn't it. Not only do they not have a network, but they don't know what to do with a network once they have it. They don't know how to e-mail a professional. The services that are out there don't attempt to tackle the hardest but most compelling problem in the career development space... how to get students figuring out for themselves where they belong and pursuing those paths. Just throwing a bunch of jobs and companies at them is window dressing and not going to really help them figure much out. If anything, it just perpetuates the problem that most students think their only options are to become bankers and lawyers or work for big companies, because that's who they see recruiting. Path 101 will get them talking, exploring, using tools, very much the same way TheKnot.com not only helps you find flowers for your wedding, but helps you actually think about what kind of a wedding it is you want to have in the first place. After that, flowers are the easy part.
Running out the quarter: Bo Jackson in Tecmo Super Bowl
Bo Jackson: Greatest video game athlete ever
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?