Businesspeople ask me all the time how to find a technical partner for a startup.  When they ask, it often sounds like they're asking for a product off the shelf--like, "Where can I get some cheap folding chairs?"

Finding a technical partner is more akin to finding a life partner than anything else--the difference being that neither party has any intentions to stick around for fifty or sixty years.
Where to find one is kind of an interesting question, because, like single men and women, there are certainly places they are more likely to hangout--bars and listservs versus bars and clubs--but going to one of these places is no guarantee of meeting anyone.  The key is getting out there--finding as many ways as possible to meet with people and get involved in activities around your interests.

The truth of the matter is that, actually, it starts with you.  No one wants to feel like they're joining less than half a partnership, in either sense.  Don't forget that this person is adding you as a partner just as much as you're adding them, so look in the mirror and think about what you bring to the table.  Think about it this way, if you have an idea and you're willing to give up half of your company to get a technical partner, consider the CTO's side of it.

They're giving up 50% of a company to get you as a business partner, because they probably have ideas, too--ideas they could potentially own 100% of and maybe get built in their spare time.  So, what makes you worth 50%?  (Or 60,70, or 80% if you plan on giving out less...)

Let's start with finances.  The ideal partner is financially independent.  For a startup, if you are a businessperson, a) Do you already have money to start the businesses?  b) Do you already have great investor relationships who will pull the trigger on funding pending the addition of a technical partner or completion of a product?  c) Do you already have clients willing to pay upfront for your product to see it get built?   As the businessperson, financing is just one of the things you bring to the table.  If you're answer is no or maybe to the above, what value are you to the business?  What value you are you to a partner? 

If your product is technically feasible, everyone around the table should believe it can get built.  Then, there's no reason not to have people who say "If you build that, I'd be very likely to buy that/fund that."  That would be my due diligence on you if I was a technical partner--lot's of people saying yes.

If I was a technical person with a prototype, and I was going to give up half (or more) of my company to a businessperson, what would I want?  I'd want a rainmaker.  I'd want someone with a huge rolodex of people already dying to get a piece of the action of this person's next endeavor...someone with so social capital built up with key influencers, industry partners, and investors that they don't know what to do with it.

So rather than trying to make it a process of "finding" you need to think about it as "attracting".  How can you make yourself, as a businessperson, more attractive to a technical person capable, at least from a product standpoint, of executing their own ideas? 

Here are a few ways:

- Get clients and customers.  The more people signed up or at least saying they're willing to pay for something if you build it, the more attractive your business is.

- Generate a buzz with key influencers.  If smart people are talking about your idea, technical people will want to be a part of it.

- Understand the tech.  You don't have to know how to code, but if your ideas are technically unfeasible or product discussions are going to be remedial, a technical person will just move on to someone who gets it.

- Be a leader in your own field.  If you want to make it to the top of the startup/tech heap, jumping from the top of your own heap is much easier than climbing from the bottom.

- Raise money from people who know you best--even if it's just a little friends and family money, a technical person will not want to be the first risktaker in the pool.

And yes, that picture is of Alex Lines, my co-founder at Path 101, which officially launches on Tuesday... and that's how I found him when I walked in at 7:50AM this morning.

We have equal ownership in the company and I'm pretty sure he got the short end of that stick.  :)

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This is one of the top stories of the day?

Seriously?

A company moves and one blog links to it.

TechMeme shark: jumped. 

I think I'll go write a blog post about Twitter now.

1. Be confident and realize that you are pitching at all times.  I can't tell you how many times I'm at a social event and someone tells me about their startup with the pitch equivilent of a "wet noodle" handshake.  Everytime you tell someone what you do, that's a pitch.  Knock it out of the park every time. 

2. Tell me something you learned about the market or your users--shows you are adaptable.  The worst thing an entrepreneur can do is be "strong and wrong".  The best ideas are iterated on constantly--and the last person an investor wants to talk with their company about is someone who can't take feedback.

3. Tell me who you can partner with and why this is a priority for them.  It is so incredibly difficult to build traffic or revenues from scratch.  Partnerships are often the key to your uptake--so help investors understand who else in the market would be willing to work with you.

