Facebook Developers Garage on Saturday Aug 25th 2007. rocked!!!! It was an awesome event with 300 developers all handon discussions at Facebook headquarters, with excitement in the air that we are all part of some new beginning.
Caitlin O'Farell of Facebook organized it and keep a smooth flow of the event. Thanks Caitlin!
10 min of Lightning Round presentations by real facebook App developers
Everyone sharing their experience building and scaling Apps was the highlight of the event as they had different viewpoints about scaling, my summary is below.
All in all, Facebook is in early stages as a development platform with great promise with many smart minds betting on it with lot of promise to bring the real promise of the web to provided hosted solutions with power to user communities and promise of building inter-operable applications building on each other, reducing development costs. Its left to us to build Applications that create fundamental value and create businesses here!
1. Tyler Ballance of Slide was a great speaker, spoke in depth about building apps thats scale:
* Choose the language you are most comfortable in - php, .net or rails Do not choose php because Facebook is built in php or rails because thats new.
* Focus on building App and getting it to users, don't write spagetti code, optimize later.
* Compartmentalize your business logic from interface layer, similar to any large software app during design.
* Facebook helps to scale Apps using social graph, so you may scale from 1 to 3Mil in a week, so focus on your database which can crash with too many hits, keep a simple schema, key on integers,
* FBML on canvas pages is easy to scale, it puts the load on Facebook servers and they fix quicker than App developers, your App doesn't have to fetch users name, profile etc. Cut unneccssay calls to Facebook API because if anything on facebook users blame you as they cannot tell the difference. eg. iframe
* With IFRAME/HTTP you never have absolute control. The disadvantage of using IFRAME is the need to call FB API a lot and it heightens load on your server. Also limitation on multi user access with FBfriend selecter so, Slide (tyler) built their own multi-friend seletor for Top Friends App.
* Use Browers processing to your advantage eg Flash on the browser, use Javascript even if slow, offers better user experience
* Keep in touch with new FB stuff, they are fixing and adding to our feedback.
* Most users are on FB for fun, checkout what friends are doing, leisure activity. integrate as much as possible with social graph.
* Someone asked about importing 3000 friends. Tyler said there is technical limitations in interacting with FB API they'll timeout so they did batch loads in Top friends.
2. Joyce of Booze-mail from Renkoo $1M users serving 1Million drinks served per day.
* Joyce had a different views from Type on software calls and perception of Facebook users behavior.
* She gave detailed of what backend they have to manage the load.
they use HAProxy as Loadbalancer- free open source one and 3 webservers on Amazon Web Services which is slow, old, not too much memory with problem for persistence.
* They use Heap Writes, denormalizing them.
* Added a tier of Image caching, They use "Vanish" not "MemcacheT" which was Tyler's favorite (so it appeared)
* Joyce thinks people will do more than the simple fun things of today on facebook, though Booze-mail is purely in that fun category.
3. Matt Culver of Amazon Web Services(AWS) spoke briefly about using AWS, it first appeared he was part of the Booze-mail team, but he was talking about Amazon Web Services for FB App developers.
* Most people in the room knew about Amazon Web Services so he just gave some pointers.
*Amazon EC2 - aws.amazon.com blog aws.typepad.com, wiki - evangelists.wetpaint.com and CTOS Who Use AWS, a group on Facebook. Interestingly this group has open discussions on AWS alternative and comparision with AWS.
4. Ali Partovi, CEO of ilike.com affirmed how Facebook was THE PLATFORM for anyone building any web business.
*They started as a dot come with ilike.com and their growth spiked once they decided to become a total facebook application business.
* They have 16 Engg, 100% of time spent on Facebook Platform
*Ali is very optimistic on Facebook as a platform and addressed some user's concerns. He said think of creating an entire business, not just another widget.
*Are you worried about dependency on Facebook?
He trusts current management team but says build interdependency with FB depends on us too so they won't compete.
* He said all business on any platform needs to think of sustainability so no one can replicate their business. Ilikes is building connection between parties - itunes and facebook, ticketmaster, platform for artists to create profiles on facebook. They offer a music api to add music to other apps which is stitching them into the Facebook ecosystem.
5. Courses - Michael and Joeseph spoke very honestly about their experience.
*Wish I could talk to myself the night I launched.
*Take lot of advice from slide.
*Common theme of the day from everyone was- put your app out there and see what works.
*Get mathametical with your app - track every link - where its coming from, every invitations, see whats works, whats not, adapt quickly to emphasise the stuff that works.
* Settings preview of profile boxes - let users know as users get desensitized by notification.
*Michael was teacher for 3 yrs, found it difficult to get students to get to use any technology, but students were connecting on Facebook so this was perfect to build course on FB.
*Users care about things you didn't know so listen to your discussion boards.
* He said "Slide is wrong, not just fun, facebook is going to become the center of how we organize different aspects of our life."
Personally it reminds me of the early days of the web when everyone defined it from their perspective.
*What rail server - mongrols, optimizing for scaling have lot of work to do! have 30K users. *Working on a tax application by the side.
* Mistakes -didn't launch quickly once Fb decided to get rid of their courses app.
Focus on one thing that your users care about.
*Two of us full-time older brother helping part-time at night.
*Fun - making invite page lot better. walker.com - video chatroom where people can get together and talk.
*Tracking - started by using Google Analytics, slowing us down, build your own analytics into app right at start.
6. Joe an Eric Diep - Quizzes interviews - 4 mil users
*Started at F8 launch party.
*Work independently - manage your time, set your own schedule;
*Wear a lot of hats. scale, develop, dedicate time to talk to people outside us,
*Don't worry about scale.
*Great opportunity to make something in 1 weeks effect.
*Your app is prototype, pay attention to user feedback, some user needs guidance.
*Track everything what works what doesn't.
* We have 4 boxes for servers
*How do u deal with imitiation app - with same name. Facebook allows app with same name which is an issue for all developers.
*important not to think about monetization -till u have users invested in your product, coming back.
7. James of Box.net
*James platform Director for Box.net
*Facebook - not going to be same in 2 years, getting ready for it.
*Users - learning - schools used CMS. connect learning in school and your social graph. *Edutainment games, tutoring, - all apps
*Opening Files App as a platform for developer on facebook.
*Apps to share docs and tags and description with other apps.
* Tyler compared with FB Datastore which came from Facebook. Looks like something Facebook launched similar to the App, which is going to be an issue if we build something that can be part of the FB core OS.
8. Rock You Lance Tokuda, CEO RockYou
* Gave good stats on distrinution of users for apps. 87% Apps have than 10K users
1% have Million+
*RockYou owns Super wall which has 4.8Mil users
* He gave a casestudy of how they helped Y! Music Videos scale.
Y! Music App had only 7K users in 1 month. RockYou ported same source code and added viral features got 900K users in couple weeks.
What they did:
- Cross sell apps network got 100K users
- Virality , integrated with superwall,
* Lance gave a framework of designing good Facebook Apps
a) New users - simple linear flow, min steps to configure apps, provide defaults (min work)
b)Engage friends
Engage on invite- strong call for action
Ideal is when friends want to engage all friends
ongoing engagement - trigger events to invite friends or connect with them.
c) virality
Strong call to action for receiver
d)Integration with other Apps - cross sell existing user base
eg. likeness - quiz related to music
peter louis who developed superwall was there to talk to everyone.
* Louis announced Superwall API - All media types supported images, video, flash.
==
9. Chris Chan - Causes 3M users.
*Decision - name causes has a positive feel.
*Looks like Facebook (not separate branding), credibility with same font size, style.
* Decided to accept donations
*Viral flow - show cause page without adding app. If you shorten viral play too much, users won't understand what the apps is about.
* Tech - Asynchronous, reduce depenedency on Facebook. Stats we track and update, separate from user requests. Hired SQL consultant helped.
*F8 Story - Blake built zombie and vampires and chris. 10 days launched at F8 at 2pm.
$300K for donations, its 10cents per user. Testing is like eating vegetables.
User Announcements
1. VC view (didn't catch the VCs name, will check my notes and update): People will come, Facebook users are going to be worth $10/user so everyone should build apps for facebook.
2. Worth checking out collegewikis.com
Dave @ Facebook summarized the day, then there was Pizza, networking and a round of indepth technical discussions.
Dave's summary talks about Facebook's welcoming attitude towards users and builds trust to build on Facebook as the next platform.
