September 7, 2008
When Peek Speaks, what does it speak of?
August 28, 2008
Peek on GeekSugar
Posted by amol at August 28, 2008 2:22 PMAugust 21, 2008
Digg Peek
http://digg.com/gadgets/Will_Peek_s_100_Lo_Fi_BlackBerry_Take_Off
Posted by amol at August 21, 2008 10:21 AMAugust 20, 2008
Peek in Silicon Alley Insider
Alley Insider asks who wants Peek
Huffington Post runs this too, saying we may catch the market by surprise
Peak Speaks about the answer Peek isn't for geeks or businessy types; it's for people who want an easy, attractive way to stay connected
Posted by amol at August 20, 2008 2:35 PMAugust 7, 2008
Help me out by blogging about Peek
Write a blog post and link to Peek at getpeek.com
And say something nice while you're at it!!
Posted by amol at August 7, 2008 2:08 PMAugust 6, 2008
Peek speaks!
The story of how Peek came to be
Posted by amol at August 6, 2008 2:12 PMJuly 25, 2008
Jupiter blogs about Peek
The very insightful Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter on Peek
Posted by amol at July 25, 2008 8:11 AMJuly 24, 2008
NPD writes about Peek
Ross Rubin of NPD writes about Peek's personal mobile email service.
Posted by amol at July 24, 2008 11:21 PMJuly 19, 2008
Good startup ideas.
Y Combinator: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund
Now go do one of these.
June 6, 2008
Networking
There is a modest startup scene in New York, a place dominated more by glitzy media and big dollar finance types.
I was lucky to be invited to a very nice event yesterday, intended for "founders" but really just a media/new media company and venture capital party. Totally media. There were startup founders there....but far more less interesting types.
Posted by amol at June 6, 2008 2:30 PMApril 29, 2008
Peek
Peek website is now up
Posted by amol at April 29, 2008 2:04 PMApril 8, 2008
Peek
Peek has a website
Posted by amol at April 8, 2008 6:51 PMMarch 19, 2008
Dan Schulman's track record
Down 90%
Posted by amol at March 19, 2008 1:00 PMFebruary 25, 2008
Dan Schulman's Unpaid Patch Bet
Success has many father, so Virgin Mobile often gets folks claiming to the be that father. The only person who can really claim to be the person is John Tantum. For example, here is an interview from July 2001 in a telecom mag about the founding of Virgin Mobile and its early strategy.
Amusing then to see Dan Schulman claiming to be that person in a ghostwritten shell piece in the NYT Jobs supplement over the weekend. Irritating! Founded in his house indeed! The company had 70 people by the time he was hired, and was based in San Francisco on 4th Street and Market. How close is that to his house in Warren NJ? (The NYT piece.)
In fact, he only made his foolhardy patch bet in November 2001 nearly 2 years after I had joined the company!
PS he hasn't paid me yet. (It's $500 if you are reading this, Dan.)
Posted by amol at February 25, 2008 3:15 PMDecember 27, 2007
First reads
Our application just received its first messages tonight -- 1132pm EST in Toronto! Big milestone!
Posted by amol at December 27, 2007 11:30 PMOctober 22, 2007
Social blogs
I have been fooling with some social media/blog type services lately.
Tumblr and Drop.io which seem to me to be excellent, really nicely designed blogging tools. Tumblr more than Drop.io, which seems a bit more tuned to sharing media. But both are mainly upgrades over a mere blog in that they are a) fast to set up, b) host your pictures and other media for you, and c) seem to have some social elements.
Unless you choose to use them as sideblogs or media sharing tools, why would you "switch" from your existing blog or social network to begin using them? I don't know that I would, given how entrenched I am in my horrible blogging software, Movable Type.
But I do like that I can post and blog pictures/mp3s super-easily. There is something to that!
(Same goes for all those other sites I have seen....)
Posted by amol at October 22, 2007 4:14 PMJuly 27, 2007
Mailster gossip
Mailster on Alley Insider, which is posting like crazy about NY, startups, and mediacos.