4. Who currently supports what you're doing with real action?  Has anyone made a bet on you, or does the investor need to be the first one in the pool?  Employees working for sweat equity, customer committments, family and friends willing to break their piggybanks for you--anything to make it so that the person you're talking to doesn't feel like Will Ferrell--naked in the town square with no one running behind him.

5. Show investors that you understand how to get users economically in a way that supports the model.  For example, I can't tell you how many products I've seen that offer $10-50/month subscription fees and the company tells me about going the direct sales route.  That would only work if your salespeople are willing to eat bread and water... and not particularly often. 

6. Convince investors that you are obsessed with the problem you are solving.  This needs no explanation, but is often lacking.

7. What have you learned from your competitors--know them like the back of your hand.  If an investor asks you, "Do you know the folks doing "x"?" and "x" is anything having to do with your business whatsoever, the answer better be yes, and you better know how you're better than them, can learn from them, or can work with them... and preferably you already have spoken with them.

8. Know your realistic, addressable market.  If you're selling potato peelers and only 10 million people in the country eat potatos, don't say you're going to sell 8 million peelers in year one.

9. Appreciate the feedback.  If you tell someone about your business, expect a reaction.  You might not like the reaction, but all feedback is good.  Don't try to debate people--just respond cordially with facts or assumptions that answer their question.  If you don't have those, don't start shovelling and never, ever, dismiss anyone's feedback.

10. Come see David Rose at Fordham this Thursday, March 12, 2009:

On Thursday, New York's most active community participant from the investment side, David Rose, will be at Fordham talking about pitching and raising angel capital.   David is the founder of NY Angels and runs RoseTech Ventures.  RoseTech also operates an incubator on 23rd Street and is a renowned pitch coach as well.

We will also be letting 5 companies give their two minute elevator pitch (and we really mean two minutes) for David to critique.

Date:     Thursday, March 12
Time:     06:00 PM to 08:00 PM
Organizer:      Fordham TEC

Location:
Fordham University Graduate School of Business
   33 West 60th Street 12th Floor
   New York, NY - 10023, USA

RSVP here (req'd):  http://gbadirect.bnet.fordham.edu/vo/fbd1/cal/rsvp0.aspx?ID=3839

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Fred Wilson recently wrote about whether or not entrepreneurs need a college education.  He wrote, "Education is critically important. But you don't have to go to school to be educated and if being an entrepreneur is your goal in life, that's even more true."

The other day I was having a discussion with a friend of mine who works in the food business.  She runs a cafe in a high-end, high-visabilty retail store--the flagship location for a very successful business.  I assumed she had a degree, but it turns out that she didn't.  She simply started cooking--went to Rhode Island and studied by working with some of Nantucket's most successful chefs.  She learned how to run a food business firsthand. 

Still, those stories are the exception.  People in most industries expect you to have a degree, and the stats show that you're more successful with that piece of paper than without.

However, the question gets a little trickier when it comes to whether or not you need that piece of paper from an Ivy League school or whether your local state school will do just as well.  Do you need an expensive degree?

Given the rising cost of a college degree and the current economy, more and more students are thinking about what the ROI of their education will be.  Does it really pay up to go to a "better" school?  And what does it even mean for a school to be better? 

If you're going to school with the goal of getting a good job, that would imply that graduates from better schools get better jobs--whether that means more responsibility, more pay, faster progression, or even more happiness.

Unfortunately, no one really tracks this.

US News & World Report tracks statistics like the percentage of professors with terminal degrees and what percent of the alumni base give back.  Given that we know that not all PhDs make the best teachers, and the alumni giving rate is a function of salesmanship of your alumni relations office more than anything else (or performance of your school's basketball team) then can we really count on these kinds of surveys to accurately measure the best schools?  They certainly aren't taking outcome--what happens to someone 1, 5, 10, 20 years after they graduate--into account.

So who knows that?  Anyone with a critical mass of resumes who understands different industries, job titles, etc. would know part of it--but you would also want more information.  Imagine if, after analyzing resumes, you could survey your alumni and ask them if their degree led to their success? 

Imagine students had that information even before they chose their college!

These are the kinds of things we're thinking about at Path 101 and we're looking to work with schools who want to get at the hard facts.  We're building a database of over a million resumes and analyzing careers.  We have a number of schools that have over a few thousand resumes represented in our database already and the results of how those resumes compare to their peers in the same industry are fascinating.