He says, users drive growth for apps, listening to community and adapt. Some apps are building an ecosystem of services offering interoperability between communities, which is very exciting for Facebook, which he calls "Value center community" so he encouraged everyone to build a suite of apps like Rockyou.
PS: I'll upload my photos from the event on FB later.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Friday, August 24, 2007
Animoto - Making videos in 5 minutes Awesome
Found this cool technology to make videos so easily in 5 minutes!
A new startup Animoto, based out of NY has come with a cool technology.
Its child play - What is video - you pick some pictures, add some music mix them, make the pictures move and become a video! Add 15 pictures and in 5 minutes you get a video!
Awesome!!! Personally I was prepared for funky UI and no help and Animoto pleasantly surprised me. Its clean UI, seamless experience with decent help message on the side.
I emailed them and got good support response too.
You can see the depth of thinking behind the technology and productizing it. They offer the choice to use your own images, or pick it up from Flickr or anywhere on the web. They allow you to post the video on any blog or myspace etc. I am going to add this to my Facebook for sure!
Only limitation now is that they seamlessly log into my Flickr account but don't allow me to pickup public Flickr pictures to make a video. Appears more a decision not to get to get into copyright issues!
They have free 30 sec video (you can get a feel for BarCamp with this video), or you can upgrade to make longer movies. They allow private sharing of videos or uploading for public sharing. Intutive interface instead of the standard public and private views! They have teasers of what all is coming in the pipeline so you can take the video to your ipod or burn a CD I guess.
Animoto has great promise, has lot of startup energy, smells of success and fun. Sure viral play, so we are going to see a lot of Animotos soon. Enjoy!
A new startup Animoto, based out of NY has come with a cool technology.
Its child play - What is video - you pick some pictures, add some music mix them, make the pictures move and become a video! Add 15 pictures and in 5 minutes you get a video!
Awesome!!! Personally I was prepared for funky UI and no help and Animoto pleasantly surprised me. Its clean UI, seamless experience with decent help message on the side.
I emailed them and got good support response too.
You can see the depth of thinking behind the technology and productizing it. They offer the choice to use your own images, or pick it up from Flickr or anywhere on the web. They allow you to post the video on any blog or myspace etc. I am going to add this to my Facebook for sure!
Only limitation now is that they seamlessly log into my Flickr account but don't allow me to pickup public Flickr pictures to make a video. Appears more a decision not to get to get into copyright issues!
They have free 30 sec video (you can get a feel for BarCamp with this video), or you can upgrade to make longer movies. They allow private sharing of videos or uploading for public sharing. Intutive interface instead of the standard public and private views! They have teasers of what all is coming in the pipeline so you can take the video to your ipod or burn a CD I guess.
Animoto has great promise, has lot of startup energy, smells of success and fun. Sure viral play, so we are going to see a lot of Animotos soon. Enjoy!
Saturday, August 18, 2007
BarCampBlock - Thank You! Tara you are Ms.BarCamp!
I've been to BarCamp Boston and Manchester, but it was a totally new experience going to BarCampBlock in Palo Alto, where it all started.
I spent more time on the block than sessions and learned a lot! The beauty of BarCamp is that each person takes something different based on what they are focused on and what they contribute!
Great Organization to the team and Ms.BarCamp Tara!
My previous topics at Barcamp Boston has been about taking a concept to business and raising money. I decided to go with an open mind and not talk about the same topic.
Thanks to Tara, Chris, Tantek, Ross and Liz on great organization. The energy all over the block was amazing and contagious. Tara would be talking to a group, and keep an eye to refill drinking water and food to keep us all fed. She is amazing, and is Ms.BarCamp!
Utream.tv captures the chaos and energy as everyone rushed to the grid to build the conference schedule on the fly!
Brian Solis has done justice to cover the people of the crowd! Missed Robert Scoble sneaking out of his non-blog week :-)
Lawrence Sinclair was a star as he instantly brought together a bunch of Facebook App Developers and formed a co-working group to develop more cool Apps.
Its an understatement to say that I met most of the people who I've got to know in the first 6 months of my valley visits all here at BarCampBlock.
One has to experience BarCampBlock to know how being a techi is cool here, being an entrepreneur is great, and everyone gets to action to brainstorm and collaborate in real time to create the thriving silicon valley culture!
I've been bitten by the "Facebook As a Platform" bug recently and some of Dave McClure's tests on Facebook and it influenced my view of what hallway sessions and BarCamp sessions I participated in.
Sessions - So much to choose, so little time
So many sessions covering so many topics! Too bad I don't have a Time turner like Hermoine so, can't time travel to attend two parallel sessions.
I presented a session on "Social Media Optimization (SMO) for Facebook" which had 40+ audience in the Socialtext co-working room, with a whiteboard and great conversations.
The Wikipedia definition of SMO is broad. I focused on SMO for Facebook App Developers. What to utilize of current Facebook API and support to make your App on Facebook to reach users with clean UI, messaging, target users and influencers of your space and create viral play.
I had fun and left with more things to think about and made more friends on Facebook :-)
Session Summaries
Nelz has done a great job of summarizing sessions I missed!
I liked the session on "Future of Widgets" by Shawn Van Itersum, Product Manager of Clearspring, a Widget development platform.
He had a session on intro to Widget in the morning. The afternoon one had great conversations. Rashmi of Slideshare.net had great questions on widget analytics which are issues I have faced.
Clearspring offers a Widget development platform for developers. I am not sure how it compares with going with RockYou for Widgets or the Gigya Widget distribution platform. Shawn was a good presenter and made a compelling case for Clearspring so I am going to check them out for sure!
The discussion was not about his company but about widgets and problems of supporting widgets for multiple platforms, distribution etc. Clearspring is mostly available for content widgets on Myspace. There was some discussion about Widgets for the blogosphere.
All in all, a day spent well, worth pondering year long till next years's BarCamp.
Update: Brad Templeton of EEF was there. Gotto join EEF to donate using causes App.
Had great conversations with Nate (CTO) of Pbwiki.
I spent more time on the block than sessions and learned a lot! The beauty of BarCamp is that each person takes something different based on what they are focused on and what they contribute!
Great Organization to the team and Ms.BarCamp Tara!
My previous topics at Barcamp Boston has been about taking a concept to business and raising money. I decided to go with an open mind and not talk about the same topic.
Thanks to Tara, Chris, Tantek, Ross and Liz on great organization. The energy all over the block was amazing and contagious. Tara would be talking to a group, and keep an eye to refill drinking water and food to keep us all fed. She is amazing, and is Ms.BarCamp!
Utream.tv captures the chaos and energy as everyone rushed to the grid to build the conference schedule on the fly!
Brian Solis has done justice to cover the people of the crowd! Missed Robert Scoble sneaking out of his non-blog week :-)
Lawrence Sinclair was a star as he instantly brought together a bunch of Facebook App Developers and formed a co-working group to develop more cool Apps.
Its an understatement to say that I met most of the people who I've got to know in the first 6 months of my valley visits all here at BarCampBlock.
One has to experience BarCampBlock to know how being a techi is cool here, being an entrepreneur is great, and everyone gets to action to brainstorm and collaborate in real time to create the thriving silicon valley culture!
I've been bitten by the "Facebook As a Platform" bug recently and some of Dave McClure's tests on Facebook and it influenced my view of what hallway sessions and BarCamp sessions I participated in.
Sessions - So much to choose, so little time
So many sessions covering so many topics! Too bad I don't have a Time turner like Hermoine so, can't time travel to attend two parallel sessions.
I presented a session on "Social Media Optimization (SMO) for Facebook" which had 40+ audience in the Socialtext co-working room, with a whiteboard and great conversations.
The Wikipedia definition of SMO is broad. I focused on SMO for Facebook App Developers. What to utilize of current Facebook API and support to make your App on Facebook to reach users with clean UI, messaging, target users and influencers of your space and create viral play.
I had fun and left with more things to think about and made more friends on Facebook :-)
Session Summaries
Nelz has done a great job of summarizing sessions I missed!
I liked the session on "Future of Widgets" by Shawn Van Itersum, Product Manager of Clearspring, a Widget development platform.
He had a session on intro to Widget in the morning. The afternoon one had great conversations. Rashmi of Slideshare.net had great questions on widget analytics which are issues I have faced.
Clearspring offers a Widget development platform for developers. I am not sure how it compares with going with RockYou for Widgets or the Gigya Widget distribution platform. Shawn was a good presenter and made a compelling case for Clearspring so I am going to check them out for sure!
