Archive for the ‘startup’ Category

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Startonomics – Los Angeles ’09

Monday, February 9th, 2009

Last week, I made a trip to LA for Startonomics, held on UCLA’s campus. Like most Web 2.0 conferences these days, the presentation slides are all online, and streamed live on the Web, and the videos of the talks to be available online soon. My favourite video + slides startup is still Omnisio – they still do the best job IMHO in presenting the video and slides together in sync.

So why go if all the content is online for free?

Because you can’t meet cool new people and do the face-to-face interaction thing ;)

During the conference, I jotted down some notes, pen and paper. The following are a tiny subset of them .. in a very scribbled fashion (because I have no time to make it pretty :/ )

Morning Keynote Address by David O. Sacks, Founder/CEO of Geni & Yammer

- Lesson from PayPal, don’t rely on someone else’s buy-in to succeed. If your business model hinges upon someone else saying “yes” to you, you’re fighting an uphill battle.

- Avoid deep tech in first few iterations, fail hard and fail fast. All technology as time goes by eventually grows deep anyway, once you’ve tested it on the market and you know you have a rough diamond. “Not right today, but I can fix it tomorrow”

- On the flip side, if you fail too fast, you don’t learn anything. Aka, “pace” your failure.

Get Your Bootstrap On: Starting Up When the Economy is Down by Mike Jones, CEO, Tsavo Media

* This was by far my favorite, I got to speak to Mike during the break and he’s a really cool guy. I can’t seem to embed, but you can find the video here

- Aim for success, prepare for failure

- Good startups, they send weekly status reports to their board of advisors without being asked. It measures where they are and how far they are from the projected objectives. Transparency is good.

- When you raise money, it’s your responsibility to bring back the money to your investors!

Just Like the 405: Seven Ways to Drive Bumper-to-Bumper Traffic by Jason Nazar, CEO, Docstoc

- Like Docstoc: You must ask yourself what piece of the puzzle are you solving? Are you adding value over time?

Afternoon Keynote Address by Richard Rosenblatt, Former Chairman, Myspace.com, Former CEO, Intermix Media, Co-Founder, Chairman & CEO, Demand Media

- When running a startup, things *will* go wrong. Everything MBAs project will be wrong. But if you go in knowing that you will fail, that’s okay. Because you know you will need to change and evolve your product/b-plan anyway.

- What kind of company will you build? (a) King of my hill (b) Get what the market gives you (c) Go big or go home – change landscape

Pitching and Packaging for Partnerships: How to Land Amazing Deals and Tell If They’re Working by Peter Pham, CEO, BillShrink

- You want your partners to say “you’ve built what we’ve wanted for years, but just didn’t have the resources to build it ourselves”

- You won’t get to be there in person to pitch all decision makers inside of a large corporations, but your email will be forwarded throughout the chain, so include screenshot mockups, they speak volumes for your product.

- Send partner weekly updates, move deals along, don’t let the line go cold.

How to Create a Web site the Users Eat Up and Beg for More by Ted Rheingold, Top Dog, Dogster, Inc.

- Use the “so what” litmus test on proposed new product features, fight feature-creep.

- Actionable insights are everything, don’t do inconsequentials.

- Quantitative success does not equal qualitative success.

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.. and many more below other good talks below. Check out the links, for the preso slides as well.

Jim Benedetto (SVP MySpace) on Scaling for the Masses (session 3)

Mark Jeffrey (Mahalo) on the Art of Product Development (session 2)

Neil Patel (ACS) on Finding Users (session 5)

Sean Percival (CEO Tsavo Media) on Social Media is Dead, Long Live Social Media (session 6)

Jay Weintraub (CEO LeadsCon) on Monetizing by Numbers (session 9)

Frank Addante (CEO Rubicon Project) on The Dynamics of Olympic Startups (session 10)

Dan Gould (Fox Interactive) on Idea to Advisors to Angel Funding to Series A (session 11)

Mark Suster (GRP Partners), Brian Garrett (Crosscut Ventures) and David Travers (Rustic Canyon) wrapped up the day to give their take on startups in LA, valuations in ‘09 and what it takes to get them to cut a check.

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Posted in entrepreneurship, startup, technology | No Comments »

STOP THINKING AND START WORKING

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

Hah .. the title of this post is not the result of a broken caps lock key. It’s a direct quote that I’m stealing from my now-colleague, Carl Mercier. Carl is the founder of a startup named Defensio, that my current employer just recently acquired. In a post-acquisition interview on StartupCFO, he said,

I think the best advice I can give to entrepreneurs is STOP THINKING AND START WORKING. I’m one of those guys who’s afraid to fail. I hate losing. I used to try to come up with the perfect idea and the perfect business model. Obviously, it was never quite as good as I wanted it and I was never starting anything. Not starting meant not failing: it was my comfort zone. But not starting also means not winning. It’s very cliche, but your original idea really doesn’t matter. It’s all about execution and being able to seize the opportunities that arise.