If you work for an alumni organization and you'd like to work with us to understand whether or not you are producing successful alumni, especially relative to your peer institutions, please contact me at charlie@path101.com.

Check out our presentation on this topic:

The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:

My name is Charlie O'Donnell and I am the Co-Founder & CEO of Path 101, a site being built to help people figure out their careers.  We were recently selected to be the first company to receive money from NYC Seed--so, first off, thanks for your support of that initiative.

I am also the founder of nextNY, a community group of over 2100 local tech and digital media professionals as well as a former analyst at Union Square Ventures.  I also teach entrepreneurship at Fordham University.  In addition,  I am the EIR at ITAC, which has been running FastTrac in NYC for years (and was noticeably and unfortunately absent from recent PR about the city's 11 point plan). 

I've testified twice in front of the City Council in the last two years on how to support entrepreneurship and innovation in NYC.

In 2007, I said...

"If there was one thing I would want to leave off with for all of those who are interested in supporting the technology community in New York City, I'll tell you simply to join it...Come to the a nextNY gathering, join our listserv, or a New York Tech Meetup.  Start reading the blogs of local entrepreneurs and blogging yourselves.  Get off the email newsletters and get on RSS feeds.  Join LinkedIn.  If you don't use the same tools as the technology community and show up to our events (instead of just inviting us to yours), you are never going to be looked upon as a source of active support and your programs will fail to get traction. "

In 2008, I said...

"More than anything else, though, I think it's important that our local government--the individuals--lead by example and participate in the local technology community.  The local community is hyper connected through blogging, social networking sites, and a quirky but rapidly growing service called Twitter that ties people together one 140 character short form message at a time.  There are currently almost 2000 up and coming technology and digital media professionals on the nextNY listserv--are any of you on it?   Sure, it's kind of geeky in it's content, but you can set it to provide a daily digest.   If you're not on it, and can't spare the time to read the one daily digest e-mail of the group's activities, I'm not exactly sure how you're really going to be able to be supportive of the local tech community.  Communities are growing organically on these sites--like the 500+ people who have attached themselves to the Shake Shack Twitter account, mostly local tech folks, in order to navigate the long lines at our favorite local food establishment.   These communities are growing largely without the participation of local government leaders.  How many of you have a blog on your own websites that gets at least one posting a week, or a social networking profile that you yourself actually login to with similar frequency?   If you're not doing this, you're really not going to be in the flow of the needs of the local community."

A couple of weeks ago, you put out a press release about your 11 point plan to foster innovation in NYC.  Compared to the kind of community idea generation platform we saw with the Obama campaign and transition, the approach to this didn't seem too... well... innovative.  It certainly wasn't very participatory as only a few people knew it was coming, and honestly, most of the entrepreneurs in the community still don't know too much about it.  We tend not to read government press releases.  Seems only fair, as few people in government read our blogs.

The other day, I got an invite to a closed door meeting about building a centralized web presence to support entrepreneurship in NYC.  The invitation reminded me that I was not to discuss the contents of the meeting elsewhere--which, as a blogger, just makes me think of the word "muzzle".  For an entrepreneur whose pitch presentation is up on our site for everyone to see, and who fully believes transparency is the way to go, this seems archaic.  (I'm not the only one who believes in transparancy, btw...)

I can't make it, because I'll be at Union Square Ventures' Hacking Education conference, but what's really clear to me is this:

If you're really interested in getting the best possible feedback on what the NYC entrepreneurial community needs to grow, I'd highly suggest participating in the NYC entrepreneurial community... the way actual entrepreneurs do.

Every time I ever meet with city representatives, EDC folks, testify in front of the city counsel, etc... I invite the folks I meet to join the nextNY listserv, come to our events, or to a NY Tech Meetup--to participate in the very community you say you are trying to support.

To my knowledge, no one has ever accepted the invitation.

Don't get me wrong.  I know Mayor Bloomberg is never going to come and sit in on the Tech Meetup, even though he should.  However, there's no excuse for the junior folks in your organizations not to come mix with us.  That was part of my job at Union Square Ventures--to network with the innovation community wherever they were and whenever.  (So, yes, that includes "after work", which has no meaning to an entrepreneur.) 