The discussion was not about his company but about widgets and problems of supporting widgets for multiple platforms, distribution etc. Clearspring is mostly available for content widgets on Myspace. There was some discussion about Widgets for the blogosphere.
All in all, a day spent well, worth pondering year long till next years's BarCamp.
Update: Brad Templeton of EEF was there. Gotto join EEF to donate using causes App.
Had great conversations with Nate (CTO) of Pbwiki.
Friday, August 17, 2007
BarCamp Block Sat and Sun
I am going to BarCamp Block in Palo Alto tommorrow (Sat), Tara Hunt seems to be doing all the work like at Web2Open.
I stepped in the world of BarCamps first at Boston BarCamp and helped organize one, spoke on technology commercialization on the fly, and went to Manchester BarCamp where I presented Building the Business Side of a Business.
This is the first one in the valley, Tara has said 900 have signedup, don't see much people on the wiki as they the attendees profiles are on Crowdvine, which I've not learned to use much yet but exited at the randomness and real time makeup of the conference!!!
Do say hello if you are at BarCamp tomorrow.
I stepped in the world of BarCamps first at Boston BarCamp and helped organize one, spoke on technology commercialization on the fly, and went to Manchester BarCamp where I presented Building the Business Side of a Business.
This is the first one in the valley, Tara has said 900 have signedup, don't see much people on the wiki as they the attendees profiles are on Crowdvine, which I've not learned to use much yet but exited at the randomness and real time makeup of the conference!!!
Do say hello if you are at BarCamp tomorrow.
Facebook Seeded Entreprenerialism
I met 10 people at Facebook Developers Meetup last night at Neto in Palo Alto and saw 3 cool Apps not formal demos, but entreprenurial feedback sessions on future plans - Zoo by Action, ulinkx by Saket and a stealth mode professional networking App by two guys who moved from NY to launch a cool FB App . Dave Westwood had great experience from Myspace and helped us make the connection to Facebook as the new platform.
I came back excited remembering the day I first saw the Mozilla Browser and the Web revolution began.
For the past few months, I've had my share of Facebook hype stories and ideas for Facebook Apps for startups I am associated with and exposure to old business types analyzing like many analyzed the Web as it shifted and morphed and grew and crashed and was reborn.
Heres my new revelation why I believe Facebook with it semi-open platform is a real business here to stay and threaten the existing Web ecosystem only to help new entrepreneurs:
1. Facebook offers a UI platform with built-in viral play so anyone can build an App on FB and instantly get viral play within its network. The web is full of smart techies who want to build technology cooler than the next person, but no technology is sustainable business by itself.
So every App builder needs to market it. FB offers instant viral play just by building on its platform.
2. I think today, times are analogous to the early days of creating a web site when Yahoo was manually indexing them in their home page. My favorite FB App Booze-mail got 200K users within 2 weeks with no marketing.
3. Everyone loves Google for its cool search, but what made them a business and the biggest brand we all wake up to is their Ad business helping big and small businesses by bringing their customers to their sites. Facebook is a real threat to Google in that App developers are flocking to FB to park their new tech ideas to allow FB to send users their way to start building dependency on FB as we did with Google.
4. Theres an entrepreneur in every creative person, especially ones who can code as a way of expressing themselves. Facebook makes it cheap to build an App and get started with user traction. Not a full business, still a great start!
5. I have smart friends who are watching on the sidelines questioning the proprietary platform on limitations of access control and ability to personalize a user's experience in an Application environment. I agree the FB Apps I have seen so far (not including the ones I saw last night at the FB Developers Meetup and the App Cause) are playful ones as a test App built by smart techies.
Its the beginning, some Apps make an hybrid using the FB platform as the UI and lead to a Web site. Others are building robust backend systems with FB as the UI platform to benefit from the viral play.
Facebook has to open up a lot and make many important decisions to become a Google and not Netscape, but it looks promising that we can all be part of building the social operating system stitching our Apps to create a new ecosystem here.
Its exciting as the beginning of some real outlet for technical expertise with a business window to reach users to validate your idea. Welcome to Facebook Seeded Entrepreneurialism.
Be sure to checkout Dave McClure's comments on the hype around VCs investing in Facebook and the real venture fund focused on Facebook Apps - AppFactory run by Salil Deshpande.
I came back excited remembering the day I first saw the Mozilla Browser and the Web revolution began.
For the past few months, I've had my share of Facebook hype stories and ideas for Facebook Apps for startups I am associated with and exposure to old business types analyzing like many analyzed the Web as it shifted and morphed and grew and crashed and was reborn.
Heres my new revelation why I believe Facebook with it semi-open platform is a real business here to stay and threaten the existing Web ecosystem only to help new entrepreneurs:
1. Facebook offers a UI platform with built-in viral play so anyone can build an App on FB and instantly get viral play within its network. The web is full of smart techies who want to build technology cooler than the next person, but no technology is sustainable business by itself.
So every App builder needs to market it. FB offers instant viral play just by building on its platform.
2. I think today, times are analogous to the early days of creating a web site when Yahoo was manually indexing them in their home page. My favorite FB App Booze-mail got 200K users within 2 weeks with no marketing.
3. Everyone loves Google for its cool search, but what made them a business and the biggest brand we all wake up to is their Ad business helping big and small businesses by bringing their customers to their sites. Facebook is a real threat to Google in that App developers are flocking to FB to park their new tech ideas to allow FB to send users their way to start building dependency on FB as we did with Google.
4. Theres an entrepreneur in every creative person, especially ones who can code as a way of expressing themselves. Facebook makes it cheap to build an App and get started with user traction. Not a full business, still a great start!
5. I have smart friends who are watching on the sidelines questioning the proprietary platform on limitations of access control and ability to personalize a user's experience in an Application environment. I agree the FB Apps I have seen so far (not including the ones I saw last night at the FB Developers Meetup and the App Cause) are playful ones as a test App built by smart techies.
Its the beginning, some Apps make an hybrid using the FB platform as the UI and lead to a Web site. Others are building robust backend systems with FB as the UI platform to benefit from the viral play.
Facebook has to open up a lot and make many important decisions to become a Google and not Netscape, but it looks promising that we can all be part of building the social operating system stitching our Apps to create a new ecosystem here.
Its exciting as the beginning of some real outlet for technical expertise with a business window to reach users to validate your idea. Welcome to Facebook Seeded Entrepreneurialism.
Be sure to checkout Dave McClure's comments on the hype around VCs investing in Facebook and the real venture fund focused on Facebook Apps - AppFactory run by Salil Deshpande.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
DEMO Alumni and the Pleasure of a Startup Launch
I didn't realize I was part of yet another network of people connected by the tag "DEMO Alumni" till recently as there was a DEMO Alumni party last night:-)
I had launched Coola at DEMO in 2000. Launching at DEMO has been a life changing, career changing for sure, experience for me.
Chris Shipley has been working for 20 years identifying new technologies and providing a beautiful launch pad with DEMO conferences.
I have the greatest respect for her eye for spotting promising technologies and winning teams. You can see the list of successful companies who launched at DEMO and exited or IPOed. For those who do not exit their first startup, you can still see future success of the same founders.
Chris Shipley helps shape the business concept by asking smart questions, listening and helping the teams figure out their blind spots and package the company with a clear launch checklist which makes DEMO a fun and unique event and going to DEMO an exciting time for all DEMO companies.
Recently I've been involved in the DEMO process (hush, can't tell you anymore now) and am impressed at how well-oiled an engine it is with a weekly calendar listing deliverables to get ready to launch for DEMO. This will help the new kids from school who come with a cool technology to define launch with such a high bar set getting ready their product, web site, brand identity, press kits, getting ready with all aspects of launch marketing, DEMO presentation honing your pitch and Exhibit Stall to showcase your product and a media wish list for targeted PR.
I think of getting to present in DEMO as setting high your standards on the business side of your business and a good start for anybody's career.
My favorite DEMO Alumni serial entrepreneurs are Vincent Paquet and Craig Walker, who build Dialpad, sold to Y!, most recently build Grandcentral sold to Google. I've been a Grandcentral fan right from the start and noticed how they set about meticulously building their company, stitching themselves into the ecosystem, scaling site content to show company growth and incrementally improving user communications all DEMO style.
Hope to see you at DEMO again and next year at the DEMO party!
I had launched Coola at DEMO in 2000. Launching at DEMO has been a life changing, career changing for sure, experience for me.
Chris Shipley has been working for 20 years identifying new technologies and providing a beautiful launch pad with DEMO conferences.