I’m a thinker, planner, strategist, but often I get stuck in the planning phase because I want to get it soooo right, the first time round. Dare I say I’m a perfectionist? I certainly don’t think so (and certainly don’t want to be one!)—but then again perhaps it’s my blind spot. I just don’t want to do a sloppy job. I can live with “good enough”.

This interview made me realize that Carl and myself had rubbed shoulders at least once before at Y Combinator’s Startup School @ Stanford, just last year. We just didn’t really know each other then. Certainly happy to know another YC SUS gang at the work place. What a small world! :)

I actually really like this quote. I’m posting it here, also to remind myself .. that subconsciously, maybe I’m just afraid to fail, as much as I convince myself that I’m not, and that I just need to get the hell out there and execute. I like it also because it hurts a sore spot.

As my Practical Product Management teacher John Milburn would say, “it ain’t worth a flip if you can’t prove it.”

p.s. Carl—By golly I swear I will make it to the cool kids pre-SUS robot party ;) See you there!

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Posted in entrepreneurship, execution, fear, startup | 2 Comments »

Lying is ok. Guy says so. I guess. That’s all I need to know.

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

Q. You dedicate a few amusing chapters in “Reality Check” to lies told by entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, lawyers, engineers, business partners and C.E.O.’s. With all this rampant lying, are you suggesting that artful lying and lie-detecting are part of the game that entrepreneurs need to master?

A. If an entrepreneur’s lips are moving, she’s probably lying — though she may not know it. Part of being an entrepreneur is that you have to lie — first of all to yourself. You have to tell yourself that you can create something, people can build it, customers will buy it and you can collect the money.

If you cannot ignore the naysayers who tell you that it can’t be done, it shouldn’t be done, it isn’t necessary, you can’t be an entrepreneur. One of the best ways to ignore is to lie and deny.

The challenge is that once you do ship, you have to remove the lie-and-deny shields and listen to what your customers are telling you. Flipping this bit is one of the hardest things for an entrepreneur to do.

From The Care and Feeding of Entrepreneurs on the NYTimes.

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Economic doom and gloom – but the greatest will arise from these ashes

Saturday, October 11th, 2008

With this week’s bloodbath in the stock market epitomized by headlines from BusinessWeek like “The Sky Falls on Wall Street“, famed angel investor Ron Conway and big name VCs like Sequoia warning portfolio company CEOs of the huge iceberg immediately ahead, what are  entrepreneurs to do to keep spirits up and look alive?

I found this post dated last January by Will Price, CEO of Widgetbox particularly insightful. Some excerpts below.

Times are bleak, but the sky is darkest before dawn. Great companies that succeed in adapting to this harsh weather will be one of the strongest built:

If I take the last downturn as my guide, I can say with confidence that venture investors would be well suited to continue to invest right through the downturn – in 2002 and 2003 terrific companies were formed and funded at very reasonable valuations and with business models that reflected the demand for capital efficiency and economic viability.

Like Occam’s Razor, recessions whittle away unnecessary and non-value-added businesses and the capital, purchase order, and resource scarcity inherent in downturns forges companies of real substance and durability.

[...]

However, history suggests that capital efficient companies solving well-characterized pain points will continue to be great investments. Valuations, input costs (labor, rent, services) will fall, and future returns will show that 2008 and 2009 were great years to do start-ups. Similarly, in early 2009, as the consumer start-up market finds itself cut off from funding, it will be pay to make bold and brave investments in the consumer space.

Entrepreneurs building a business during these times should well, focus on the business fundamentals. You can’t control the weather, but you can control how you build your business. Given the weather, a solid foundation is must. That means a real product that solves a real problem that real people would want to dive into their wallets to pay you:

None of us can predict the markets or future valuations, we all, however, can understand fundamentals. Businesses that solve real pain points with disruptive technology, a huge value/price advantage, and a scalable business model will work – the kiss of death, however, will be getting the capital structure ahead of those very same fundamentals. Failure is often a function of too much capital and too high prices suddenly running into economic expectations that are materially reduced with respect to market size, market growth, and trading multiples.

On going back to the fundamentals of a solid business:

None of us can predict the markets or future valuations, we all, however, can understand fundamentals. Businesses that solve real pain points with disruptive technology, a huge value/price advantage, and a scalable business model will work – the kiss of death, however, will be getting the capital structure ahead of those very same fundamentals. Failure is often a function of too much capital and too high prices suddenly running into economic expectations that are materially reduced with respect to market size, market growth, and trading multiples.

I agree with the general assessment of this statement, although Twitter isn’t exactly the perfect example to illustrate this point. Granted, if you are broke, you better focus on doing things to get out of being broke, but if you have a truckload of cash and being profitable is a “nice to have” .. then oh well, you can do whatever you want on your own time.

At least from what I understand anyway, Evan Williams already made a bunch from his Blogger/Pyra Labs acquisition and is in no hurry to make more money. As for Twitter investors, they aren’t either. Twitter is funded from Odeo’s funding; the latter company has already been written off as “dead” – and unlike VCs, angels don’t have fiduciary duties and thus don’t have to “go after” that money.

Ron Conway himself once said that the lack of fiduciary duty makes him more productive and thus has no interest in moving to becoming a VC. Super angel investing is just fine ;)

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Posted in business, entrepreneurship, problem-opportunity, startup, things to ponder about, things to remind myself | No Comments »

A laundry list of business problems (opportunity)

Sunday, July 20th, 2008

“Every problem is an opportunity, and the bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity. No one will pay you to solve a non-problem.”
– Vinod Khosla, on big problems and big opportunities.

The one thing I’ve come to admire about Paul Graham (using “Paul Graham” as a synonym for Y Combinator itself), is that he’s turned into quite a force to be reckoned with – aligning, match-making problems with teams and solutions, cranking up accomplishment cycles. Seems to me that these days, he has access to all sorts of real-world business problems, and conveniently enough he also practically has an army of technology entrepreneurs ready to take a bite out of any gauntlet that he throws down.

I love that quote from Vinod Khosla above, and I’m always on the look for problems, because I see them as unmet needs, and I love disruption – David vs. Goliath style take-on-the-incumbent fights. PG has recently written up on ideas for startups that he’d like to fund, so reading this list was definitely a must for opportunity-seekers, and you know what .. even if it’s not a problem that you can see yourself solving, it’s good to be aware of the problems out there in your adjacent industry.

I find #6 interesting:

More variants of CRM. This is a form of enterprise software, but I’m mentioning it explicitly because it seems like this area has such potential. CRM (“Customer Relationship Management”) means all sorts of different things, but a lot of the current embodiments don’t seem much more than mailing list managers. It should be possible to make interactions with customers much higher-res.

When I think CRM, I think of Salesforce.com, simply because well, who doesn’t associate CRM with Salesforce? ;) What I really like about Salesforce.com is how they have opened up their platform for 3rd party developers via AppExchange. Why is this such an important strategic move?

They realize that now that they are a huge company serving a huge customer base, there’s bound to be a subset of their customers whose needs are either over-served or under-served, and thus these customers will be ripe to be poached by smaller and more agile startups. Thus, the bigger Salesforce gets, it’s only a matter of time before their core market gets nibbled from say, the low end, .. which would force Salesforce.com to then shift focus on the higher end of the spectrum (and keep going higher) until the nibblers now become this real threat of displacing the incumbent.

Thus, by opening up their platform to innovation, they can capture the “long-tail” of features needed by their customer base and actually meet them. Imagine you are running some obscure business in a very niche vertical. You need CRM, but you also need this 1 extra feature very specific to your business. You now have the option to installing the “addon” to meet your needs. Other (most) companies who don’t care about this addon don’t need to install it.

What Salesforce.com has also effectively done here is allowed their SaaS bread-and-butter be customized specifically to each customer! This is powerful, because most people think that SaaS is just a web app, and because it’s served from the same web server to all customers, customization is difficult.

Software customization/personalization is also way to segment your market and extract more value from the different segments. And all of this, for free to Salesforce.com because they don’t even need to hire developers to build stuff — the platform is open to any 3rd developer. In short, AppExchange is one of Salesforce.com’s competitive advantage that builds network effects over time (like eBay), further solidifying their dominance on the market.

The iPhone too, has a developer app market place. And this too, will be a powerful force to be reckoned with by iPhone competitors over time.

Back to what PG was saying, “It should be possible to make interactions with customers much higher-res.” I wonder what he means by that exactly, but then again he did say that this list was intentionally vague. I can at the very minimum at least conclude that he sees an opportunity for innovation in CRM, which I do too :)

Paul Graham’s list of problems: http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

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Posted in entrepreneurship, problem-opportunity, product management, silicon valley, startup, things to ponder about, web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

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