This Monday is the NY Tech Meetup. There should be EDC, SBS, City Council reps there every month--500+ entrepreneurs meeting up to see innovative new companies. If you're not there, then how will you know how to help this community? If you're answer is "We don't really want to be a part of the community, we just want to ask a small handful of people that may or may not be representative of it" then your efforts are bound to fail.

As for the website, you're You're looking to build what you call "a key missing component to hold together the community in the City"--but the reality is, we've been holding together pretty well. You just don't see it because you're not in the same places, online and offline, as we are.

In the last couple of months, nextNY has had four events for startups--all free, including an event at Sun last week with about 90 people. Three years ago, I started nextNY and we now have 2100+ members, around two third of which work for startups of less than 10 people. We
average about an event a month and lately even more than that. Last week's topic: Understanding tech if you're a business person with a startup idea. We had two experienced startup CTOs, two CEOs and two tech consultants, as well as representatives from Sun.

NYC Entrepreneurs are regularly interacting in existing digital spaces--the nextNY listserv, Twitter, through blogging. That's how all these people found out about the event--and remember they weren't techies. These were business people looking to understand tech, and they still found it. I posted it to the NY Tech Meetup listerv, to nextNY, it was on Gary's Guide, and I tweeted it.

Did you know about it?

Are you participating in any of these tools?

If not, honestly, I don't see how you'll ever understand the technology needs of the entrepreneur community or how to even evaluate our feedback. By not using these tools, for all intents and purposes as far as the innovation community is concerned, you're not listening--because that's where we are talking.

How much do you think my interest in talking with people who are not listening is?

This meeting should be a *public* discussion. We should invite anyone and everyone who wants to participate--not to have 500 people each attempt to give separate pieces of advice... but to have a small group discussion that is open for others to watch, and then ask questions and
make suggestions during a certain set aside time.

Allow anyone to take video, blog it, tweet it, what have you... because here's what you'll get:

1) You'll build a brand in the community that shows you're interested in engaging, in touch, and forward thinking.

2) You'll start a conversation... a trackable one where you'll get way more ideas afterwards in the blogs and discussion boards than you could ever get in one meeting.

3) We as the community will be able to see whether or not you're open to our ideas... because the public discourse will make you accountable to follow up on our suggestions or provide reasons why you are not. Otherwise, the only people who will know whether or not their ideas get ignored are the ones in the small group of invitees.

That's the kind of discussion I'd be really interested to participate in... not a closed door meeting where I can't blog about the ideas discussed.

Sincerely,

Charlie O'Donnell

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Good idea:

"...welcome foreign innovators. Harvard research fellow Vivek Wadhwa reports that immigrants have founded more than half of all Silicon Valley start-ups in the past decade. These immigrant-led, American tech companies employed more than 450,000 workers and grossed $52 billion in 2005. For U.S. companies to employ a highly specialized foreign worker, the employee must hold an H-1B visa, but current law allows for the issuing of only 65,000 H-1B visas per year. The H-1B cap was established to prevent foreigners from taking American jobs, but, in fact, an education gap frequently leaves American candidates less qualified for these positions. Lawmakers could improve the situation all around by removing the cap on H-1B visas while imposing a 10 percent payroll tax above and beyond the benchmark salary for any position being filled by holders of such visas. The proceeds of the payroll tax could be channeled into U.S. reeducation programs. This compromise would bring the best innovators to work here while subsidizing the continued education of American talent."

Bad idea:

"...match funds for venture capital and angel investments. Venture firms and investors need financial incentives to invest in companies that create U.S. jobs. What if firms with credible histories could receive as much as $100 million in federal matching funds if their investments create jobs in the United States?"

Reid Hoffman - Let Start-Ups Bail Us Out - washingtonpost.com

moar funny pictures

Have you seen Skittles.com lately?  It's now an aggregation of Twitter search, Facebook, YouTube, etc...  Instead of pages on Skittles.com, you essentially get pages from other social network sites, about Skittles, but at the Skittles URL. 

Like the Matrix, you can't really be told.  You have to see it for yourself.

People are going to have two reactions to this.

Self proclaimed social media gurus and advertising wizards are having a field day with it.  They're tweeting and blogging about it left and right--causing it to shoot right to the top of the Twitter trending topics list...