I have the greatest respect for her eye for spotting promising technologies and winning teams. You can see the list of successful companies who launched at DEMO and exited or IPOed. For those who do not exit their first startup, you can still see future success of the same founders.
Chris Shipley helps shape the business concept by asking smart questions, listening and helping the teams figure out their blind spots and package the company with a clear launch checklist which makes DEMO a fun and unique event and going to DEMO an exciting time for all DEMO companies.
Recently I've been involved in the DEMO process (hush, can't tell you anymore now) and am impressed at how well-oiled an engine it is with a weekly calendar listing deliverables to get ready to launch for DEMO. This will help the new kids from school who come with a cool technology to define launch with such a high bar set getting ready their product, web site, brand identity, press kits, getting ready with all aspects of launch marketing, DEMO presentation honing your pitch and Exhibit Stall to showcase your product and a media wish list for targeted PR.
I think of getting to present in DEMO as setting high your standards on the business side of your business and a good start for anybody's career.
My favorite DEMO Alumni serial entrepreneurs are Vincent Paquet and Craig Walker, who build Dialpad, sold to Y!, most recently build Grandcentral sold to Google. I've been a Grandcentral fan right from the start and noticed how they set about meticulously building their company, stitching themselves into the ecosystem, scaling site content to show company growth and incrementally improving user communications all DEMO style.
Hope to see you at DEMO again and next year at the DEMO party!
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Conflict Management in Startups
How many times have you seen it as an entrepreneur that you toil to build your dream startup and a new hire comes in and suddenly there is chaos and conflict and decisions seems to loop around without going towards your milestone, especially a outbound market facing milestone?
Every startup team has to go through this process several time as you scale your team. The first time is essentially painful.
You have new people, new directions, new challenges as past blind-spots are exposed or from simple chaos of communication and at maintaining speed. Looking back, I have always found that it has been good. But when it happens it feels like a twister with no way to get out of it.
I recently saw a familiar discussion between engineering and marketing to get a company logo right getting a startup ready for launch. I have seen this thrice before at different startup environments. My being aware of the nuances of what happens did not help me speed the cycle or mend broken hearts as passions spiraled to get the best logo for the startup.
I have seen the same about getting ready for the first real customer sales or a company launch. Listing all tactical work or being aware of the team dynamics from the past does not seem to stop me from watching the same people dynamics.
What I have learned to do is to challenge strong emotions of conflicts to work "for" the company and not against it.
What we can do is create an environment where confrontation is encouraged to get issues on the topic, keep the focus on issues not people and let the passions run high towards results.
When the end result is achieved, be it a product launch or that first sale, the team bonding that happens and the confidence amongst the waring team members and the company as a whole is worth all the pain you would go through this.
As an entrepreneur, when you see such an conflict in the early stages of the company, you have an opportunity to create a positive company culture and create corporate memory and confidence to solve future unknown problems by being able to brainstorm, handle criticism and come out as a winner with a better team product.
Every startup team has to go through this process several time as you scale your team. The first time is essentially painful.
You have new people, new directions, new challenges as past blind-spots are exposed or from simple chaos of communication and at maintaining speed. Looking back, I have always found that it has been good. But when it happens it feels like a twister with no way to get out of it.
I recently saw a familiar discussion between engineering and marketing to get a company logo right getting a startup ready for launch. I have seen this thrice before at different startup environments. My being aware of the nuances of what happens did not help me speed the cycle or mend broken hearts as passions spiraled to get the best logo for the startup.
I have seen the same about getting ready for the first real customer sales or a company launch. Listing all tactical work or being aware of the team dynamics from the past does not seem to stop me from watching the same people dynamics.
What I have learned to do is to challenge strong emotions of conflicts to work "for" the company and not against it.
What we can do is create an environment where confrontation is encouraged to get issues on the topic, keep the focus on issues not people and let the passions run high towards results.
When the end result is achieved, be it a product launch or that first sale, the team bonding that happens and the confidence amongst the waring team members and the company as a whole is worth all the pain you would go through this.
As an entrepreneur, when you see such an conflict in the early stages of the company, you have an opportunity to create a positive company culture and create corporate memory and confidence to solve future unknown problems by being able to brainstorm, handle criticism and come out as a winner with a better team product.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Entrepreneur Charge - Meet Sumaya Kazi
I have been a reader of this blog called thedesiconnect.com and seen it evolve and grow into an online magazine for the past 2 years. What amazed me is their adapting to the market in simple ways by adding features and bringing in new additions to their team, relentlessly perfecting their site and newsletter magazine.
Recently, I had the pleasure of meeting the founder Sumaya Kazi, 24 year old female charged with energy and an amazing clarity if her ideas of team building and great dreams for making the world a better place.
Sumaya has organically scaled her team geographically spread over the world, all working part-time renumerated by pure passion for their common project - the desiconnect that scaled and grew to theculturalconnect.com including latinconnect, africanaconnect and middleastconnect.com
Many of you may have seen Sumaya on CNN, she is an example of building startup energy with great team, focus and passion. Her passion is not big business models, making money, eyeballs - simply following her heart to change the typecast of different cultures and creating role models for all to follow.
Hope this inspires all of us to march ahead with our dreams for ideas we are passionate about.
Recently, I had the pleasure of meeting the founder Sumaya Kazi, 24 year old female charged with energy and an amazing clarity if her ideas of team building and great dreams for making the world a better place.
Sumaya has organically scaled her team geographically spread over the world, all working part-time renumerated by pure passion for their common project - the desiconnect that scaled and grew to theculturalconnect.com including latinconnect, africanaconnect and middleastconnect.com
Many of you may have seen Sumaya on CNN, she is an example of building startup energy with great team, focus and passion. Her passion is not big business models, making money, eyeballs - simply following her heart to change the typecast of different cultures and creating role models for all to follow.
Hope this inspires all of us to march ahead with our dreams for ideas we are passionate about.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Viral Play by Jason Feffer founder of Myspace
Jason Feffer co-founder of Myspace is speaking at Community Next conf at Sunnyvale about Viral Marketing history.
Viral at Myspace started 4 yrs ago internally with 4 employees to 180 employees today.
Happy users tell 3 friends, unhappy or critcal ones tell 11.
UI was one that attracted users. Focus was to give tools starting with emails, their own URLs etc.
We got bad press bringing unwanted attraction because of the controversy about predators on Myspace. Fef says they worked very hard to clean these up, but it attracted media with controversial stories about underage kids on Myspace, and how schools and parents very concerned. Myspace had to deal with it and it got *lot* of users.
What they did purposefully:
1. Recognized Myspace users were people who like to be exhibitionists, so focused to give them tools to tell their friends about themselves, not to tell about Myspace.
1 Exhibitionist brought 5000 users easily when it worked.Picked up when bands started using Myspace to market their band.
2. Don't lose control of your brand to others. Myspace turned down free promoter options to use Myspace brand and create parties.
3. Messaging focused on entertainment, not technology. So focused on right press. Stayed in LA just for that.
4. How they handled Fake profiles - restricts on terms of service, but if users brought real content good for the community, it was fine. If P&G came and created fake profiles, we'll work with them to make their profiles as real branded.
5. Niche Targeted Marketing - How did they focus in the beginning? Initial target was 10M users for Ad revenues but Jason thought 8M users seemed too much. In the beginning you don't need too many hard core users, because they will bring many many of their friends and scale. Focus on being vertical focused and help that base of users spread the world.
Jason's new startup is Sodahead, - check it out, he is in early stage consciously applying all his learning from Myspace.
Jason's advice is on focus on target suers, focus on everything around that. Lending Club used Facebool API only to launch its beta. Today there are a lot of widgets, use it.
Viral at Myspace started 4 yrs ago internally with 4 employees to 180 employees today.
Happy users tell 3 friends, unhappy or critcal ones tell 11.
UI was one that attracted users. Focus was to give tools starting with emails, their own URLs etc.
We got bad press bringing unwanted attraction because of the controversy about predators on Myspace. Fef says they worked very hard to clean these up, but it attracted media with controversial stories about underage kids on Myspace, and how schools and parents very concerned. Myspace had to deal with it and it got *lot* of users.
What they did purposefully:
1. Recognized Myspace users were people who like to be exhibitionists, so focused to give them tools to tell their friends about themselves, not to tell about Myspace.
1 Exhibitionist brought 5000 users easily when it worked.Picked up when bands started using Myspace to market their band.
2. Don't lose control of your brand to others. Myspace turned down free promoter options to use Myspace brand and create parties.