June 18, 2007
Success rate of real ventures
Marca quotes the following today:
The survival rate of Dot Com ventures founded during the height of the bubble in late 1998, 1999, and 2000 was a surprisingly high 48%, in line with if not higher than that observed in prior instances of industry emergence...
Which matches well with the "1/3, 1/3, 1/3 myth" item I posted a while back.
Posted by amol at June 18, 2007 12:29 PMJune 12, 2007
Mailster in the WSJ
Mailster in the WSJ (permalink)
Posted by amol at June 12, 2007 10:08 AMJune 11, 2007
Marca's blog - how to hire
blog.pmarca.com: How to hire the best people you've ever worked with
This is totally valuable thinking. I very much agree with the MSFT/GOOG are non-dispositive stuff.
June 3, 2007
Ampd goes down
Ampd finally down. Rumors...confirmed.
Posted by amol at June 3, 2007 6:27 PMMay 31, 2007
The venture myth of 1/3, 1/3, 1/3
VCs like to say their deals go about 1/3 bust, 1/3 sideways, 1/3 successful. So the winners have to pay for the rest. Let's say you want to return a net 20% annually to your limited partners. You need to earn about 25% (since you are going to take about 20% cut) plus you have to cover your management fees of about 1% of the fund value per year. So call it a gross return target of 30%.
You need to make your initial $1 worth $3.71 at the end of 5 years if you want that 30% gross. And if 1/3 of your deals are GOOB, and 1/3 are merely sideways (worth their original $0.33 of your fund), then you need to turn the last $0.33 invested into about $3.38. So you need to get 10x on that initial money on about 1/3.
The chart above, though, is the actual outcome distribution of venture deals from a deal database that a guy from Chicago GSB considered. Only 9% go out of business. 45% stay private -- "sideways". And 46% are IPO, acquired or filed to IPO. That's 50% more exits than the old 1/3 mythology suggests. Some caveats though, since not all exits are positive returns etc etc.
Another thing to conclude is that if your company gets venture financing, there's a 91% chance it will be around in 5 years either alive, acquired, or public.
Posted by amol at May 31, 2007 9:12 AMMay 20, 2007
A shared file
Here is the kind of thing you can share...http://www.flyupload.com/?fid=5319989
Posted by amol at May 20, 2007 12:32 AMMay 19, 2007
Upload and share a monster file
Flyupload
Posted by amol at May 19, 2007 7:55 PMMay 14, 2007
I told you so department: T-shirts over Ads
One of my goofiest ideas from a few years ago was using the Adsense 5c per click arbitrage against the average revenue potential of t-shirts created on Cafe Press.
Well, I am right -- T-shirts are intrinsically more valuable as clicks than the rates charged by adsense for junk inventory.
Of course, I never did build that automated news-driven t-shirt-generator-and-ad-buyer robot that would take the day's headlines and spew out clever shirt slogans like "who would Jesus bomb?" and "Free Anna Nicole".
Posted by amol at May 14, 2007 7:46 PMWhatever happened to Firefly?
I am trying to figure out what happened to these guys. Still on sale at Target, but perhaps not a "success story" in the MVNO world. Still operating clearly. Only clue is they did a recap and they claim they had "expensive" customer care issues. Huh? For kids?
http://www.cardinalvc.com/pg_news-2-69-.html (how tough the space is)
http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/archives/2005/11/the_firefly_pho.html (hilarious fake trash can anecdote)
http://venturebeat.com/2006/10/19/firefly-raises-3m-to-restart-revealing-mvno-problems/ (3mm to wipe out previous holders)
Why would 3mm save the company? How did they blow 25-50ish million?
Nanification
I am working on a project right now to create a new product and I recently came up with a great metaphor for it. It is like the Nano to our evil competitor's iPod.
They make a great product. But they are the only option. And because of this they make it really big, powerful, and expensive. We think people want a smaller, lighter, faster, cheaper one. So we are making one.