...which of course means that, when I go to Skittles.com, I can go see a Twitter search page for Skittles, which is filled with links to Skittles.com... thus creating an infinite loop capable of tearing a hole in the space-time continuum, ending all life as we know it.

Way to go, Agency.com. 

On the other hand, anyone not familiar with Twitter, which is probably most of the 18,000 average monthly visitors that previously came to Skittles.com and who will come to Skittles.com in the future when they hopefully change it into something less half-assed, will be seriously effin' confused.  They will undoubtedly get annoyed, frustrated and leave.

The folks at Agency.com will probably get praised for being so cutting edge, even though the Skittles idea was pretty much a ripoff of the Modernista site.

Instead, they should be burned at the social media stake for promoting everything that's wrong with big companies engaging in social media.

Where do I begin?

1) Instead of reaching out into the community and showing up in our spaces, they took our spaces and brought them back to their site.  Instead of sending traffic to us, they took our stuff and made it all about them.

2) Now their site is all about people talking about their site--which is kind of like bragging, in a way.  How exactly does that make visiting their site a good experience?  I go to Skittles to see who's talking about Skittles?  Is that what I came for?  If I wanted that, it'd go to Twitter search--the version without all this floating Skittles crap on top of it.

3) They didn't make it easy for the mainstream to participate.  When you show up on Skittles.com, it's not obvious to the non-Twitterer WTF is going on and how you get your thoughts on the page at all.

You know what's a really great experience in comparison?  Jelly Belly.  Over 130k monthly vistors and the site has a ton of news, info, virtual tours.  No, it doesn't have a ton of social media juice, but in terms of effectiveness, it's got 10x the normal traffic as Skittles, and, OMG, people are still Twittering about Jelly Belly even without this silly social media publicity stunt of a website.  Best of all, it has tons of info about Jelly Belly, which is exactly what I expect and want when I go to the Jelly Belly corporate site.

Right now, Skittles.com isn't telling me much about the product--at least not anything more than Wikipedia was already telling me.

It isn't telling the stories of it's customers.

It isn't entertaining.  Did you watch the YouTube videos?  They're mind numbingly stupid.

What's the point, other than generating a lot of chatter about the campaign, rather than about the product?

Fail.

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The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:

Andrew Chen is asking which startup's collapse will end the Web 2.0 Era?

End the Web 2.0 Era?  Wait... so are we going to ditch open source, go back to high burn rates, long and slow builds, and not focusing on data at all? 

How exciting for Microsoft!

Back in 2005, Tim O'Reilly attached the name "Web 2.0" to a set of emergent technology principals--guidelines for building "lightweight", data-focused, web services. Most of the services that inspired such categorization never consciously decided to be or aspired to be "Web 2.0 companies". That's usually the way evolution happens--natural selection and environmental adoption spits up a set of traits that get adopted through natural selection and some anthropologist comes along later and throws a taxonomy on it--drawing lines across the gray areas almost making them seem intentional.

I guess that's how the intelligent design theory got started.

These companies were simply pushing the edge of what we've come to know as best practices.  They aimed to solve particular sets of problems given current technology capability, cost and penetration. Stewart and Catarina weren't trying to build a Web 2.0 company at Flickr, nor was Joshua at del.icio.us.

In fact, I can't think of any startup where the intention was to "build something Web 2.0". Instead, the thinking was usually, "Wouldn't it be better if you could see the reviews of your friends?" or "Instead of making content, why don't we let our users share their own content" or "Let's just code this up in Rails, put out an alpha, and see what people think of it."

It all just seemed easier/quicker/more efficient to accomplish certain things using these Web 2.0 principals.  It was like that even before Web 2.0 had a name. You just had less people familiar enough with the technologies to apply them to real problems and build solutions until we popularized them with a monniker.

However, from a business perspective, grouping the set of companies whose products exposed these principals is a gross miscategorization.  Spread out across a myriad of uncorrelated industries, some were amazing ideas, many were not (as normally happens with innovation and entrepreneurship). Some had clear business models, others did not--and to confuse things, others had potential business models they chose to forgo to get scale or market share.

Andrew writes, "it turned out that most of these startups didn’t work out as real businesses."