3. Messaging focused on entertainment, not technology. So focused on right press. Stayed in LA just for that.
4. How they handled Fake profiles - restricts on terms of service, but if users brought real content good for the community, it was fine. If P&G came and created fake profiles, we'll work with them to make their profiles as real branded.
5. Niche Targeted Marketing - How did they focus in the beginning? Initial target was 10M users for Ad revenues but Jason thought 8M users seemed too much. In the beginning you don't need too many hard core users, because they will bring many many of their friends and scale. Focus on being vertical focused and help that base of users spread the world.
Jason's new startup is Sodahead, - check it out, he is in early stage consciously applying all his learning from Myspace.
Jason's advice is on focus on target suers, focus on everything around that. Lending Club used Facebool API only to launch its beta. Today there are a lot of widgets, use it.
Saturday, July 07, 2007
Business Model Blunders
I built my first startup Coola from Boston but traveled to Silicon Valley often for business partnerships and eventually scaled half my team there.
Living in the valley now, I meet someone from my startup days and it brings back nostalgia of the early day entrepreneur in me, and most important, reminds me of mistakes I wish I had avoided :-)
What is amazing is how I got good advice but did not seem to have internalized it then and I just get it these days. I still see entrepreneurs hungry to surround themselves with advisors but not benefiting from their experiences fully. Sometimes it inevitable, because we each have to grow as entrepreneurs from within, sometimes its our attitudes which limits us.
My biggest blunder was my search for our business model. This has helped me find a sweetspot in helping startups scale from a concept to their first customers, but its the same path everytime.
Here is my attempt to capture finding a business model for your startup, please let me know if you have more to add to this or different experiences to share.
Your dream becomes a business only when you find the right business model that brings your revenues.
What is a business model: It simply means knowing who your customers are and how they are going to pay you and why.
Where to start looking at the best business model for an idea?
First, there are lot people who are strategists who can come with lot of possibilities when you present your idea.
It is creative thinking coupled with years of experience looking at different business models that worked or failed for other companies in the past.
Venture Capitalists usually do this well, mostly in pointing a parallel business and how a particular business model failed for someone.
You need to seek friends and advisors who get charged about your idea and can brainstorm wild possibilities of who could use your solution.
Avoid blind spots in finding your business model:
Avoid blind spots of your own or your advisors in following a particular business model by force fitting it into your idea against the competencies of your team.
I have seen the same idea executed as two different businesses because of the passion of the founders for a particular market.
I came across many strategists during my early startup days; most were consultants.
If you look closer, you'll find most of these consultants have certain type of business and business models that they deep down believe, maybe because it worked for some other client or because of their background.
For example, when we came up with Coola technology to make information mobile. Since the founders came from a software background, we first thought of web businesses as our customers and the optimum deployment as a hosted solution. My partner had extensive experience in databases and financial systems, so he built a server to integrate with variety of corporate servers.
We came across a VC who had experience in email market. He was ready to invest in us if we changed our business model to make our technology over email.
Over the years I have come to appreciate the way of coming up with business models for new idea that marries strategy with execution.
Steps to Find your Business Model:
1. Ask yourself "what is my fixed and what is my variable" in my business. This will help to understand what is the core part of your business that you want to build as your core IP and competitive advantage in the long run.
For example, if we look at a photo site like shutterfly.com, is their fixed the technology for sharing, operations of printing quality pictures, or the community they built with loyalty to come back as repeat customers.
If they decide the community is their fixed, that will help decide to be a destination site, focus on user acquisitions, and help plan activities around building loyalty to such a community. If on the other hand they decide their technology and fulfillment is their fixed, they'd work on their site design to lock in visitors and can go about signing partnerships with the portals to do co-branded deals to bring in customers.
2. Insert yourself into the existing eco-system. Find partnerships, technology integrations, co-marketing deals, but make sure it is all revenue generating for both parties.
If you look closely at the news, you can see how Google became famous because Yahoo chose them as their search engine when Yahoo did not have search. Today Yahoo and Google are competing for AOL and every other key players partnership to tie them some sustainability into the web eco-system.
Beware of revenue sharing deals when you cannot clearly calculate where the revenue is coming from. We had a deal with Boston.com but spent a lot of time with web business that wanted to do revenue share deals when either of us could not see where real money came from.
It is easy to get carried away by examples of large players and how they have grown with revenue share deals, but think critically about the customer paying you, for your small business to you or your partner and why.
3. Every idea given to different teams will make different businesses. It depends on what core competencies exist in your team.
Where is your strength? Are you server or client side people? Do you have competency in awesome content creation? You can always hire people with other skills, but where is the core of the top team who are going to drive this?
4. VCs always ask for a rounded team and beam if you have team and advisors from the vertical you are targeting.
You will have to know the nuances of the vertical you are targeting, so experience in that segment will go a long way. So, even if several verticals are possible when you brainstorm and do a blue-sky scenario, focus on the one where you have real experience in your team and can execute.
5. If you know your fixed, its great to dream, don't let it hamper your quick execution in the immediate future.
I love this quote:
" Every morning in the jungle a lion and a gazelle wake up and start running. The lion will survive only when it runs faster than the slowest gazelle gazelle will survive only when it can run faster than the fastest lion"
In the startup world, it is not the greatest idea that wins, it is the one who runs the fastest.
So good luck to finding your winning business model and to run fast to win.
Living in the valley now, I meet someone from my startup days and it brings back nostalgia of the early day entrepreneur in me, and most important, reminds me of mistakes I wish I had avoided :-)
What is amazing is how I got good advice but did not seem to have internalized it then and I just get it these days. I still see entrepreneurs hungry to surround themselves with advisors but not benefiting from their experiences fully. Sometimes it inevitable, because we each have to grow as entrepreneurs from within, sometimes its our attitudes which limits us.
My biggest blunder was my search for our business model. This has helped me find a sweetspot in helping startups scale from a concept to their first customers, but its the same path everytime.
Here is my attempt to capture finding a business model for your startup, please let me know if you have more to add to this or different experiences to share.
Your dream becomes a business only when you find the right business model that brings your revenues.
What is a business model: It simply means knowing who your customers are and how they are going to pay you and why.
Where to start looking at the best business model for an idea?
First, there are lot people who are strategists who can come with lot of possibilities when you present your idea.
It is creative thinking coupled with years of experience looking at different business models that worked or failed for other companies in the past.
Venture Capitalists usually do this well, mostly in pointing a parallel business and how a particular business model failed for someone.
You need to seek friends and advisors who get charged about your idea and can brainstorm wild possibilities of who could use your solution.
Avoid blind spots in finding your business model:
Avoid blind spots of your own or your advisors in following a particular business model by force fitting it into your idea against the competencies of your team.
I have seen the same idea executed as two different businesses because of the passion of the founders for a particular market.
I came across many strategists during my early startup days; most were consultants.
If you look closer, you'll find most of these consultants have certain type of business and business models that they deep down believe, maybe because it worked for some other client or because of their background.
For example, when we came up with Coola technology to make information mobile. Since the founders came from a software background, we first thought of web businesses as our customers and the optimum deployment as a hosted solution. My partner had extensive experience in databases and financial systems, so he built a server to integrate with variety of corporate servers.
We came across a VC who had experience in email market. He was ready to invest in us if we changed our business model to make our technology over email.
Over the years I have come to appreciate the way of coming up with business models for new idea that marries strategy with execution.
Steps to Find your Business Model:
1. Ask yourself "what is my fixed and what is my variable" in my business. This will help to understand what is the core part of your business that you want to build as your core IP and competitive advantage in the long run.
For example, if we look at a photo site like shutterfly.com, is their fixed the technology for sharing, operations of printing quality pictures, or the community they built with loyalty to come back as repeat customers.
If they decide the community is their fixed, that will help decide to be a destination site, focus on user acquisitions, and help plan activities around building loyalty to such a community. If on the other hand they decide their technology and fulfillment is their fixed, they'd work on their site design to lock in visitors and can go about signing partnerships with the portals to do co-branded deals to bring in customers.
2. Insert yourself into the existing eco-system. Find partnerships, technology integrations, co-marketing deals, but make sure it is all revenue generating for both parties.
If you look closely at the news, you can see how Google became famous because Yahoo chose them as their search engine when Yahoo did not have search. Today Yahoo and Google are competing for AOL and every other key players partnership to tie them some sustainability into the web eco-system.
Beware of revenue sharing deals when you cannot clearly calculate where the revenue is coming from. We had a deal with Boston.com but spent a lot of time with web business that wanted to do revenue share deals when either of us could not see where real money came from.
It is easy to get carried away by examples of large players and how they have grown with revenue share deals, but think critically about the customer paying you, for your small business to you or your partner and why.
3. Every idea given to different teams will make different businesses. It depends on what core competencies exist in your team.
Where is your strength? Are you server or client side people? Do you have competency in awesome content creation? You can always hire people with other skills, but where is the core of the top team who are going to drive this?
4. VCs always ask for a rounded team and beam if you have team and advisors from the vertical you are targeting.
You will have to know the nuances of the vertical you are targeting, so experience in that segment will go a long way. So, even if several verticals are possible when you brainstorm and do a blue-sky scenario, focus on the one where you have real experience in your team and can execute.
5. If you know your fixed, its great to dream, don't let it hamper your quick execution in the immediate future.
I love this quote:
" Every morning in the jungle a lion and a gazelle wake up and start running. The lion will survive only when it runs faster than the slowest gazelle gazelle will survive only when it can run faster than the fastest lion"
In the startup world, it is not the greatest idea that wins, it is the one who runs the fastest.
So good luck to finding your winning business model and to run fast to win.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Google Gadgets Ventures
I am at Marissa Mayers keynote at Searchonomics Conference in Santa Clara.
She just announced "Google Gadgets Venture".
Make Google Gadgets with Gadgets Maker (which was previously available only for developers) open anyone.
Showcase on Google Homepage for users to select.
If you get more than 250K page views per week, Google will pay $5K funding.
Use this and build a business plan and can qualify for seed money of $100K.
Marissa says Google sees Google Gadgets growing a who industry like SEO and Ad Sense done earlier by Google.
She just announced "Google Gadgets Venture".
Make Google Gadgets with Gadgets Maker (which was previously available only for developers) open anyone.
Showcase on Google Homepage for users to select.
If you get more than 250K page views per week, Google will pay $5K funding.
Use this and build a business plan and can qualify for seed money of $100K.
Marissa says Google sees Google Gadgets growing a who industry like SEO and Ad Sense done earlier by Google.
Searchonomics Wed 27th
Hi Readers,
I'll be at Searchonomics on Wed, no I am not going to the Techcrunch party in the evening.
I've added a new amung.us stats widget that tracts concurrent users of the blog, I don't know if its me, there are many cool stats options for behaviorial targeting these days. Mybloglog is still my favorite. Theres plenty of startup opportunities to do real behaviorial targeting to help people solve real problems.
Hope to see some of you.
I'll be at Searchonomics on Wed, no I am not going to the Techcrunch party in the evening.
I've added a new amung.us stats widget that tracts concurrent users of the blog, I don't know if its me, there are many cool stats options for behaviorial targeting these days. Mybloglog is still my favorite. Theres plenty of startup opportunities to do real behaviorial targeting to help people solve real problems.
Hope to see some of you.
Friday, June 22, 2007
Path to Startup Success
Do you know what is worse than failure? A mediocre success!!!
In the startup world where the only race is against time, I am amazed at how often I find great ideas covered in a maze without clear focused execution.
I've written about how the early days of an entrepreneur are unstructured. The beauty of a startup environment is the limitlessness and ability to arrive at solutions for everything. When you scale a team to more than 3 or get a real customer, chaos sets in.
The positive side of this is the startup energy. But every startup gets surrounded by a lot of well-wishers sending a lot of people to help the startup.
The single most success factor of an entrepreneur's success depends on the ability to separate the good, not from the bad, but well-meaning mediocre people!!!
In the early days, in the race against time, each referral to a person who does not bring in better people or direct access to an amazingly mind-blowing solution will bring the company to a mediocre success.
What I mean by this is that, everyone in the startup can spend 80 hours a week and be creative to find solutions in their field. If they allow mediocre people to mislead them one at a time, very soon, its hard to differentiate the efforts that are not worth pursuing to the ones that lack processes or people and this chaos will seep into the energy of the startup.
These people may come in the form of advisor's friends, vendors and employee referrals.
If we look around at companies that are successful, you can see the growing energy and in spite of any media created buzz, you can see a real successful company by the real company it keeps.
All entrepreneurs love to hear people who love their idea and believe in them. What you need to watch out for is that you don't surround yourself with people who keep talking about how they love your idea without helping towards execution.
As the team grows past 3 people, I think getting company wide milestones with dates and dependencies and tracking them may seem a little bureaucratic at start, but will help in keeping the transparency on the real progress based on data. I am not suggesting company meetings, such a milestone can be on a wiki or can be a business metric tracked by everyone.
In the startup world where the only race is against time, I am amazed at how often I find great ideas covered in a maze without clear focused execution.
I've written about how the early days of an entrepreneur are unstructured. The beauty of a startup environment is the limitlessness and ability to arrive at solutions for everything. When you scale a team to more than 3 or get a real customer, chaos sets in.
The positive side of this is the startup energy. But every startup gets surrounded by a lot of well-wishers sending a lot of people to help the startup.
The single most success factor of an entrepreneur's success depends on the ability to separate the good, not from the bad, but well-meaning mediocre people!!!
In the early days, in the race against time, each referral to a person who does not bring in better people or direct access to an amazingly mind-blowing solution will bring the company to a mediocre success.
What I mean by this is that, everyone in the startup can spend 80 hours a week and be creative to find solutions in their field. If they allow mediocre people to mislead them one at a time, very soon, its hard to differentiate the efforts that are not worth pursuing to the ones that lack processes or people and this chaos will seep into the energy of the startup.
These people may come in the form of advisor's friends, vendors and employee referrals.
If we look around at companies that are successful, you can see the growing energy and in spite of any media created buzz, you can see a real successful company by the real company it keeps.
All entrepreneurs love to hear people who love their idea and believe in them. What you need to watch out for is that you don't surround yourself with people who keep talking about how they love your idea without helping towards execution.
As the team grows past 3 people, I think getting company wide milestones with dates and dependencies and tracking them may seem a little bureaucratic at start, but will help in keeping the transparency on the real progress based on data. I am not suggesting company meetings, such a milestone can be on a wiki or can be a business metric tracked by everyone.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Google Developers Day 2007 - Jeff Huber Keynote from San Jose
I am at Jeff Huber's keynote. Its been slow so far, bringing everyone upto speed on all of Google's developer tools and API.
One interesting one is mapplets = google gadgets API + google Mashups API. I'd love to see real cool Apps, the demos were just ok.
Here is Google Gears - sounds promising. I maybe seeing big dreams because of my background of the big vision to make all Applications Mobile with my first startup Coola in 99.
Othman Larakin, the product manager is presenting.
- Access to Apps online and offline.
- Google Reader Offline allows you to download last 2000 RSS feed messages for offline access.
- Adobe has been everywhere, I saw Kevin Lynch last week at Saleforce Developers Day. He is here now showing Apollo and Gears.
I already love Apollo and Flex. Kevin's demo is very indepth, better than all the Google demos before him, more by his passion, tempting us to develop on Apollo. Kevin is promising to integrate their APIs with Google Gears API.
I am a tech entrepreur and involved as advisor of many cool tech startups. So I look at every event and presentation from that perspective. So look for an opportunity for your startup in all this to create differentiation, take you closer to other smart startups to collaborate and make even smarter products and services and have fun through it all.
One interesting one is mapplets = google gadgets API + google Mashups API. I'd love to see real cool Apps, the demos were just ok.
Here is Google Gears - sounds promising. I maybe seeing big dreams because of my background of the big vision to make all Applications Mobile with my first startup Coola in 99.
Othman Larakin, the product manager is presenting.
- Access to Apps online and offline.
- Google Reader Offline allows you to download last 2000 RSS feed messages for offline access.
- Adobe has been everywhere, I saw Kevin Lynch last week at Saleforce Developers Day. He is here now showing Apollo and Gears.
I already love Apollo and Flex. Kevin's demo is very indepth, better than all the Google demos before him, more by his passion, tempting us to develop on Apollo. Kevin is promising to integrate their APIs with Google Gears API.
I am a tech entrepreur and involved as advisor of many cool tech startups. So I look at every event and presentation from that perspective. So look for an opportunity for your startup in all this to create differentiation, take you closer to other smart startups to collaborate and make even smarter products and services and have fun through it all.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Web2.0 Aquisition spree and Google Dev Day
Fox Interactive buys Photobucket for $300M, Ebay buys Stumbleupon for $75M all cash (according to techcrunch), CBS buys Last.fm for $280M all in 1 day! Wonder who Y! is talking for acquisition, cyworld maybe?
All these aquisitions are valued on consumer user numbers, wonder how many overlap.
Personally I don't see these as bubbles or consolidations, but the competitive market is heating up and all the big players are looking for strategic advantage with the supported user base, so good technology is in and user numbers is the validation.
I am heading to Google Developers Day today, which has been moved to San Jose Convention Center to hold 5000 people where Google will announce Google gears and they are smart to have it available for Mac (yay!)
All these aquisitions are valued on consumer user numbers, wonder how many overlap.
Personally I don't see these as bubbles or consolidations, but the competitive market is heating up and all the big players are looking for strategic advantage with the supported user base, so good technology is in and user numbers is the validation.
I am heading to Google Developers Day today, which has been moved to San Jose Convention Center to hold 5000 people where Google will announce Google gears and they are smart to have it available for Mac (yay!)
Energy of Linkedin Team and listening to the market
I attended Lunch2.0 at Linkedin last week. I love the energy of startup teams, so needless to say that I could associate a face to linkedin which is a product I love and use a lot, was exciting.
Couple of surprises!
- Linkedin has 11 million users and has 100 employees. As an entrepreneur the number of employees in a company and who does what always fascinates me. Linkedin started out as a consumer platform and after a period of lull, added cool UI features and downloads. It has not splashed dollars on much PR, and it shows in the organic growth and the type of excited marketing people they have.
There was contagious energy in the room from the linkedin team, adding to the fact that Guy Kawasaki and Justin Kan of Justin.tv were there.
- Allen, co-founder and the VP of Products spoke about their vision of the product and was open to hear market feedback. One fascinating observation is that linkedin product folks thought we should not connect to anyone we do not absolutely know as the spirit of the product was to help the consumer connect with maybe 100 people they know well. I respect the privacy of anyone who does not want to add everyone to their network, I do not seek out strangers to connect, but thought bulk of linkedin was built on strangers connecting to reach into each other's networks.
This prompts me to write here because startups start with a vision to solve a problem, products are built, but companies take a life of their own with two factors pulling them outbound and shaping them to the business they evolve into -
1. Customers who pay, drive the attention and resources of the company. In linkedin there was a huge business operations group which brings revenues.
2. Marketing, focusing on viral play, especially for successful web products drive viral features. Linkedin grew virally only because people could invite others so easily with their support for uploading outlook calendars and because recruiters contact strangers to connect to their networks to expand the reach of their linkedin networks.
The day before lunch2.0, I was at Shally Steckerl's presentation at HRCA at Y!. I went to learn the recruiter's market and understand their needs and pains. Shally gave an amazing presentation showing tools and technique for recruiters to find their candidates. Shally was an expert search engine user and I learnt a lot.
Shally is a linkedin fan and gave his email for all to connect to him on linkedin saying he could reach 7 million of the 11 million linkedin users. During the weekend I was at TIECON where a Y! VP after a panel told a swarming crowd that he would accept all linkedin invitations. So I don't know but I suddenly keep hearing about linkedin as a way of life.
Its evangelists like Shally who drive the user adoption of linkedin and recruiters who pay as customers.
I left with the feeling that the 100 people of linkedin were hungry and looking to scale much larger and think of their product as nimble and in early stages than 11 million of us see it in our daily lives.
Couple of surprises!
- Linkedin has 11 million users and has 100 employees. As an entrepreneur the number of employees in a company and who does what always fascinates me. Linkedin started out as a consumer platform and after a period of lull, added cool UI features and downloads. It has not splashed dollars on much PR, and it shows in the organic growth and the type of excited marketing people they have.
There was contagious energy in the room from the linkedin team, adding to the fact that Guy Kawasaki and Justin Kan of Justin.tv were there.
- Allen, co-founder and the VP of Products spoke about their vision of the product and was open to hear market feedback. One fascinating observation is that linkedin product folks thought we should not connect to anyone we do not absolutely know as the spirit of the product was to help the consumer connect with maybe 100 people they know well. I respect the privacy of anyone who does not want to add everyone to their network, I do not seek out strangers to connect, but thought bulk of linkedin was built on strangers connecting to reach into each other's networks.
This prompts me to write here because startups start with a vision to solve a problem, products are built, but companies take a life of their own with two factors pulling them outbound and shaping them to the business they evolve into -
1. Customers who pay, drive the attention and resources of the company. In linkedin there was a huge business operations group which brings revenues.
2. Marketing, focusing on viral play, especially for successful web products drive viral features. Linkedin grew virally only because people could invite others so easily with their support for uploading outlook calendars and because recruiters contact strangers to connect to their networks to expand the reach of their linkedin networks.
The day before lunch2.0, I was at Shally Steckerl's presentation at HRCA at Y!. I went to learn the recruiter's market and understand their needs and pains. Shally gave an amazing presentation showing tools and technique for recruiters to find their candidates. Shally was an expert search engine user and I learnt a lot.
Shally is a linkedin fan and gave his email for all to connect to him on linkedin saying he could reach 7 million of the 11 million linkedin users. During the weekend I was at TIECON where a Y! VP after a panel told a swarming crowd that he would accept all linkedin invitations. So I don't know but I suddenly keep hearing about linkedin as a way of life.
Its evangelists like Shally who drive the user adoption of linkedin and recruiters who pay as customers.
I left with the feeling that the 100 people of linkedin were hungry and looking to scale much larger and think of their product as nimble and in early stages than 11 million of us see it in our daily lives.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Empowering People thru Entrepreneurship by Ebay's Meg Whitman at TIECON2007
Meg Whitman gave an awesome keynote session at TIECON 2007 at Santa Clara Convention Center Sat May 19th, 2007.
First, I loved how down to earth Meg was and very personable with a honesty in her answers.
Meg presented lot of stats about Ebay as a business. Interesting she sorted it as the core ebay auction business, craigslist, paypal and skype.
Her lessons on leadership were inspiring:
- Right person for the right job at the right time with the right values
- Reorganize early and often (change is good and keeps you alert)
- Hire ahead of the curve
- Focus - she mentioned art of exclution not inclusion.
- Mission motivates
- Get out enough - meet customers, goto conferences, stay in touch with market.
One theme that resonated throughout the talk was "Don't compromise your integrity". She said to cultivate this in the company she tells her staff"would you make this same decision if your mother or sister or kid was in the room?", that would serve as a guiding principle to always make decisions with integrity.
More on leadership that has worked for her always, that can help all entrepreneurs:
- Enable, don't direct
- Its always about customer experience
- Level the playing field often
- Make size an advantage (for large companies)
- Distruptive Ideas are vital (she calls people in companies who are good at distruption and innovation and not structured execution as "baby tigers" and says companies should promote them among all the big structured managers)
- Constant innovation of core business should come from within (its an mindset,its in the DNA, cannibalization doesn't scare Ebay)
She had a piece of advice for women entrepreneurs and CEOs (woman and men) to let go, the ability to not be a perfectionist in all your roles as parent, spouse, home maker will help to get more productive in all of them.
All in all a very inspiring and intellectually stimulating hour spent well that will linger in our minds for a long time!
First, I loved how down to earth Meg was and very personable with a honesty in her answers.
Meg presented lot of stats about Ebay as a business. Interesting she sorted it as the core ebay auction business, craigslist, paypal and skype.
Her lessons on leadership were inspiring:
- Right person for the right job at the right time with the right values
- Reorganize early and often (change is good and keeps you alert)
- Hire ahead of the curve
- Focus - she mentioned art of exclution not inclusion.
- Mission motivates
- Get out enough - meet customers, goto conferences, stay in touch with market.
One theme that resonated throughout the talk was "Don't compromise your integrity". She said to cultivate this in the company she tells her staff"would you make this same decision if your mother or sister or kid was in the room?", that would serve as a guiding principle to always make decisions with integrity.
More on leadership that has worked for her always, that can help all entrepreneurs:
- Enable, don't direct
- Its always about customer experience
- Level the playing field often
- Make size an advantage (for large companies)
- Distruptive Ideas are vital (she calls people in companies who are good at distruption and innovation and not structured execution as "baby tigers" and says companies should promote them among all the big structured managers)
- Constant innovation of core business should come from within (its an mindset,its in the DNA, cannibalization doesn't scare Ebay)
She had a piece of advice for women entrepreneurs and CEOs (woman and men) to let go, the ability to not be a perfectionist in all your roles as parent, spouse, home maker will help to get more productive in all of them.
All in all a very inspiring and intellectually stimulating hour spent well that will linger in our minds for a long time!
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Energy of Startup Teams
You have heard me talk about how I love the energy of Startup teams.
I want to share some thoughts about how to cultivate and grow the startup team energy.
Everyone who has been with a startup as an entrepreneur or an employee in early stages knows how the speed of the environment and limitlessness of the air, sometimes frustrates with too many directions.
As startup founders, we all go about alone or huddling with co-founders in rounds proving the viability of our concept, building prototype and raising money, then the fun begins as you start scaling the team.
Its amazing every time how the dynamics changes with each new person brought on board - new ideas, new energy, lot of chaos with communication and direction.
There is a growing up for startups which has to be done with awareness to let the startup energy burst open. I see 3 areas particularly:
1. Founders get used to being every employee for the startup doing all work and when new employees come on board, its hard to transition work to let go efficiently. I go back to my favorite advice of making a milestone chart for different functional areas so you can scale each separately and let go as you find the resources for each.
2. Founders and initial employees are used to be internal focused, pitching their vision, focusing on building product to showcase the concept that when the time is right to switch to a market facing mode, it is hard on everyone. A startup that operates in stealth mode and opens up with a friends and family beta and launches formally gets time to grow organically out of the internal to the external phase.
3. The real energy of the teams come through when they face a common goal, not an internal date, but one with feedback from outside, be it users or customers, so commit a date to your investors proactively.
It is so immensely beautiful when the team starts acting like a team when they meet a common goal and start responding to the real market. This phase is usually preceeded by a lot of friction, obvious and not so obvious ones, about direction, about the speed of the company, specific areas of scaling responsibilities, formal and informal communication styles.
If this phase is handled with patience and the common goal to make the startup successful, it will bloom with the full energy of the startup team, which will take care of these and all other growing pains to achieve amazing results breaking barriers with utter creativity and great respect for each other to a great nurturing environment and the startup will truly grow beyond the original entrepreneur to its own living entity.
I want to share some thoughts about how to cultivate and grow the startup team energy.
Everyone who has been with a startup as an entrepreneur or an employee in early stages knows how the speed of the environment and limitlessness of the air, sometimes frustrates with too many directions.
As startup founders, we all go about alone or huddling with co-founders in rounds proving the viability of our concept, building prototype and raising money, then the fun begins as you start scaling the team.
Its amazing every time how the dynamics changes with each new person brought on board - new ideas, new energy, lot of chaos with communication and direction.
There is a growing up for startups which has to be done with awareness to let the startup energy burst open. I see 3 areas particularly:
1. Founders get used to being every employee for the startup doing all work and when new employees come on board, its hard to transition work to let go efficiently. I go back to my favorite advice of making a milestone chart for different functional areas so you can scale each separately and let go as you find the resources for each.
2. Founders and initial employees are used to be internal focused, pitching their vision, focusing on building product to showcase the concept that when the time is right to switch to a market facing mode, it is hard on everyone. A startup that operates in stealth mode and opens up with a friends and family beta and launches formally gets time to grow organically out of the internal to the external phase.
3. The real energy of the teams come through when they face a common goal, not an internal date, but one with feedback from outside, be it users or customers, so commit a date to your investors proactively.
It is so immensely beautiful when the team starts acting like a team when they meet a common goal and start responding to the real market. This phase is usually preceeded by a lot of friction, obvious and not so obvious ones, about direction, about the speed of the company, specific areas of scaling responsibilities, formal and informal communication styles.
If this phase is handled with patience and the common goal to make the startup successful, it will bloom with the full energy of the startup team, which will take care of these and all other growing pains to achieve amazing results breaking barriers with utter creativity and great respect for each other to a great nurturing environment and the startup will truly grow beyond the original entrepreneur to its own living entity.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Web 2.O Community Roundtable (Web2Open)
I am at the community roundtable of Web2Open, the barcamp inside Web2.0 led by Tara Hunt all day.
Very smart, open people, including Eric of bloglog.
I can't do justice to the whole event as its been going on from 10 am till 5pm.
What defines a comunity's success?
Scale, about being awesome, keeping community happy.
Nice disussion about Citizen participation community, NGO model. Real metric is how many times we are pushing people into real world.
Summary by everyone is about
- how great it is to have an open honest discussion about community building online,
- re-affirmed about their belief about trusting your community,
- been part of online communities and now world is open to it, challenge how all communities can co-exist and open source where its going
- learning the difference between what B-school taught about market and community and real communities by today's discussions
- Cool thought! Imagine a s set of tools that would enable a community to form + move across the net (Community registration by scott).
- Comparison of geek community (barcamp LA compared to Miami)
- a user walked in by accident, wowed! compared to bloggercon
- passionate person from LA inviting people to LA, will host a geek event. (The Purple Tornado)
- glad people are still talking about it and making it better.
- a user watched the community roundtable online, knowledgeaspower.com
- involved mac, tech and sports communities.
- Dave winer scripting news summarized the keynote for us.
Very smart, open people, including Eric of bloglog.
I can't do justice to the whole event as its been going on from 10 am till 5pm.
What defines a comunity's success?
Scale, about being awesome, keeping community happy.
Nice disussion about Citizen participation community, NGO model. Real metric is how many times we are pushing people into real world.
Summary by everyone is about
- how great it is to have an open honest discussion about community building online,
- re-affirmed about their belief about trusting your community,
- been part of online communities and now world is open to it, challenge how all communities can co-exist and open source where its going
- learning the difference between what B-school taught about market and community and real communities by today's discussions
- Cool thought! Imagine a s set of tools that would enable a community to form + move across the net (Community registration by scott).
- Comparison of geek community (barcamp LA compared to Miami)
- a user walked in by accident, wowed! compared to bloggercon
- passionate person from LA inviting people to LA, will host a geek event. (The Purple Tornado)
- glad people are still talking about it and making it better.
- a user watched the community roundtable online, knowledgeaspower.com
- involved mac, tech and sports communities.
- Dave winer scripting news summarized the keynote for us.
Venture Capital 2.0 Panel by Mike Arrington At web 2.0 Expo
I am sitting at a panel at Web 2.0 at SFO.
Mike Arrington is the moderator, panel is full of VCs, Jeff Clavier of SofTech, Mike Eisenberg of Benchmark, Josh Koplman of First Round Capital, David Hornik of August Capital and Chris Moore of Redpoint Ventures.
This is one of the very select panels I decided to attend trusting Mike Arrington and he has not let me down :-))
I've sat thru VC panels at so many panels in past conferences and THIS IS THE BEST!!!
Updated: Video of the panel is here. Its a here and we are riding high with more web.20 ideas not bubble 2.0 yet!
Mike Arrington has nailed it well that startups are able to start and grow with little money (200 to 500K) which is led by smaller fund of $300Mil and the rest of larger VCs have to scramble to get into the deal for companies in second rounds.
The VCs are talking about value-add, and saying everything is hunky dory.
I am impressed that Mike Arrington has lived up to his self-earned special space in Web 2.0 world, as the absolute subject expert on the web 2.0 startup world, bringing in good data to substantiate his questions.
An interesting point I heard from Dave Hornick is that VCs are avoiding Bubble 2.0 by building incentive to build real businessed. Hmm! Would love to learn more about this an check this out!
I'll post a video of select portions of this panel later.
Mike Arrington is the moderator, panel is full of VCs, Jeff Clavier of SofTech, Mike Eisenberg of Benchmark, Josh Koplman of First Round Capital, David Hornik of August Capital and Chris Moore of Redpoint Ventures.
This is one of the very select panels I decided to attend trusting Mike Arrington and he has not let me down :-))
I've sat thru VC panels at so many panels in past conferences and THIS IS THE BEST!!!
Updated: Video of the panel is here. Its a here and we are riding high with more web.20 ideas not bubble 2.0 yet!
Mike Arrington has nailed it well that startups are able to start and grow with little money (200 to 500K) which is led by smaller fund of $300Mil and the rest of larger VCs have to scramble to get into the deal for companies in second rounds.
The VCs are talking about value-add, and saying everything is hunky dory.
I am impressed that Mike Arrington has lived up to his self-earned special space in Web 2.0 world, as the absolute subject expert on the web 2.0 startup world, bringing in good data to substantiate his questions.
An interesting point I heard from Dave Hornick is that VCs are avoiding Bubble 2.0 by building incentive to build real businessed. Hmm! Would love to learn more about this an check this out!
I'll post a video of select portions of this panel later.
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