If you think of the Nano, it is actually a flank defense more than an innovation on pure terms. When it was introduced, it was Apple's first flash-based player (well, the shuffle was first). It was a pre-emptive response to...the onslaught of far lower price and far more mobile players like those from Sandisk and Rio.
Well it worked.
Maybe we will be a Sandisk to our big goliath's Nano. Or maybe we'll be the Civic to their Cadillac.
Posted by amol at May 14, 2007 6:56 PMTheFunded
Man this site is really taking off. It's good too!
Posted by amol at May 14, 2007 6:33 PMFlyUpload
Upload big files!
Posted by amol at May 14, 2007 9:57 AMMay 5, 2007
Founders at Work
Founders at Work
Great book. First person accounts of how founders made Paypal, Hotmail, Apple, Yahoo!, and lesser but more recent startups like 37Signals, Bloglines, etc.
Nuggets:
Levchin of Paypal: they were a Palm Pilot to Palm Pilot payment platform at first. Remember that?
Bhatia of Hotmail: Tim Draper is a liar. He didn't invent "viral marketing" by telling them to put "from Hotmail" at the footer to every email. Plus he dragged them over the coals on financing the bridge round pre-acquisition. Clearly, Sabeer didn't leave the deal feeling warm towards DFJ!
Woz: the guys is a real friggin' genius and Jobs is the classic salesman-CEO to his classic engineer-nerd founder. By the way, before founding Apple, he created the Atari game Breakout...as a part-time job. Man!
All I've got is the Rescue Ring....
May 4, 2007
Protecting documents
There is this amusing dance in legal discussions about document formats. Lawyers have tools that turn pretty much anything into a Word doc (even PDFs), and that lets them use this thing called DeltaView to see any and all changes.
Well, to avoid that happening, other lawyers like to fax documents (or fax-to-PDF) to avoid the conversion to text. So then the responding guys have to make hand edits (and therefore fewer edits).
And of course there are the many many usability pitfalls of Microsoft Word itself -- it tracks changes without you noticing, it has crappy compare tools (are the redlines comparing THIS doc to that one or THAT doc to this one?), and it's generally a mess.
So the most super-secret way to operate is fax-to-PDF and sometimes just send a rich-text doc (not MSFT formatting/memory crap in there). But the friendliest way to operate is to send DeltaViewed-blackline and redline docs. Friendlier behavior usually correlates to better balance of power.
Now you know who you are dealing with!
Posted by amol at May 4, 2007 12:25 PMMay 3, 2007
Paul Graham on starting startups
This is the best article about starting companies I have read in ages, and full of very true insights about what motivates startup founders. It's also a guide to looking at the world around you and finding the resources you need to start something.
May 2, 2007
Virgin Mobile files for IPO
Virgin Mobile USA files for IPO :: RCR Wireless News
In its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Virgin Mobile released detailed information on its business. The firm, founded as a joint venture between Sprint Nextel and the Virgin Group, launched service in July 2002. By November 2003, the MVNO had racked up 1 million customers. As of Dec. 31, Virgin Mobile counted 4.57 million customers, a 19% increase from the 3.84 million customers it served as of Dec. 31, 2005.
As of March 31, Virgin Mobile counted 4.88 million customers.
As for the firm’s customer metrics, Virgin Mobile said its ARPU clocked in at $21.48 in 2006, down from the $22.54 it recorded in 2005. Virgin Mobile’s cash cost per user, or CCPU, was $13.15 in 2006, down from the $14.94 it posted in 2005. Virgin Mobile said CCPU is used to measure and track its costs to provide support for its services to its existing customers.
Finally, the MVNO’s cost per gross addition, or CPGA, was $120.55 in 2006, up from the $118.62 in 2005. Virgin Mobile said CPGA is used to measure the cost of acquiring a new customer.
The MVNO also boasted of its data sales. Virgin Mobile said that 17% of its service revenues for 2006 were from non-voice services, which the firm said was 5% higher than the wireless industry average of 12%, according to the Yankee Group.
As for the firm’s financials, Virgin Mobile said it recorded operating revenues in 2006 of $1.1 billion, up from around $990 million in 2005. The MVNO posted a $36.7 million loss in 2006, down from the $102.9 million loss in 2005.
Virgin Mobile USA’s IPO filing comes on the heels of a number of high-profile IPO efforts in the wireless market, including those from Clearwire Corp. and MetroPCS Communications Inc.
Posted by amol at May 2, 2007 12:39 PMApril 17, 2007
Convergence
Man, I have spent a lot of the last 6 months talking about/contra convergence.
This is one link that just ends the conversation: what's in your bag? at Flickr
Posted by amol at April 17, 2007 9:48 PMApril 15, 2007
Criteria for opportunities
My friend Fabrice has this obsessively structured approach to life (read his blog, you'll see what I mean), and I was reminded of this as I ran across this post and an interview with him on Venture Voice. Pretty random really -- the interview is pretty old (18 months old) and it just turned up on popurls.com due to Odeo (here is the link). What a long chain of cultural re-packaging.
He has these "9 rules" for picking an opportunity (in my order):
Market potential
1 - a big potential market
2 - with a rapidly growing actual market
Attractive execution model
3 - with a clear business model at the outset (not speculative)
4 - high scalability of growth model (no friction)
5 - potential to "win" or lead the market (not intrinsically fragmented)
6 - low supplier/distributor pressure (i.e., risk of disintermediation or supplier leverage)
7 - I know how to do it or can learn how
Financing
8 - needs less than 15mm in funding
Personal
9 - will be fun (the key driver through adversity)
his take
How his first major venture went:
A European Auction site.
350K cash invested to start Aucland and Terremate
--
sold 50-60% share for 120mm capital
Locked up value of 400mm+
QXL/Ricardo all stock - couple of hundred mm.
Terremate - 170mm
Stocks all crashed 90%+
--
Left with 700K cash by October 2000.
Big mistakes
1 - Gave 50% to cofounder giving him too much shared control. Better to act fast
2 - Overbuilt scalability b/c Ebay was crashing a lot. Took us 9 months to build. With Zingy we were fine crashing a lot
3 - All competitors were free but VCs forced us to make business model from the start. Slowed growth
4 - Wrong investor -- high net worth guy -- Arnault. Didn't like him, very arrogant but offered 2x money at 2x valuation. Long story - reminds me of my O'Brien story. He refused to sell when Ebay came to offer. Very interesting - listen to minute 22 and following on this - the interview. Didn't have a right to force the sale.
Started looking for "the next idea".
Second big venture:
Zingy, starting in 2001. Essentially a copy of Jambo and Kiwi from Europe -- b2c telecom service company.
Tried to raise venture and couldn't. Looked for friends and got several increments of 100K. Ended up reaching 1.4mm from friends and family in increments, supporting a run rate of 100K per month. Couldn't raise anything else from them as they were not seeing any traction. Started investing his own money -- all the 700K + 100K of credit card debt. And then just ran out of money and missed payroll for months in early 2002!
Fixed the errors. Started in June 2001 and was live by September 2001. Free. Had 1mm users a year later. When they started charging, they had a big base and 50K staid on.
With volume growing, were getting meetings at lots of carriers. But no deals. Got the first deal -- with MSN and lots of PR. The terms of the deal -- paid them a minimum commitment.
Motorola called, as they were running the ringtones site for Nextel. Had a strong result with them in first month trial.
Sprint calls -- they want help licensing all the hip hop sites. Get a deal.
Earning 100K revenues but spending 200K per month. End of summer 2002 -- cut the staff down. Several of the senior guys leave. August 15, Sprint's first check arrives and its 500K. Saves the company; they are instantly positive. They know the business works and now they are growing.
August 23 they launch on AT&T. They see the daily revenues (real time billing system).
October 1 - MTV and Virgin Mobile launch. 10K per day. 20K per day.
October 15 - Nextel. October 19 - AOL. Launch 14 US, 4 Canadian, 4 Latin American carrier launches over the next year up to 4mm per month in revenues.
VCs start calling. Company is generating 3-4mm per month. Acquisition offers come in for 8-9mm valuation. Fabrice has 53% of the company. Offers are rising -- 10mm, 20mm.
They decide to simply focus on growth with their profits -- add polyphonic tones, color wallpapers, ringback tones, bigger offices.
By April 2004, a Japanese company approaches them. They offer 40mm cash. Serious offer.
Hires a bank -- you should do this! Have them be the bad guys on the deal. They get a higher valuation -- 80mm in cash to the original bidder, of which half up front the rest in earn out. 20x the expected earnings for 2004.
Decided to sell. Was worried about supplier and distributor leverage. Wanted to take money off the table.
Stayed on as CEO with them and blew out the earn out targets. Acquired Vindigo, added games, prepared for S-1, etc.
In retrospect, maybe the risks at the time were not real.
Lessons learned on how to build a multi-billion dollar company
- invest more in consumer marketing
- invest more in exclusive licenses
- more in product development
- LESS in profitability
- the public company owner was not aligned on that target
March 31, 2007
Founders against the world
Guys who start companies are really very different people. They aren't all alike but they aren't like the folks who tag along etc. A good friend and fellow entrepreneur makes a big distinction between the As, Bs, Cs:
- As join a company when it's firstname@thecompany.com and nobody's sure about funding. They do everything, fast, with intuition and with errors.
- Bs join when they can say "it's a backed by so-and-so and I'm getting 10,000 options!". They are opportunists with valuable relevant skill matches but a need for stability in their risk taking. When they are the right guys they build terrific organizations, manage people effectively to create high quality stuff.
- Cs join to do very specifically defined things and play roles in a well-defined hierarchy. They come looking for "well, this thing could go public..."-type excitement but they aren't building anything radical (even if they are following a visionary founder or A that waves that flag). The company is 100+ people by then and increasingly resembles the big corporate where the C used to work (processes, big meetings, emails with many people CCd, version control, program management, politics, fragmentation of objective, etc.)
And then there are the founders who actually attract the As in the first place. Founders are willing to put up with great burdens of risk and responsibility in exchange for both reward but also freedom and autonomy.
I say all this about founders because there is no institution of founders out there. The institutions of entrepreneurship are more often dominated by VCs and professional managers, both of which can be terrific founders but aren't necessarily. They are different roles. And the classic great VC or professional manager/CEO/leader types don't need to have the qualities that founder types do. In fact, a lot of what they do when they are "doing their jobs" is tame founders. Great VCs find these wild founders and commercialize them. Professional managers take over their companies and help the ideas turn into franchises. And so on. But when you read about entrepreneurship, you don't often hear about the special qualities of founders. Since founders don't seem to be writing the textbooks...
Posted by amol at March 31, 2007 11:12 PMMarch 20, 2007
Personality
What kind of personality is well suited to starting companies? What is an entrepreneur like? Well, here is the start of a partial list:
- Vision is important. Visionary or ready to operate in a visionary space. Not a skeptical, "yes maybe, but..." personality.
- Resoluteness through setbacks. Need to be able to fail elegantly, not fall apart. There will be lots of setbacks.
- Selling. When you start a new project, you are the only one who believes it. You will spend a long time selling it to people until they start telling you it was obvious all along.
- "Number of zeroes" as Nesheim says in his book. It's important how big the numbers are -- millions, billions, whatever -- not whether it's 1 million or 2 million. People who don't get this are useless.
March 19, 2007
Ruefully funny software
Meet Socializr, From Friendster's Founder - WSJ.com
The Socializr site is sprinkled with rueful jokes about Silicon Valley culture. The company's motto is "Don't be boring" -- "because Google already took 'Don't be evil,'" the Web site notes. The title on Mr. Abrams's business card is "junior computer programmer."
"With these things, you have to have a sense of humor," Mr. Abrams says.
Posted by amol at March 19, 2007 10:52 AMMarch 15, 2007
Private markets
For the last year, contrary to the silly stretch piece in the WSJ that "IPOs are back!", the way to exit has been private (StubHub to Ebay, Myspace to News, Skype to Ebay, Tellme to Microsoft, Webex by Cisco, Youtube by Google, Good to Motorola).
And the IPOs have been ouch-worthy (Vonage down 80%, Clearwire not looking so hot).
The worrying thing is that my old screwup-magnet friends at Virgin Mobile are now angling for public markets paradise with their own 7 year vintage S-1 filing. I hope they don't screw this up like so many other things lately. It makes those of us who were responsible for the thing look silly :(
The method behind Method
Method is a consumer goods "startup" that makes home cleaning products. I first saw them at Target in 2004 or so, and perhaps they were founded as a company only a year before. They do a bunch of things really well, in their attack on a very large and very commodity category full of big spending competitors. Some of the themes in how they compete:
- green, organic, natural, environmental -- in a very chemistry-heavy category; these imply somehow that it's "safer"
- sustainable, responsible, balanced, "people", community-- e.g., "no testing on animals", a position of dialog with customers. More Whole Foods and Starbucks than Wal-Mart and McDonald's
- design -- the packaging and colors look cool
- they talk about their core themes as including "efficacy" and "safety". Safety seems to follow from the green core, rather than a Mercedes-Benz style "we engineer it for safety". Efficacy is a table stakes element and not really part of the differentiation
- they talk about fragrance too, and that's probably a potent differentiator though I don't often think of it when choosing Method (women probably are more likely too...)
Some of their tactics:
- blog that reports on environmental and other issues -- not just method related, but related to their corporate "spirit"
- "advocates" social networky thing on their site
- philosophy/mission at the core of the value proposition -- it's 1/3 of the site
- conventional "non-conventional" marketing -- like starting distribution at Target, using pop-up shops, slowly expanding the reach
Important things to note that are "weaknesses":
- they charge a price premium. That is their luxury for doing the above stuff well
- they are fast-followers not leaders on the actual cleaning technology. E.g., they just introduced a swiffer-like product this quarter, 3-4 years since it's original P&G conception.
March 11, 2007
How PR used to work, and how it works now
How PR used to work
- Publicist calls journalists
- Journalists come to company
- Company announces, "We are doing X"
- Journalists publish articles that you are announcing you will do X!
These days only the most powerful companies can do this. Like Apple and the iPhone. Just announce and the news is news.
How it works now
- You swear secrecy
- You "screw up" something related to a product launch X (publish a user guide somewhere)
- You leak it
- Someone blogs about X excitedly (while making fun of how dumb you were to accidentally leak it)
This is because nobody cares what your stupid company has to say. All companies are evil and all PR is bullshit. So why report what Microsoft is touting about their lame new SQL Server?
Much better, stick it to the Man by rubbing his nose in his own mistakes!
Well, now you must gives the kids of today something to revel in. It's becoming formulaic.
Posted by amol at March 11, 2007 7:36 PMMarch 10, 2007
People's qualities
When hiring people at new companies, an all too easy and too common mistake is to simply hire "smart" people. It's a poorly defined notion and ends up with lots of "like" bias (get people like you). Some patterns I have seen over time:
- Good schools. Hire people that went to some good schools, regardless of what they did there or its relevance to the business. Also ignore other experience or level of tenure.
- Good people. Hire people you like or who share your values. They know people you know and laugh at the same jokes and so on.
- Good experience. Hire people from a company that dominates/plays field X, where X is where you aspire to have your startup compete. E.g., you hire an Oracle guy to be part of your database search company or a Virgin Mobile guy to help you with your MVNO.
All are very dangerous patterns to fall into. One common danger is that someone who matches your guiding principle may cause you to miss one of their many flaws. Good schools are full of lazy or privileged losers; culture fit is just a tiny part of high performance; and matching experience is often skin deep optics more than substance. By the time you decipher what his title meant at Oracle, you will probably already know that "program lead" won't be helping you optimize your fundamental algorithms.
In particular, these heuristics for hiring your people fail on another important measure: they don't track the fundamental capabilities you want to see. They are, if anything, meant to correlate with people having these capabilities. But if you don't know what you're looking for you will end up with any old Columbia graduate or friend of a friend.
The most obvious one to check is problem solving and experience. Can this person figure out the stuff they need to figure out? People usually do interview for this -- Are they smart? Are the credentials good? Do they have relevant content knowledge?
To me the most likely failure points are: a) how well they work in a team and manage a team (very hard to assess objectively via credentials or by interpersonal/qualitative interviews), and b) is this person a leader who will drive decisions and change and action or a chump?
In every venture I have been involved, we had much more interest in the problem solving capability, and much more success in finding people with it. But we had much less luck on the team and leadership qualities -- ending up too often with a mix of chumps, bureaucrats, political operators, brittle authoritarians, narrow minded conservatives, etc.
I will not repeat some of those hiring errors. If only I knew how to be sure I won't...
Buying and selling
One of the big lessons of the last couple of years experience is that it is very much worthwhile to own things. The asset value is what it's all about. Back in my McKinsey days, the trajectory was so well defined in part because you didn't own anything -- success means you make XYZ compensation and unlucky results mean you just have to leave and look for new things.
Well, starting a company means you own something and see if the wind will catch it. We're just now learning the lesson of how powerful that is, and I'm hoping to build on that further in the next venture or two.
Hopefully, the fate of the mobile service we have been building over the last year or so will become a concrete and public bit of news shortly. The indications so far are good!
Posted by amol at March 10, 2007 9:29 PMFebruary 18, 2007
Journalism X
I wonder what is next for journalism, since it seems to keep changing all the time. One of the present fadlets is professional blogging -- not by amateurs-turned-pros (like Gothamist or any litany of others) but by pros-turned-professional bloggers (like Huffington or Politico).
A friend I met recently, Laurent, is leaving the fancy gig as American correspondent for Liberation (the champion of leftist Parisian journalism) to...start a group blog. Behind the scenes: RUE89 le Making Of
Posted by amol at February 18, 2007 1:59 PMFebruary 17, 2007
3GSM
Big shows are a terrific setting to do meetings. 3GSM is one of the best I've been to. It's kind of elite -- I didn't see 300 people from Microsoft crawling the scene, though I did see a large number. There is sort of a feeling that a carrier or equipment maker or whoever should send 5-6 of their top guys. Lots of investors floating around, too. And very few mom and pop type gawkers that you typically find a things like CTIA (wireless dealers) or CES (computer store guys or technicians).
An interesting thing is that the big US players weren't around -- no Cingular. Of course, colossal self-justifying presences from Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and Telefonica. Essentially, the show is a forum for them to hold court with their suppliers and prove to their shareholders that it's worth owning multi-country footprints.
Posted by amol at February 17, 2007 3:09 PMFebruary 10, 2007
Unfair advantage
I've been reading a terrific book by John Nesheim that was spurred partly by some comments of a particular VC (who must have been reading this book...) and partly by my colleague in my new venture who had just read Nesheim's older book about startups and financing (also a good one -- High Tech Startup).
The great thing about this one, though, is that Virgin Mobile (and my favorite contribution, the Rescue Ring) is in it!
People who want to work at startups
I am always surprised by how unsophisticated potential employees at new companies are. At established companies, the dynamics are easier to understand: salary, bonus, advancement path.
In a company where most of your potential value is in the stock, the potential value of options is very complicated. Worse, the potential value of the company itself is complicated too!
It is, of course, a difficult conversation to have with your new potential team. And it is even likely that the team isn't all that well informed -- future dilution, down rounds, vesting schedules. What does anyone know about these things if they haven't done it a few times?
Still, one must try. Read a book -- there are a bunch of good ones.
Posted by amol at February 10, 2007 10:36 AMFebruary 5, 2007
Objections
In the early stage of a company it's all sales mode: team, funding, partners, yourself. Everyone needs to be sold.
And when you are selling there are certain patterns you run into -- of which one is the "objection".
A classic objection pattern is the "first thought bias". You say some stuff, an idea occurs to the listener, they either listen till you are done or tune out, then they say..."My first thought on this is XYZ."
XYZ is typically something deeply revealing about their personal background. If they came from hardware, it's a comment about hardware. If they just came back from India, "can this work in the developing world?". And so on. Which in itself is only mildly bad (that perspective so much drives people's topline reactions rather than "objective" truths driving their observation).
What is seriously bad is that the first thought always comes back. At the end of the call in the recap, in the next call's recap, and in the ultimate "here's what we think about your business" bottom-line you will hear that first thought 80% of the time.
One way to handle people's first thoughts is to be understanding -- "I hear you but there are some things I would add...", the collaborative discussion approach that I have been coached toward over time (in Philosophy and in business) in part because of my personally confrontational debating style.
Another approach though is to utterly destroy one of these first thoughts. If you believe in first thought bias, letting a person make an invalid observation initially will saddle you with it for life. So you must crush it. I haven't tried this one very much yet, but I'm going to. Tell me how it goes for you.
Posted by amol at February 5, 2007 7:41 PMJanuary 30, 2007
Funding new projects
Building something from nothing (to paraphrase Heidegger's "maximum" question of metaphysics), is tough work.
Finding the right match with money is harder than you think. That is, the list goes past item #1.
1. Appetite. The all-important variable of course is interest. Does your investor want to back you? Do they have the appetite to do the deal? Of course you need to find someone who wants to do the deal, but the list is longer than this! On my last project, we had the pleasure of several interested appetites, but that wasn't enough to do the deal.
2. Valuation. Investors in the first formal round often want half. You need to make sure this works for you -- sufficient reward left for you, sufficient funds to get to the next round. If they have to take half, then see if you can postpone bringing them in until the value for half is high.
3. Milestones. What will you do with the money? What do they expect you to achieve? The investors will soon be your board, and they'll be riding you to do these things. And if they are the flakey sort, they may be driving you in a different direction than the one you thought was agreed initially. You have to get a clear shared view of what you ("the management") are going to be doing. If you don't like what they are saying, watch out.
4. People fit. There will be lots of stuff you can't discuss or foresee. So you need to like the people -- their experience, their approach, their reputation, their personal fit with you in style and culture. Wow does it suck to have annoying or incompetent board members.
5. Firm and fund fit. Do these guys have enough money to follow you? They probably can't invest more than 1/10th of their fund in any one project (you). So do you think these guys can take your "whole" deal? And what about exits -- what are they going to look for? Can they help you pull off a sale?
Posted by amol at January 30, 2007 8:05 PMJanuary 9, 2007
MFR: My Friend Raza
Who knew? Raza and Vishal's company is publicly listed and the thing is worth 100MM!
UNCL: Summary for MRU HOLDINGS INC - Yahoo! Finance
Posted by amol at January 9, 2007 8:28 PMJanuary 4, 2007
Anti-portfolio
Bessemer has a really funny take on the deals they have declined. I love that they do this so openly, since there is nothing more annoying than the smug VC naysaying that is their stock and trade. At least this admits of the pain of false negatives.
Bessemer Venture Partners - Our Portfolio
Our reasons for passing on these investments varied. In some cases, we were making a conscious act of generosity to another, younger venture firm, down on their luck, whom we felt could really use a billion dollars in gains. In other cases, our partners had already run out of spaces on the year's Schedule D and feared that another entry would require them to attach a separate sheet. Whatever the reason, we would like to honor these companies -- our "anti-portfolio" -- whose phenomenal success inspires us in our ongoing endeavors to build growing businesses. Or, to put it another way: if we had invested in any of these companies, we might not still be working.
Posted by amol at January 4, 2007 9:08 PM