Most startups don't work out as real businesses.  That's because creating something from nothing is hard.  It isn't because they're "Web 2.0" any more than it's because they were using open source technology.  You wouldn't turn around and say that most startups using open source fail and then blame open source, right?  Most startups ultimately don't make it anyway--and it usually has something to do with poor execution, bad management decisions, failure to solve a big enough problem or provide the right solution, etc.

Here's the truth: There never was a Web 2.0 any more than there ever really was a Yugoslavia. You just can't arbitrarily tie things that have very little to do with each other and slap a name on it--expecting it to be cohesive. If I use AJAX and Rails to build a group scheduling application for enterprises, it requires a completely different knowledge base and business accumen to make a Rails+AJAX real estate investment modeler--and no boom or bust in the Web 2.0 space will affect both equally.

At the end of the day, these companies will live and die because of their underlying sector and management execution more than whether "Web 2.0" falls out of favor. Indeed.com is much more correlated to recruiting than it is to Web 2.0.  Zoho needs to execute a good sales strategy for the SMB market rather than it needs to keep up with all the companies reviewed on TechCrunch. Muxtape didn't die because it was a Web 2.0 company. It died because it stepped in the mindfield we know as the music industry without a map.

Reporters and pundits will undoubtedly call the shakeout of companies started '04-'07 the end of Web 2.0, but the reality is that it's really just the end of a bunch of pretty unrelated businesses that had poor value propositions or business models--i.e. par for the course in Startupville. It's hard to be successful--even in good times. Most startups don't make it. 

In the beginning and in the good part of a cycle, the busts don't get the headlines. They're dwarfed by the launches and the fundings. With less fundings, and more companies with their heads down trying to build businesses than wasting their time pitching to TechCrunch, we were bound to hear more of Chicken Little. Since crashes gather more clicks than stories of unrelated individual companies running their course, that's what we have.

Silly bloggers. Web 2.0 can't die. It never existed in the first place.

Great comment on Andrew's post:

"An interesting difference between this wave and the experience we went through in 99-01 is that most of them will not collapse in big ways. Think about watching a 2 story building versus a collapsing old Vegas casino.
1. They are smaller, and even ones that are bigger can operate very small. I wonder what a 200 person Facebook looks like financially.
2. The ad revenue is alot of the time being done with ad networks that did not exist in 99, including Google so there is less fixed costs.
3. I don't know anyone who has bought an EMC box in this wave, infrastructure is much less of a fixed cost
4. Not alot of Oracle licenses that have to be paid up each year anymore either.
5. And most importantly, I think we all learned something last time and things just did not get as crazy in the start up world.
So maybe just like there weren't any big exits, there might not be any massive failures. But I guess we all know there will be some. Who will be the pets.com of Web 2.0 ?"

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Back in November, NBC Digital head George Kliavkoff left the company, but not without sending out a message to the troops.  In it, he cited that "NBCU has made significant strides in digital" and that he had done his job well enough that there really wasn't a need for him anymore.

After NBC (EDIT: and Fox--bad to assume both owners aren't at fault here) just forced Hulu to yank its content from Boxee--a browser built for TV that sent them 100,000 streams just last week--it reminds me of another "Mission Accomplished" speech. 

Check out the excerpts:

"I believe in my heart that this is a best time to start, run or invest in digital companies..."

Unless of course those digital companies need any content whatsoever.  Then, the practice of sacrificing virgins to the content-owning overlords may prove too costly for startups located in NYC or LA--given the rarity of chaste women in those cities.  I'm enthusiastic, however, about the potential of some Utah-based companies...

"I want it to be clear that my group does not take credit for any of these other than having helped set a tone..."

Don't blame me if this shit didn't stick. 

"...and create a culture where hopefully there was a new focus on, and understanding of, digital."

They totally understand digital.  In fact, some of them can even use it in a sentence. 

"NBCU successfully worked with ISPs and content aggregation partners..."

And by "content aggregation partners", we mean sites we own and not necessarily sites or services we plan to kick squarely in the nuts.

"These accomplishments, and many others, too numerous to mention, are an indication that a digital mindset has in fact taken hold throughout NBCU, in every business unit."

And by "digital mindset", I mean that NBCU employees have all been replaced by soulless robots programmed to do one thing... 

Help aliens destroy the world.

The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm: