Sharpshoot

Guess who is back

2012-01-27T22:16:00.001-08:00

I've had a long hiatus from a public profile since shutting down Snaptalent in 2009. It was an emotional time as founder and CEO to put in 2 years into something, and make the decision that based on market timing, that we'd return the $1m we had in the bank back to investors and shut down the company. That was one of the toughest entrepreneurial decisions i have ever made, but looking back now, was one that will benefit me in the long term. For those two years I learned 10 years of entrepreneurial lessons.

Our investors, who included some of the top angels and VC's in Silicon Valley, London and New York, remarked it was a bold and very noble decision. Difficult to make, but with the long term karmic balance of the ecosystem maintained.

They included

TAG - Saul & Robin Klein

Index Ventures - Danny Rimer

Jeff Clavier

Early Googlers like Andrea Zurek, Aydin Senkut, Paul Buchheit

Chris Sacca

Pejman Nozad from Amidzad

Auren Hoffman of Rapleaf, and now Founders Fund

YC Mafia like Robby Walker & Wayne Crosby of Zenter (GOOG) and Trevor Blackwell

Y Combinator (winter '08) - Paul Graham & Jessica Livingston

Jonah & Noah Goodhart

Tom Cole - then of Trinity Ventures, and now Serial Entrepreneur

Naval Ravikant

Betaworks - Andy Weissman & John Borthwick

If it wasn't for PG, in the summer of '07 sending me an email that I should consider pitching him, a week later in Mountain View, while they were returning back from Boston's summer batch for YC. That email, and the subsequent pitch at YC changed my life. Forever.

I learned a lot. A lot that i haven't shared. It takes a lot to get emotionally ready again. To build. To create. To obsess about something thats yours. To bring your destiny into your own hands.

The good news is. I'm feeling that energy again. Guess who is back.

So, you got a Y Combinator interview, now what?

2009-04-13T15:19:00.000-07:00

This piece was written last year as advice for Y Combinator applicants

As a company from the latest Winter batch of Y Combinator (YC), I can promise you that the YC experience will change the trajectory of your company forever.

What are the main benefits if you get accepted?

It’s important to remember that Y Combinator is the stepping stone for you to turn a dream and a hobby into a real business. For me, it was the first time I could focus on really making a go of building a big business with some very talented co-founders (Jamie, Tim, and now Brad) and really make the transition from PhD drop out to full-time entrepreneur. Many of you have been in jobs you hate, have just left school, or even dropped out to make this happen. Remember that feeling of being trapped and having a dream? Take that frustration and put your all into making this interview happen.

For Snaptalent YC was a great platform for generating more opportunities for our company and really allowed us to focus on gathering enough evidence to launch, build a product and get more funding to move our dream to the next level.

YC has three main benefits for startups that are accepted:

Product advice: Paul Graham is one of the most astute product advisers i know. Having seen a lot of startups, his experience from building Viaweb, and his experience with YC, Paul gives you the confidence to go after a big market by focusing on making a product users will hug you for when they see you in the street. It’s that blend of great design, usability, and technical savvy that characterizes a YC startup. If you have the ingredients now, some of the stuff Paul will say will make you go ‘you know what, that’s actually right’ after disagreeing initially. This stuff is Gold dust.
Peer group: As the alumni group gets larger the range and depth of experience and contacts just grow. It can be product advice, scaling advice, funding advice, visa advice, experts in different functional languages and platforms, acquisition advice or just contacts to do deals - the YC alumni network can connect you to anyone from Silicon Valley to Europe. Its not just the alumni network, as each batch arrives (there were 21 startups in the Winter ‘08 batch), the range and depth of experience in your immediate peer group is rich and diverse. For example, in our batch, Heroku and Rescuetime were second-time entrepreneurs, Chatterous guys were Python superhackers from Amazon, and everyone swapped contacts and advice like crazy. You may have even spoken with YC alumni pre-interview. In a few years, people won’t just talk about the PayPal mafia, they will talk about the YC mafia. This is a phenomenon and you want to be part of it!
Opportunity: YC is an opportunity to make encounters and gain the advice of people who can really help you make the most of your idea. Every second is an opportunity to learn and evolve. From YC dinners with people like Chris Sacca, Evan WIlliams, Marc Andressen, and Paul Buccheit, to Demo Days and open houses, everyone could help you succeed if you talk to them. YC gives you credibility like no other, but its up to you to make the most of it. These folk could be advisors, investors, mentors or give you valuable passing advice. YC is an amplifier for such interactions for you to get funded and move to the next stage, from product to company.

So, what is YC looking for and how can you be best prepared for your interview?

YC are looking for teams of entrepreneurs who are incredibly ambitious, determined to succeed, can listen and learn, and most of all, who can really get things done in a short amount of time. These are people who love building great products and are interested in building a business around that product, doing whatever it takes. Remember YC has to at least return its investment to keep going, so if you get in, your company’s eventual success could help not only you get rich but seed future generations of YC startups.

In the space of a weekend, the YC partners will interview 50-60 startups. Each interview only lasts 10 minutes and the objective is to get a sense of whether you are a good team. The idea is secondary, but as i will discuss the way you present the idea and what you say all link back to showing that you are a good team.

So, here are the things to do well:

Have a Demo: you have 2 weeks now to get something up that can show off what you can do. Lock the door and get to work. It doesn’t need to be complete, but if you can show evidence for good design and speedy execution than thats great evidence to have you be part of YC. Work on a usable interface (pg loves that) and be prepared to walk through it if you get the chance. Even if you don’t show the demo the experience of knocking one out will show you the intensity of YC. Our demo helped show our ability as a team to do something fast. When we got the interview we were all panicked by how little time we had. It’s natural, expect it to be like that.
Don’t be verbose. Don’t waffle. You only have 10 minutes. Be thoughtful and articulate. Pack as much meaning into as little words as possible. Be concise and clear. PG and co get so many applications and have so little time to read them that you should expect that the YC partners don’t have any idea what you do. Practice the following questions: ‘So, what do you do?’, ‘Why is that different to what exists now?’, ‘Why will people use this?’
Be flexible: you will be caught off guard. Expect the interview to uncover areas you haven’t even thought of. The YC partners are going to see how you react to this. There have been previous teams where YC has hated their idea and they’ve had to change it on the spot or had 24 hours to come back with a new idea. This is where your team shines through. Good entrepreneurs learn, are open-minded to feedback and can adjust. These are the kind YC wants to fund. We didn’t even apply with Snaptalent we changed our idea after we were accepted. YC backed the team. Expect the same with your interview.

When you get to California, take some time to relax and get into the mindset. I remember how nervous we were before our YC interview. We solved mental arithmetic problems in the car to keep us fresh and mentally alert. I thought the interview went terribly. We were challenged on everything, why was our idea different, how could we do better. Just relax and be yourself. Don’t be stubborn and have fun meeting and hanging out with the other teams. There will be YC alumni hanging out too - grab as much of their insight as possible. One surefire way of predicting success is when prospective applicants take a lot of time to learn from alumni. It means you care - if you see one of us, grab us and feel free to chat.

The fact that you have been selected for interview shows you are on the right track and are super talented. You now have a great odds of getting in. This could be the chance to make some personal history.

As YC alumni we’re happy to answer any questions, feel free to add a comment to this post or email me on Sumon [at] snaptalent [dot] com . Wishing all of you the best of luck!

Football clubs still using Snail Mail!

2008-07-08T21:51:00.001-07:00

Being disappointed that Arsenal is selling yet another one of our leading lights, Emanuel Adebayor, I was even more surprised by the way they expressed that communication.

Planetfootball quotes AC Milan vice president Adriano Galliani as saying

"Today Arsenal sent us a letter saying they were willing to talk to us about Adebayor," Galliani told Antenna3 television.

"The letter from Arsenal that says, 'Following our communication of 13th June, in which we informed you we were not willing to deal over Adebayor, now we are writing to tell you that we will consider a deal if it still interests you'.

Being a digital maven, sometimes it seems that writing a letter delivers a much stronger statement. My prediction is that this is going to be the next product (email --> letter) coming from Moo.

Go on Richard. Make it happen ;)

The start up team balance

2008-07-07T21:46:00.000-07:00

In a startup you need a combination of visionary people and people who aren't visonary but can understand the vision and execute against it. This is the startup team balance.

Too many visonary people = not enough gets done as everyone is dreaming about the vision all day

Too little vision = nothing big is ever achieved as no one really has a vision beyond what is going on.

One or two visionary people is enough, coupled with people known as executors. These guys/girls are steady eddies who, understand what needs to be done and just get on with it. These are probably the hardest people to find, since they have to be matched on ambition, aspiration, and productivity.

They generally seek out ambitious ventures in which they passionately believe in the vision. Their productivity is what drives turing those dreams into reality i.e. a game changing company.

Are you a visionary or an executor?

The speed of acquiring talent

2008-07-06T22:18:00.000-07:00

Not having someone fill a role at a Company costs that Company productivity. It takes time to identify someone who could fulfill that role at maximum productivity i.e. has the right fit for the company. So the ultimate pain killer would be a service which reached as many of the right people as fast as possible and which qualified each of those for fit in the most efficient way possible.

This would make the time to productivity (t) as small as possible for companies. Companies will pay for productivity.

I guess this is a problem we are thinking about every day.

Jumpstarting the rollodex

2008-06-29T21:06:00.001-07:00

Its incredible how much web services which connect people over common interest can greatly accelerate how quickly you meet like minded people offline. Before our true identities were exposed on the web the same level of connection would be impossible or much less efficient.

Lets take a business example - with so many people blogging about themselves and their thoughts our true identity is being exposed through social media. It means that when we get connected to people, the qualification stage of whether we want to meet them happens way before we waste time in countless encounters. With twitter, tumblr, linkedin profiles, facebook - there is so much more context to taking a mutual connection.

This means when you meet in person, you already have a good sense of why it would be worth knowing that person versus prior to when our identities were not on the web it would take a ton of meetings just to get a sense of whether you wanted to do business.

I believe this effect of having true identity on the web, and pre-qualification is giving rise to a new phenomenon in modern business: jump starting the rollodex.

With so much information out there for people - it doesn't take 5 years to get to the top of the industry. Be opportunistic, and make that networking happen more efficiently. At least i know its touched my life in unexpected ways so far.

The power of a cause

2008-06-24T21:13:00.000-07:00

Something i've been thinking more and more about is what happens to performance under situations of stress. Let me share with you some examples of what I'm thinking about - these all refer to entrepreneurial endeavors

1) Moving to a new city to work: So i've moved from London to San Fran. Even though i've been here for less than a day, my unfamiliarity with the local environment means that I'm trying to squeeze as much out of my waking day through work than anything else. I can't really do anything else - so that makes me want to work all the time. So situation 1: if you hire workaholic people from out of town and bring them to work then they are likely to work all day, sleep at night and then work all day again just to pass the time. Certainly this wouldn't be the case in London.

2) Having money pressure: Having less money means you need to be on a budget to survive. This means you generally have to be more creative with what you spend money on and do things which are generally free. This means that if you are workaholic generally you are likely to do everything thats fun and free. Often this involves continuing to work. All the time.

3) Having time pressure: generally mission critical things have a high time value. Move too slow you lose. I'm under time pressure to deliver certain things. It makes me want to be more efficient, find better ways to organise stuff and in general make the most of my time. Bottom line, as a workaholic it makes me want to work faster.

So there you go. Find ambitious workaholics, push them into a startup in a new city, with restricted pay and time pressure and watch their performance soar. The power of the cause makes it worth it - this sacrifice is worth something & the emotional cost is negligible to the benefit.

Now i just need to find some more ambitious workaholics to join me to ease the pain.

Plus i really got to sleep :)...

I like this quote

2008-06-05T07:40:00.000-07:00

"If you can track the success of advertising, especially if you can follow sales leads, then marketing ceases to be just a cost-centre, with an arbitrary budget allocated to it. Instead, advertising becomes a variable cost of production that measurably results in making more profit."

I also like this derivative quote

"If you can track the success of recruitment advertising, especially if you can follow candidate leads, then marketing ceases to be just a cost-centre, with an arbitrary budget allocated to it. Instead, recruitment advertising becomes a variable cost of production that measurably results in better candidates."

The latter is what we're doing with Snaptalent.

I haven't posted for a while

2008-06-05T07:34:00.000-07:00

I'm still alive but this time doing what i was made to do.

We just started a company out on the west coast called Snaptalent and spent jan-march doing Y Combinator. I'm a huge believer in revolution - we're reinventing a market that hasn't changed in 15 years, recruitment advertising.

Ahh, that you say - its boring. I know, thats why we're making it sexy and cool again.

If one could connect the best people and best companies in a much more efficient manner you can impact the productivity of companies, the productivity of a labour market and ultimately the productivity of local and national economies.

Thats a big vision and what keeps me going with this. We're not in it for the short ride, this one is a long term project which if we do right will impact 100s of millions of people worldwide.

We'll do it right. Expect more cool blogging from me soon.

Internships at anytime of your life

2007-12-12T14:56:00.000-08:00

One thought which has troubled me for a long time is the idea that internships are only available to people at a certain age and certain time of your life. For example most internships targetted at Young people in the UK are either only accessible to people who are in the penultimate year of their degree. This way if you miss that deadline you've basically blown your chance to do one. This is silly. What if i've graduated? what if i'm a talented first year. What if i've already worked for a few years and want to try something else?

The value of the internship is analogous as a free trial on a website which intends to charge you on a monthly basis. Here the intention is to intice the user to find value in the thing he is intending to purchase before committing to the service. This way if there is ongoing value the user has enough evidence to purchase it. Similarly the month to month nature of the contract allows the user to back out when he or she no longer obtains value for the service.

Imagine if we applied the same principle to the recruitment market? Anyone and everyone could trial a company for three months. The company gets labour for three months at a reduced price with increased evidence that the person is suitable for the role. Also the company knows exactly when to terminate the agreement if the person is not working out. If the person wants to he can start on a month to month contract. If he or she is no longer enjoying it (usually a function of how much they are being stretched and progressing) they can back out at the month end date. They could try a three month internship at another company at anytime and not worry that they aren't eligible for this trial period.

The terminal nature of career choices has no doubt alientated many talented people working in companies right now. I believe such fluidity in the recruitment market will not only alleviate unhappiness but provide companies with a much more iterative way to identify people who will be best suited to its roles, ultimately benefiting the economy with increased productivity.

What do you think?

James Watson's lessons on how to make the most of life

2007-12-02T07:16:00.000-08:00

James Watson together with Francis Crick, generated the fundamental ideas behind DNA's structure winning the Nobel prize in 1962. The rapid growth in our understanding in our genetic structure, composition and control was one of the things which originally snared me to study Biochemistry back in 2001. I can tell you our understanding of genetic structure and control is completely different from what watson's model postulated - but the fundamentals are still true. I also remember him the being the first ever speaker i saw as an undergraduate in Oxford, on my third day there.

Whats interesting is to see the principles which drove James to do what he did everyday..

Watson's lessons in Science, and Life

James Watson wrote an article in the September '93 issue of Science, where he laid down some rules of thumb for succeeding in Science. The rules don't just apply to biology research, but also to Engineering and all of life. The rules are:

1. Learn from winners. Avoid dumb people. Turn to people brighter than yourself. Some people with ego problems never hire anyone smarter than they are, and that is a sure route to failure. As in any game, it is better to compete with those who are better than you are, because it is more difficult and makes winning mean more. Go somewhere beyond your ability.

2. Take risks, and be prepared to get into deep trouble. Watson switched schools at one point and lost his stipend. But the moved paid off in the end.
3. Have a fallback, and make sure someone is there in case you get into deep trouble. Both Watson and Crick were in deep trouble at some point during their breakthrough research, and fortunately they always had someone around to bail them out.
4. Never do anything that bores you. Don't do something that leaves you flat, because it is hard to do something well if you don't like it.
5. Expose your ideas to informed criticism.

Taken from an article written by Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, Nils Nilson - he pretty much set up the CS department there...

See it here: Article

Now, Ooyala is a game-changing startup!

2007-12-02T06:41:00.000-08:00

3 ex-googlers looking to revolutionise the monetisation of video on the web. Check this video out

The three A's of building a great company

2007-12-01T13:36:00.000-08:00

Image: Alexander the Great

As I enter this pretty formative phase of my entrepreneurial career, something i'm thinking increasingly more about is how we can build a team and a company culture that truly strives to be great.

The history behind great teams has seen companies like Paypal, Doubleclick, Google etc define their values early on. The result of this has been the emergence of alumni of these companies retaining these values and unleashing their ambition on ventures creating companies like Slide, YouTube, SpaceX, The Founders Fund (PayPal), Media Whizz, Music Nation (Doubleclick), Felicis Ventures, Ooyala, Odeo, Twitter, Friendfeed, WeatherBill, Webwag (Google). I think this is one hallmark of great teams, finding individuals who are sufficiently touched by the culture and ambition of the company that they continue to express that by founding even more great companies.

I think there are three defining a's when it comes to build a great team which scares the competition shitless with the way that it executes upon an opportunity. In my opinion these are aspiration, audacity and agility.

1) Aspiration
Quoting Marc Andreesen, every major silicon valley success story has been created by founders in their 20s. Why? because young entrepreneurs aspire to prove themselves, they aspire to improve and aspire to make a difference in everything they do. This collective aspiration allows them to move against the odds while competitors get side-tracked by herd-like behaviour int he market. Aspiration stems from strong leadership. As said by Carli Fiorina, former CEO of HP "leadership is defined as the ability to make people see possibilities in themselves they would not otherwise see". Great teams aspire to be market leaders, everyone in those teams aspires to being more than what they were hired for. Collective aspiration creates greatness.

2. Audacity
Audacity manifests itself in the way a great team attacks an opportunity. Innovation requires fresh thinking. This involves being fearless, determined and ready to try anything. Audacity creates new insights, fosters cameraderie, and creates a culture where anything is possible. Would google have launched a search engine in the face of 5 established competitors? Would paypal have contemplated addressing an area with no financial background? Audacity is essential in becoming a great team.

3. Agility
Startups which move fast are incredible. They make competitors quake in their boots, iterate on features so fast customer expectations are way exceeded, and can agressively attack any new opportunity which may create a lead. Agile teams communicate incessently & think and act on the same wavelength. Everyone on the team is vigilant and wary for opportunity and can make swift decisions leading to minimal bottlenecks. It was the agility and freedom which allowed Paypal to change their business model three times. It was the agility of google to combine search with online advertising that led Google to define its area. Agility is what defines great startups.

I think as i build this company we're definitely going to adopt these three a's: agility, audacity and aspiration with vigour.

What other a's do you think should be in here?

Feel free to email me, if you consider bring part of a great team is better than striking out on your own.

Sumon [dot] sadhu [at] gmail . com

Silicon Valley Crack

2007-11-18T19:33:00.000-08:00

I'm addicted. I'm addicted to the big thinking, game changing, no-hold-barred, risk-taking, make-it-happen-capin, attitude crack. Give up your jobs, your degrees and follow your passion in life. Stop compromising on what you can achieve with your artifcial limitations and superficial concerns. Stop saying NO when saying yes is oh so much dangerous. I'm on silicon valley crack and I want to build the biggest company possible. Get audacious & join me.

I'm at Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford. Meeting with PG, Jessica, Bob, Kirill, Reid Hoffman etc. Man i've never been so hyper - and guess what i'm gonna be like this for the next few years - for the rest of my life. Wake up Europe, Wake up - this shit's amazing!

Throw your 40 hour weeks in the bin
Save your city jobs for retards
Who gives a fuck about work/life balance
Stop holding back your dreams because someone said you can't do it - cast them aside and make it happen. If anyone said - I know you can... prove them wrong.

Platform thoughts

2007-10-25T08:53:00.000-07:00

Good god, its been a while without blogging. Part of that selfinduced. Been super busy and also have some very exciting news coming up in the pipeline which i shall tease you with for now.

Whats been incredible to watch over the last few months has been watching the evolution of platforms on the social web. From firsthand insights with Lightbox, and also being in California over the summer during the FB app boom its really a pivotal time for platform developers.

People have initial reservations over whether you can build a business upon being dependent upon someone else's infrastructure. However who would have predicted the growth of the personal software industry as the first wave of Operating systems emerged in the late 80's? This is exactly the same trend.

With the advent of the MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Orkut, Tagged and Bebo platform we can definitely expect some of the best Facebook applications (the superpokes, graffitti, movies, visual bookshelf etc) and platform companies (Slide, Rockyou, Social Media, Lookery etc) to grow into huge and influential consumer software businesses.

I believe the same trend will come about in the Enterprise software business. Salesforce's platform is just the first wave of software companies opening up their infrastructures to help companies in reaching new customers. Its really exciting right now to see some of the experiences we're used to with consumers software to filter into business software. As our generation grows up this is going to be an exciting trend for entrepreneurs to exploit.

Send me an email if you want to talk about platforms. I'm feeling pretty excited - time to nail some more work again! Updates soon.

University is....

2007-07-03T14:29:00.000-07:00

A great quote from Evan Williams in the book founders at work made me smile this morning

"I went to college, and I dropped out because i didn't need to have a degree- because i wasn't going to try to get a job with anyone"

University is great for one thing, finding out who you want to be in life. Many people never get there and hence choose to define themselves by what people think they ought to be doing. You know the pattern - go to university, get a job, get married, get a house, retire etc. Thats fine - most people are happy with that. The other thing about university is that its a microcosm of the distribution of people in real life. 99% of people happily sit in the middle and follow established rhythms through life. They turn up, they do their stuff, they get out. These are the guys who follow established rhythms in life. We need these people. But those who are stigmatised are those at the margins - the freaks, the wierdos and yes, the entrepreneurs.

Does Evan's quote reflect someone who was happy? no? The bottom line. Figure what makes you happy then take the plunge. Even if that means dropping out.

I'm speaking at the Essential Web Conference on the 27th of June at the Imax theatre, London

2007-06-14T07:20:00.000-07:00

I'll be speaking at Library House's Essential Web Conference on a Panel together with Saul Klein of Index Ventures, Adrian Critchlow, founder of Active hotels and Israeli Serial Entrepreneur Zvi Schrieber, founder of Gh.o.st. This is my first Conference panel appearance ever, hopefully the first of many. Come and SEE ME!

The topic:

Let's stop asking why Europe doesn't build new global companies and focus on how it can!

Shortage of ideas and brainpower has never been Europe's challenge in growing global technology companies from a seedcorn. This session looks for other reasons and initiatives to help address the issues which are perceived to be about inspiration, role models, people, etc.

Zvi Schreiber - CEO, G.ho.st - An outsider's perspective on European entrepreneurism

Sumon Sadhu - Imperial Entrepreneurs - A young entrepreneur's perspective

Saul Klein - Venture Partner, Index Ventures - The importance of the ecosystem and the expertise/knowledge/confidence within it - and the Seedcamp initiative

Adrian Critchlow - Alertme.com - The urge to do it again, to stay involved through investing and mentoring

Meeting with Jason Calacanis

2007-06-14T06:53:00.000-07:00

I met Jason Calacanis this morning a cool breakfast here in London.

One thing he said to me really stuck out:

'I start companies because I'm a contrarian - what other people say is impossible I like doing'

He's on his fourth company - Mahalo.com

WORD. Be a contrarian.

In case you are unfamiliar with Jason's bio: ex Seqoia, WebLogs Inc, Silicon Alley and a chat startup he sold to AOL.

"Jason McCabe Calacanis is CEO and co-founder of Weblogs Inc., a network of widely read blogs including Engadget – ranked # 1 by Technorati - Joystiq, Autoblog, and Blogging Baby. Founded in January of 2004, Weblogs, Inc. became a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL in November of 2005. Calacanis, who was appointed a senior vice president of AOL, maintains editorial supervision over Weblogs, Inc. In June of 2006, Calacanis and relaunched Netscape, the iconic browser owned by AOL and was named its general manager.

Prior to forming Weblogs Inc., Calacanis was CEO and founder of Rising Tide Studios, a media company that published print and online publications including the Silicon Alley Reporter, a must-read monthly that chronicled New York’s internet and new media industries. The company also produced of high-profile industry specific conferences in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. After the industry consolidated, the company’s flagship publication changed its focus and became Venture Reporter, which was purchased by Dow Jones.

Calacanis was born and grew up in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. He received a B.A. in psychology from Fordham University in Manhattan. He is a 5th Degree in Tae Kwon Do and has run in eleven consecutive New York City Marathons. He served as a script consultant on Wayne Wang’s film “Center of the World” about the life of a “cyber-surfer” and appears in a supporting role. He serves on the board of directors of Bay Ridge Preparatory School."

Read his blog here

Now this is the company culture i want to create

2007-06-09T05:23:00.000-07:00

Lip Dub - Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger from amandalynferri on Vimeo

CBS acquires last.fm for $280m!

2007-05-30T04:20:00.001-07:00

Mashable reports that broadcasting giant CBS has acquired London-based start up Last.fm for $280 million.

Despite reported flirtation with Viacom in the last few months, this acquisition is a fantastic milestone as it represents the first significant exit for a London based start up since the big acquisition of Skype by EBay back in 2005. Certainly as a signal to the European ecosystem it indicates that its possible to build a consumer media company in Europe and scale with a global audience and still be a target for large media companies.

With Pandora reporting that it had been banned from broadcasting outside the US and the UK, last.m had gained a huge lead in the space, in particular with the addition of music videos. Personalised music recommendation is particularly hot at the moment with iLike reported to have gained around 400,000 new users on the facebook platform this weekend.

Congratulations to Felix Miller and the team, as well as Danny Rimer from Index Ventures and Saul and Robin Klein from TAG who were investors (amongst others) in last.fm.

Why we should make it happen in Europe - lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Marc Samwer - founder of Alando.de, Jamba and the European Founders Fund

2007-05-28T09:04:00.000-07:00

While we are bombarded with amazing stories about entrepreneurs from the US, it is often forgotten that many incredible serial entrepreneurs with inspiring stories of success exist here in Europe.

Marc Samwer, together with his brothers Oliver and Alexander are great examples of the calibre of European Entrepreneur I look up to and am very inspired by. Fresh out of university they started in 1999 with the founding of Alando.de, the German eBay, selling the company to eBay for a tidy $43m only 3 months after launch. This was despite huge competition from existing auction sites and their relative lack of experience being countered by a sheer determination to make it happen . This was a huge result for these brothers who were only 6 months out of university. Not stopping there they recognized the significance of ring tones as a potentially lucrative form of media content and founded Jamba, the infamous creators of the Crazy Frog, before selling the company to Verisign for $253m in 2004. The brothers, just 28, 30 and 32 respectively, are now ploughing back this experience to the next generation of entrepreneurs as angel investors through their fund - The European Founders Fund.

Marc Samwer tells his story here at Google Zeitgeist, 2007

My take home message for myself and also for other young European founders watching this is that this time around, like the late 90's, represents a a time of huge potential for the growth of Internet start ups in Europe. While the US web 2.0 scene is maturing, Europe remains a year and a half behind, leaving fertile opportunities for start ups and start up founders here to exploit. While the support environment here is not as mature, the prominence of serial European entrepreneurs acting as active angels is not only encouraging but indicates an availability of experience which was not present when Marc and his brothers started.

Similarly, the dream of building a significant consumer Internet play as a 23 year old founder is not one that should be held back but pursued with some tenacity. The stories of European entrepreneurs like the Samwer brothers serve to strengthen that ambition. There is real potential of building significant things in Europe. With success stories like Skype, Alando, Spreadshirt, MySQL, Jamba, and emerging talent like last.fm, Moo and MindCandy this is far far from the notion of a pipe dream which only strikes once in a hundred years.

Cultivation shouldn't only stop with a change in attitude but existing founders should rally around young entrepreneurs to generate the community feeling that is required to create an environment of success in Europe. So many of these stories are locked up - never to be retold, yet we never consider that some incredible successes have happened on our back door. Lets start reaching out to those that have done it to lower these barriers.

We are often checked by people who wish to use the fallacy of youth as an impediment to hold back the success of Young European Entrepreneurs. Its time for this to change - Stop holding back your ambitions and as young founders lets really make it happen in Europe.

Start up ideas are cheap but you don't have any.

2007-05-13T10:55:00.000-07:00

I hear you complaining that you haven't got any ideas for a startup. Stop there, take a deep breath and read on.

The hardest part is starting, so here is a friendly kick up the backside:

"Watch people who have money to spend, see what they're wasting their time on, cook up a solution, and try selling it to them. It's surprising how small a problem can be and still provide a profitable market for a solution."

Trevor Blackwell, Partner, Y Combinator
Once you've started understanding what people spend money on you need to apply filters for good and bad ideas.

Here are some of my favourites

1) Evan Williams - 10 rules for Web Startups
2) Fabrice Grinda - 9 business selection criteria
3) Paul Graham - Ideas for startups

The fundamentals of good ideas worth pursuing are
1) Big market (millions of potential customers not thousands)
2) Defensible (hard for someone copy you)
3) Something you can do (if you can't implement it, learn how to and find others too)
4) something people actually want (ie you can answer the question what problem do you solve in one sentence)
5) Make something people will pay for (doesn't have to be at the start, but at some point FREE = worthless, so find something lots of people use and give 80% away for free and charge for 20%)
6) Simple - if you can't explain it in a sentence its too complex

For internet related ideas the following criteria are helpful:

"In retail, the key success factors are location, location, location. In the consumer internet, the key success factors are distribution, distribution, distribution"

Reid Hoffman, Co-founder PayPal, LinkedIn, Serial Entrepreneur & Investor

1) Has good distribution - this means your product reaches people in as many ways as possible, because the product require people to tell their friends, or your website shows up on google searches, to making it easy to share on social networks. If your marketing can be done for free why not. This leads nicely to the second point -
2) Is cheap to do but rapidly creates value - Creativity is born in constraints. Not having half a million dollars to start off with means you are creative with your money/time. These are the best skills to develop as a startup entrepreneur.
3) Is compelling enough to cause repeat usage: A useful service is addictive. How could you leverage our understanding of the psychology of addiction to make things more compelling? Interesting approaches involve design choices and game mechanics.

Remember generating ideas are easy. Thats just the start point which everyone needs. A company is the product of thousands of ideas which revolve around the core start point. Don't be surprised if your idea changes as you look into the problem and don't stop there. Go and do it!

What other thinking helps you generate good ideas for your startup? Serial Entrepreneurs reading your thoughts would be welcome.

Doers Vs Trolls

2007-04-14T12:24:00.000-07:00

Ryan Carson has an interesting post about how those who take action and those who sit and whine.

"Here are the common characteristics of a Builder & Doer: Constantly looking for opportunities Confident but humble Hard working Willing to take risks The second group of people are those who talk and complain, but never actually get off their ass to change things. Here are the common characteristics of Whiners & Trolls: Focus on problems Talk a lot, but act very little Insecure about their abilities Trolls (makes negative comments) on blogs Afraid of taking risks"

Doers Vs Trolls: what are you?

Blogtastic ressurection

2007-04-13T15:02:00.000-07:00

Howdy folks. Last time i treaded blogger i'd made a disclaimer that i'd stop blogging and go do stuff. Luckily i've done loads in between then and now (for those of you au fait with my twitter feed: http://twitter.com/sharpshoot) and can't quite keep the excitement within me.

Similarly, Douglas De Jager of extate has recinded his previous metric of inaction by starting a blog for extate (http://blog.extate.co.uk) and also many of you have been bugging me to blog again.

Fear not my friends, i am now 24 years older and bursting to the seams with good stuff to tell you about. Let the blogging commence....

Kickstart your blogging and go do stuff

2007-01-25T13:02:00.000-08:00

I don't blog enough and i know it.

One thing i remind myself and a sentiment my good friends Douglas De Jager and Bob Goodson share is the notion that bloggers talk and entrepreneurs do.

When you die, what would you rather be known as? Someone who commented on, thought about and watched others start companies or instead someone who was watched, and written about. Actions speak louder than words and there is a fine balance. Reputations stick too - are you a doer or a talker? A procrastinator or someone who wants to get things done yesterday?

It was very much this sort of fear which drives me. What do i want to be remembered as? Definately a dynamic entrepreneur with a TANGIBLE track record, as opposed to a smart, insightful observer who sat on the fence.

On the flipside, being able to create insightful observations, or sharing tips and knowledge is a way for entrepreneurs to engage and help others in the ecosystem. That is why entrepreneurs should blog...but not too often.

Give your blog some love, then follow up with a whole lot of doing. Then talk about it, let people know you are still alive and kicking.

I'm both alive and kicking. Its been an interesting start to the year so far and I definately have some thoughts to get off my chest. Here goes.

Investor Shopping

2007-01-07T12:01:00.000-08:00

From Paul Graham

"We advise founders who go on to seek VC money to take the first reasonable deal they get. If you get an offer from a reputable firm at a reasonable valuation with no unusually onerous terms, just take it and get on with building the company. Who cares if you could get a 30% better deal elsewhere? Economically, startups are an all-or-nothing game. Bargain-hunting among investors is a waste of time."

Don't waste your time. If you have any questions just go to www.Askthevc.com

You Tube - From concept to hypergrowth

2006-12-31T14:47:00.000-08:00

You Tube's remarkable rise from tentative concept to acquisition represent a remarkable journey for any internet startup. To set the context, 12 months ago few would be able to predict a site attracting 100 million uploads a day currently as investor after investor failed to grasp the significance of what they were doing.

Co-founder Jawed Karim tells the story of YouTube and the remarkable back of the scenes story of how one of the most successful sites in history was created (via a youtube video!). Enjoy.

On why innovation is simply a change in our user experience

2006-12-31T13:47:00.000-08:00

It is remarkable how an idea that is so profoundly simple can awaken one from a blogging slumber with the strength of the clarity it brings.

Evan William's assertion that true innovations in software happen only due to advances in our user experience, not radical advances in technology puts into perspective the vast stretch of innovation we have seen in the last 12 months and expect to see(an participate in) over the next few.

Youtube's 1.65 billion dollar acquisition wasn't a consequence of revolutionary advances in video streaming but simply a desire to centralise the experience of watching videos from one site relative to the fragmented experience before. The iPod's success doesn't come with it changing the way mp3 players worked but how they looked and felt, facebook is a better friendster, google was a better excite; every example of a company that has made its presence felt has come with a desire to blow users away with a better experience than before.

Of course changes in User experience are enabled by the availability of enabling technologies, but it is the desire to make things easier, simpler and more intuitive which drive innovation. Had the YouTube founders not desired to make videos load instantly they wold have overlooked the use of flash. In this case flash wasn't the reason for Youtube's success, but merely an enabler to allow a better user experience. Certainly the array of enabling technologies such as wi-max, wifi, nanolithography, rss, microformats, sematic web, RNAi provide a platform for entrepreneurs to create situations which redefine our current user experience.

This central principle span the entire contintiuum of innovation and certainly kills the arguments of naysayers who believe that innovation can no longer occur. For entrepreneurs reading this innovation therefore doesn't depend upon technical wizardry but instead the desire to change the user experience beyond what it currently is. The assertion that innovation has passed its day is dated. Seek to redefine existing user experiences and never settle, for true success is driven by an ultimate desire to make life easier, better and more intuitive. With this in mind whatever problem you are solving or even looking to solve - the answer is simple - focus mindlessly on creating a better user experience as your advantage as opposed to your technical prowess.

Read more + Hear Evan's lecture on "why user-experirence designers will rule the world"
here

Froogle arbitrage

2006-11-11T14:02:00.000-08:00

So i was reading Fabrice Grinda's sound off on why entrepreneurs should regularly brush their teeth and checking out the Phillips Sonicare 7500 (pretty cool sonicated brushing system) and noticed a huge disparity between US and UK prices.

Search Froogle.com for "Philips Sonicare Elite 7500 Toothbrush" and then do the same in Froogle.co.uk and look at the results.

In the US it costs $130 (£65) and in the UK $260 (£130). Even with shipping and taxes buying from the US cuts the price down to £10o, a saving of 23%. So therein lies an opportunity - froogle arbritrage. Take the UK and US Froogle API feeds. Search for the top 20 products and look for arbritrage opportunities. Don't forget to throw in an adaptor and kapow - u have a sustainable opportunity to exploit. Even better is the eBay price of $59!

Anyone starting frooglearbritrage.com? You have my blessing ;)

In between i'm figuring out the best way to buy this gadget......

Don't worry, I'm still alive and kicking!

2006-11-11T06:20:00.000-08:00

Wow, what a month. In the last month i've launched Imperial Entrepreneurs, exited my fashion venture, am getting ready to launch a new company and have taken my networking to the next level.

I had the fortune to hang out with many cool entrepreneurs and investors in London over the last month, steadily increased my public speaking, consulted for the welsh government and (hopefully) had an impact on many hundreds of people. When someone doesn't blog for a month you know they've been busy. More details to follow soon!

Email me if you are curious: Sumon [at] imperialentrepreneurs [dot] com

How to find a programmer in 7 days

2006-09-20T16:45:00.000-07:00

My friend Richard Price is actually looking for a programmer. But he's set a time constraint - 7 days. This is actually quite a fun experiment.

Day 1: Facebook ads - Stanford, MIT , Imperial
Day 2: spam geek lists
Day 3: Cry
Day 4: Pick oneself up again
Day 5: hang out outside a conference
Day 6: get busted by police for hanging outside php conference
Day 7: 16 replies, result! a guy that codes Brainfuck

Seriously, if you are a top notch programmer get in touch with Richard. Here's his ad

Top developer required for challenging new London startup.

Part-time is fine, but full-time is better. The work can be done anywhere, starting now.

Rails developer preferred but open to PHP/MySQL also. Familiarity with Javascript frameworks such as Moo.fx , Yahoo User Interface library etc. a bonus. Interest in search good.

The aim of this project is to bring some exciting tools to a community which is heavily online but which has been neglected by existing web services.

For more details please send a resume and your portfolio (reply-to Richard [dot] price [at] all-souls [dot] ox [dot] ac [dot] uk). Please indicate whether you are available part-time or full-time.

What are college degrees worth?

2006-09-12T16:15:00.000-07:00

What are they worth? - zefrank discusses

the show with zefrank

Character traits of the best software developers

2006-09-10T11:15:00.000-07:00

I know how difficult it is trying to assess programmers to join your start up if you don't code. This is often quite a big problem for a large number of Internet entrepreneurs who understand the environment for opportunity and are looking for good technical people to join them. So what do you look for?

Rob Walling of the blog Software by Rob has a great article outlining the defining character traits of great coders.

His summary on great programmers:

Pessimists in the short run, but optimists in the long run (look out for problems first, but know its all going to be OK)
Low tolerance of messy code (see their response to pre-prepared code samples)
Good long term planners (usually apparent in the way they approach life)
Huge attention to detail (i.e. detail "freaks")

Its a great article if you are hiring a CTO or expanding parts of your tech team. Even to keep your existing developers on their best behaviour. Check out the full article here.

Incidentally, Rob's blog is an invaluable source on understanding the human side of software development, and quite a few articles on there have caught my eye. So I highly recommend you to take a look if you are hiring coders or if you are an Internet entrepreneur bringing a cool idea into the world.

Whats Hot? - BlogMusik & Twitter

2006-09-09T05:51:00.000-07:00

Whats Hot?

I'm currently playing with:

1) Twitter : Mobile social network/mood blogging tool created by Evan Williams and the odeo crew. Hit the UK, with a EU gateway yesterday at +447781488126.
See my Twitter at www.twitter.com/sharpshoot, add me as a friend if u wanna see what crazy thoughts I have on the move. Text, "follow sharpshoot" to +447781488126

follow Sumon at http://twitter.com

2) Blogmusik: Free streaming music over the internet by a flashy iPod looking interface. Seriously cool! Just search for any artist, its all there. Currently listening to Sublime.

Blogmusik also lets you save, share your playlists and has a rather cool firefox plugin allowing you to surf the internet/search for music and play it without having your mp3 collection. Try it before it gets taken down.

Lonelygirl15 - a conspiracy?

2006-09-08T14:12:00.000-07:00

From what seemed like an organic marketing phenomenon on YouTube, reports emanating from the internet suggest that Lonelygirl15 is rumoured to be the construction of an LA creative agency with connections to Hollywood.

"evidence that lonelygirl15 is not who she claims to be: a copyright for the name obtained by an Encino lawyer, and a plot line that, leading speculation suggests, will turn out to be the lead-in to a horror movie’s marketing campaign"

also

"Three lonelygirl15-obsessed amateur Web sleuths set up a sting using tracking software that appears to show that e-mails sent from a lonelygirl15 account came from inside the offices of the Beverly Hills-based talent agency Creative Artists Agency."

The success of the Snakes on a Plane campaign has led the way for community induced viral marketing on the internet. But for all the attention that Lonelygirl15 has received, its slightly disappointing that this wasn't the homegrown talent we expected to see.

I guess its back to ZeFrank.

British Internet Startup Roundup - part 1

2006-09-01T09:08:00.000-07:00

So boom time is alive and well in the UK. Here are some notable and new British internet startups. I'm going to be showcasing more and more of these over the next few....enjoy. Here's the list, i'll give you two today to whet your appetite and three tomorrow.

1. ViaGoGo: A marketplace for second hand tickets for sporting events, concerts and other high value activities.

What problem does it solve?
ViaGoGo creates a trusted liquid marketplace for sports fans, season ticket holders to get rid of tickets quickly as in the event of last minute cancellations or non attendence. Primary competitors are eBay and also on the black market. ViaGoGo estimates that this secondary ticket market is worth £5Bn in Europe and £1Bn in the UK. The company has signed deals with Manchester United and Chelsea to allow season ticket holders to offload tickets. The trust factor is a major contributing factor to many leading ticket and event providers to colloborate with ViaGoGo, and further disabling the flow of tickets in the black market.

Business Model
Transactional: A two way commision, firstly for listing from the buyer (as a % of sale price) and secondly from the seller once the transaction is completed.

As described by Red Herring

"So how does Viagogo work? Suppose there’s a ticket on sale for $100. The buyer will pay $110 to purchase the ticket, factoring in a 10 percent commission to Viagogo. The seller receives $85, thanks to a 15 percent commission on the other end. But Viagogo doesn’t just sit back and collect its profit; the company actually takes care of the shipping labels itself, tracks the package, and holds the entirety of the payment until the deal goes through"

Who's behind it: The Entrepreneurs behind it, Eric Baker and Chris Millar successfully exectuted the same business plan in the US with StubHub.com. Eric Baker, 33, is of MIT and Stanford business school pedigree with a stint at Mckinsey before founding StubHub. Viagogo are backed by $20m from Index Ventures, the investors behind Skype and prominent angel investors including European listings king Fabrice Grinda, Lastminute.com founder Brent Hoberman (who recently invested 400k in UniVillage) , Dr Simon Murdoch ex-VP Europe of Amazon.com. The advisory board also gives a lot of credibility.

My take: ViaGoGo is viable. The key success factor is trust which will draw the big ticket suppliers and this is indicated by the partnerships with Manchester United and Chelsea. Whether customer uptake will be slower than expected will impact upon its growth as will the eBay factor and the strength of the Blackmarket. Even cutting their predicted value a 1/5th to accomodate for this gives a total market of above 1Bn. I trust Index Venture's judgement on this one.

2. Amateur Illustrator: An online community for sharing, rating and talking about Art and Illustration generated by non professional illustrators.

What problem does it Solve?
Amateur Illustrator enables illustrators to share, showcase their art in a colloborative environment where everyone is united by a passion. The main problem is that without a community of this sort Amateur Illustrators have no way to find eachother and show of their works. Community sites facilitate more three dimensional interactions than forums and the website is a good mix of set content (How tos, interviews) and user generated content (Art). To boot the site is beautiful!

Business Model.
Traditional in social networking. Land Grab users and then monetise through advertising. Illustrators are quite a niche community and have specialised yet capital intensive needs (illustration software, easels etc) and therefore there is good potential for targeted advertising. Future revenue streams could include charging users for premium features like storage for uploading more images or enabling mechanisms for artists to sell content, either per picture or in an anthology of works produced by the site. Coupling user generated content to traditional offline distribution channels is used by a number of sites including spreadshirt, zazzle and cafepress. Art is one of the few things where this could work successfully. I suggest the founder's take note ;)

Who's behind it?
Amateur Illustrator was founded by Nick Franklin, a second year illustration student at the University of Lincoln. We love Student Entrepreneurs on SharpShoot :). The site is self funded and has been around for a couple of weeks. The site was founded after Nick and a friend were frustrated over the lack of amateur illustrator communities. That got off their ass and did something about that. Great stuff.

My Take: As a free version of DeviantART, which is the leading site in the world and there is plenty of innovation left in artistic online communities. DeviantART is older but has successfully built a community of paid users. By remaining free, Amateur illustrator will undoudtedly grow. Its success will depend upon strategies to monetise the plethora of quality content being generated on it and the ecommerce possibilities which arise from that.

Sharpshoot's back tomorrow with the next installment :)

University Venture Fund - The largest Student Run VC in the world

2006-08-27T04:31:00.000-07:00

The University Venture fund (UVF) is the largest student run Venture capital firm in the world, looking after a relatively small fund of $18 million to invest in technology startups.

Founded in 2001, the UVF was started at the university of Utah primarily as a hands on teaching vehicle for students to learn the ins and outs of entrepreneurship and investment by investing real money from some quite well known Limited partners. How the fund operates is that students invest 20 hours a week of their time in researching, conducting due dilligence, creating financial models and evaluating startup teams before pitching their proposed investments to the managing partner of the fund and volunteer VC's which provide advice to the student associates.

The UVF was kicked off with a donation of $500,000, granted to UVF by one of Utah's most successful entrepreneurial families, billionaire medical device inventor James LeVoy Sorenson and son James Lee Sorenson, CEO of Sorenson Media. SInce then the fund has attracted limited partners such as legendary Silicon Valley VC, Tim Draper and established firms like UBS Bank USA and Morgan Stanley Bank. Support to the 25 student associates are given by established venture firms such as Bain Capital,European Venture Partners, ITU Ventures etc.

In 5 years the fund has made 10 investments in companies such as BaroSense Inc., LignUp Inc., Omniture Inc., Socialtext, Chakshu Research Inc., Infinera, HandiQuilter, InteliSum and Merrimack Pharmaceuticals and most recently Alianza.

Most importantly the fund is utilised by professional investors to scout for emerging trends in new media, internet or mobile technologies.

"College students have a knack for uncovering excellent venture capital investment opportunities created by their contemporaries, like Alianza," said Jared Hutchings, founder and managing director of UVF. "They are immersed in high technology, especially communication and Internet services. Because companies like YouTube and MySpace seem to pop up out of nowhere and quickly establish new Internet-industry categories, professional private equity partners that collaborate with UVF can use students as their eyes and ears to effectively search out high-tech and consumer trends."

Firstly this represents a fantastic way for students to get VC experience with real money and using their own judgement. Secondly, it enables VC's to have a Youthh ear on the ground.

If you are a professional investor and you are looking to do the same in Europe i'd be happy to open proceedings with a few other Young Entrepreneurs here.

Kiko auction ends up at $258,100

2006-08-27T01:22:00.000-07:00

Update: Kiko, the ailing calendar startup have sold their website on Ebay for $258,000! The winning bidder is PowerJoe1998

"way to go powerjoe"

Well done Kiko, at one point it was looking like no one would make a bid. Is EBay the new exit market for the new bubble?

Thats right kids, don't get acquired, getting flipped on Ebay is the IPO from heaven (No investment bankers in sight)

See my previous post on Kiko here.

Businessplanarchive.org - archives of the Dot Bomb 1.0

2006-08-21T15:24:00.000-07:00

I just stumbled across quite possibly the best resource for Internet Entrepreneurs I've EVER seen.

Businessplanarchive.org is repository of business plans, marketing plans, PR documents, emails and other remnants of the dot com boom spanning 1995-2001. Read the business plans of hundreds of companies such as Pets.com, Webvan.com, Boo.com and other notable casualties of the first dot com bubble.

The objective of the archive is to "collect and preserve business plans and related planning documents from the Birth of the Dot Com Era so that future generations will be able to learn from this remarkable episode in the history of technology and entrepreneurship"

Go check it out.

Aside: Boo.com is apparently making a comeback this year. Anyone want to bet on when it comes out?

Learning lessons from Kiko - a tale for first time entrepreneurs

2006-08-19T03:43:00.000-07:00

Kiko.com - the online calendar startup got a lot of coverage this week as the young founders decided to call it a day, putting the site up for sale on Ebay in the face of increasing competition in the online calendar space. Apart from being touted as a casualty of the new internet bubble, with much speculation over why they bit the dust, looking at the whole story provides some fantastic lessons for Young Entrepreneurs on their first startup.

Dharmesh Shah of onstartups.com speculated that the introduction of Google calendar or Kiko running out of money may have led to its demise but further reflection on the founder's blogs identifies that Kiko simply lost their eye on the prize, despite having first mover advantage and widespread press on the blogosphere (geek press that is).

A number of points are apparent which allowed Kiko to lose their advantage to more established competitors like 30boxes and Google:

1) They released TOO early: Kiko launched in September 2005 amidst fanfare as being the first AJAX calendar on the internet. But releasing early may have been a mistake. Kiko's designer Richard White, Kiko's designer elaborates further

"You always hear "Release early, release often", especially if you hang around Paul Graham crowd, but the footnote that doesn't get enough airplay is that you shouldn't release too early (queue the sophomoric jokes in 3.. 2..). You only get one shot to impress people; don't blow it because they won't coming back next week to see if you've improved. Kiko 1.0 was released in September 2005 and was met with much fanfare for being one of the first AJAX calendars on the web. Unfortunately, the user interface was pretty bad (which is how I pushed my way onto the team) and people generally said "wow that's cool… next!" The obvious problem is that when we launched version 2.0 I think the general reaction was "Kiko? Seen it. Hey how bout that new Google Calendar coming out?".

2) They lost focus: Being creative young entrepreneurs, they never stopped brainstorming and bouncing ideas and decided to pursue a sideproject. Its so easy to do this, I do it all the time. However, while this was easy to do in a creative environment they lost focus of their core product allowing competitors such as Narendra Rocherolle's 30boxes to steal market share while they should have been concentrating on getting the next version out. Upon the relaunch of their product (in january 2006) 30boxes' launch and screenshots of Google calendar dampened down the press around Kiko.

Founder Justin Kan elaborates:

"Most entrepreneurs have lots of ideas. Often times, many of them may be really good. I don’t know about you, but my favorite part about startups is talking about new products and new business ideas. If you’re a creative person, it’s very easy to get side-tracked on side ideas when you really should be working on your main one. This is bad. Bad, bad, bad."

3) They tried to build the ultimate product - rather than building incrementally from a simple start point they suffered from feature overload. Coupled with lack of focus this increased the time it took to ship product this led kiko to be succeptible to competitors evaporating any first mover advantages they had.

Richard White:

"It didn't look it at first, but if you played around with Kiko 1.0 for 15 minutes you found out that there was a *lot* of functionality under the hood. Problem was that we felt we needed to bring *all* of that functionality over to Kiko 2.0. I mean you can't cut features between versions, right? Wrong. We should have cut features, probably about 40% of them and launched."

Justin Kan:

"We tried to build the ultimate AJAX calendar all at once. It took a long time. We could have done it piece by piece. Nuff said."

4) They were slow to fire: If you are not happy with your team, cut dead wood immediately. Kiko didn't have a fully functional team, which affected morale and also focus.

Justin Kan

"Picking the right people is life and death for your company. We hired two people for Kiko. One of them (Rich White, our interface designer) was awesome; everything I could have asked for and more: self motivated, entrepreneurial, competant, hard working, and very smart. However, one of our hires turned out to be a huge mistake: he basically spun his wheels, didn’t complete anything, and left for months at a time without word."

Overall, Kiko's death has nothing to do with the fact that they had established competitors but more with operational mistakes the founder's made. Its easy as a young entrepreneur to suffer from idea overload, but I think what i've learnt from Kiko is to pick something you are going to excel at, focus harder than anyone on doing that and execute hard. Successful startups focus on doing one thing well. Frankly online calendars are features rather than companies and ultimately the Kiko founders went with their heart. Find something sexy and do it. Do your explorations, then commit to an idea and sit it out. Its easy to something for 6 months, but if it has the potential to be big, ignore other ideas or partner with other people to take them forward. Who wants their finger's in 10 pies?, someone who can't commit.

Kiko didn't get killed by Google. Even if Google is doing what ever you want to do, it doesn't mean you shouldn't do it (That would kill the entire web ecosystem). David Hannemeier Hannson of 37 signals has a great retort to Google pessimists on why google doesn't render futile resistance:

"From the ashes of Kiko, Paul Graham reads that Google is unstoppable. That all hope is lost when fighting big G on its home turf. That resistance is futile:

The best solution for most startup founders would probably be to stay out of Google’s way.

What a depressing conclusion from a man who has inspired so many and gives hope to those who dare challenge the incumbents.

No. Don’t run, don’t hide. Be different. You can’t outdo Google by trying to match them point-by-point, but you don’t have to. There are other, better ways to fight. Compete differently."

Sadly no one has put in a bid on the eBay auction. There a great many lessons to be learnt here and i wish the Kiko founders good luck with their next venture. They have experience you can't buy.

if you want to explore the lessons further:

Justin Kan's blog is here
Richard White's blog is here
David Hannemeier Hannson reply is here
Paul graham on google

Facebook launches open API

2006-08-15T04:52:00.000-07:00

Facebook.com have launched an open API to enable college developers to create mashups which leverage the Facebook paltform and its network of users.

This move indicates facebook's desire to provide more interesting services to fuel user adoption and is set to be the first foray into this area after plans to launch wirehog, a Peer-2-Peer service which utilised the facebook platform was shelved by Mark Zuckerberg in 2005. Facebook's large userbase will provide a plethora of opportunities for companies to "fuel-the facebook beast" much like the huge number of companies feeding the Myspace beast including RockYou, Slide and most recently Browster.

The URL is http://www.developers.facebook.com and enables developers to create apps with a facebook login and leverages the facebook network.

Showcased mashups include Facebank, which is a Billmonk style application to split bills between friends using the facebook login details and Photomosaic which enables users to create a mosaic of their facebook picture using friend's pictures.

The new open API will undoubtedly fuel many more interesting college mashups further cementing facebook's lead in this area.

Update: I'm putting together a group of developers and entrepreneurs to create viral Facebook mashups. Email me Sumon [dot] sadhu [at] gmail [dot] com if you are interested in brainstorming/getting involved

Internet Entrepreneur = Gangster!

2006-08-13T11:10:00.000-07:00

BusinessWeek's been slated quite spectacularly for its cover story of Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg.com but one thing I'll give it credit for is its Gangsterisation of Internet Entrepreneurs.

Check out this panel on Max Levchin & James Hong. Internet Entrepreneurs are the new gangsters, movers and shakers and revolutionaries in the Business world.

Thankyou BW for providing inspiration to the wired generation of entrepreneurs (I mean gangsters :) )

Kiva.org - helping entrepreneurs in developing countries

2006-08-13T10:41:00.000-07:00

Frankly, the first time I saw Kiva.org I thought its was a fantastic website with the potential to impact upon many millions of lives. Kiva is essentially a microfinance marketplace which enables people in the West to lend small amounts (typically $20-25) at a time to entrepreneurs in the Developing world.

Unlike donation, microfinance can actually be a way to invest your money while knowing that you are helping people fight themselves out of poverty through business in the developing world. Kiva as a concept solves two big problems, firstly it democratises the process of lending by opening up the possibility to anyone in the world. Secondly, it enables microfinance houses in developing countries to concentrate on identifying and vetting prospective entrepreneurs without worrying about getting money to them thus reducing friction from the process.

From the investment perspective, microfinance payments accrue higher interest rates compared to just putting your money in the bank, typically ranging from 13-36%. So, while you might be thinking that this is prohibitive to poorer individuals, because the amounts that are lent are smaller and the fixed costs involved in collection only scale when a large number of people are helped, higher interest rates allow many of these loans to be given in the first place. Costs are also higher because of the effort of screening entrepreneurs on the viability of their projects, therefore looking for projects which will guarantee a return on capital invested.

How Kiva works is that once you've lent out the money you'll get periodic updates on how your entrepreneur is doing and at the end you'll receive your money with interest too!

So next time, your sitting around thinking of ways of making your money work AND help people in the world at the same time, don't listen to Warren Buffett, visit Kiva.org. Even if its only for $20!

Kiva's backed by Silicon Valley angels such as Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIN and ex VP of PayPal and Dave McClure of SimplyHired and also ex- head of Marketing at PayPal so its a solid company.

Learn more about Microfinance here

How to raise money from Angels

2006-08-08T12:07:00.000-07:00

As it becomes cheaper to start internet companies, angel investment becomes the key differentiator between the wheat and the chaff. Unlike VC investment, Angel investing is a contact sport which requires a real understanding of your core offering to sell it in the right way.

The right angel investments not only give early seed capital to your startup but

Give you credibility
Give you access to knowledge and contacts relevant to your industry i.e. "added value"
Flag your startup up as more likely to gain institutional investment
Can facilitate further business development opportunities through partnership etc

So what do angels look for when sizing up an opportunity?

David Rose of coloradostartups.com has some useful advice.

Remember angels invest in people not products. Don't forget to let your passion show.

21 year old British Girl fired by text (SMS) message

2006-08-07T09:23:00.000-07:00

A British company has ridiculously chosen to fire one of its Young employees by SMS because it was "claiming it was keeping in touch with youth culture"

If dumping someone by text message is a Kop out firing someone is frankly below the belt particularly with respect to trying to keep up with youth culture. Firing is one of the hardest things any entrepreneur has to do requiring tact, careful choice of words and mutual understanding. Dropping any of these things can lead to resentment. As emphasised in How to win friends and influence people never seek to create division or resentment however strong your feelings are. As you can imagine how you would feel after this?....

The text message said: "We will not require your services anymore...Thank you for your time with us."

As asynchronous communication methods proliferate I wonder what's next. Calling in sick via IM, sicknotes via podcast?

Read the article here

Finding your inner entrepreneur - what do you really want to do?

2006-08-06T09:01:00.000-07:00

Granted, being an entrepreneur or participating in entrepreneurial endeavors isn't for everyone but just looking back at why I'm really passionate about being an entrepreneur boils down to a number of elements in my personality.

The main question for people who are at an early stage of their entrepreneurial careers or think it might be cool to do something entrepreneurial is to really identify if its a great personality fit. Even if you've never started a company before or done anything, if you can identify with these elements of your personality then definitely go and find your inner entrepreneur.

I think there are a number of personality traits which really stand out for me:

Innate Ambition: You are an achiever, you strive to do things better, you've done well in school. You are always looking out for ways to make you stand out. You crave success and prestige and you are willing to do what ever it takes to do that because it makes you happy. Being an entrepreneur, creating a product that people love, getting rich and being known for changing something is the ultimate satisfaction for people who are inherently ambitious. Being a partner in an investment bank or law firm is cool too but if you are truly ambitious and want to stand out, how many of your friends can say in 10 year's time that they built one (or several) companies from scratch, and changed the lives of millions of people with their products. Whether you are a social entrepreneur or a commercial entrepreneur you want to make a change. There is nothing more ambitious than that. I often think people lose their ambitions when they start conventional employment. Don't! If you are truly ambitious being a successful entrepreneur is the ultimate accolade.
Creativity: You love to experiment with everything, fool around, try stuff out. You are always looking a things from different angles and most importantly you want to express yourself in whatever you do. When you are writing essays you are striving for originality, you love playing new pranks on your friends, your imagination is the source of entertainment and above all you are continually seeking a way to express your creativity. You may be an artist, a musician, a philosopher, a dreamer or a poet but you love expressing yourself and hate being contstrained. Taking an inkling of an idea and then creating a framework around that by crafting a real product or an organisation from nothing is a real act of creativity. Entrepreneurs continually have to be creative, whether its working with no money to get a project going to finding cheeky ways to partner with large companies. If you are creative, you'll love the freedom of being an entrepreneur.
You live to be challenged: You like the challenge of getting top grades, beating your friend's at video games, you are continually thinking wouldn't it be cool if... You don't worry about crazy dares or doing something because it hard because that's the thing that excites you. You love testing yourself to try newer things in a certain time whether its learning the guitar in 6 months, seeing how much time you can shave of your personal best, scoring more goals for your football (soccer) team. Whatever it is, the act of setting and achieving challenges excites you and that's also what excites entrepreneurs. The challenge of creating contacts in an industry you are new to, the challenge of getting the first 1000 users with no money, the challenge of being recognised as the No. 1 of something. Entrepreneurs live to be challenged and love it.
Your glass is more than half full: This is not because you drink slowly but instead because you are above-average in being optimistic. While your friends talk about what can't happen you shake your head and say it can. You are irrationally optimistic, you think everything is possible and disagree with people who are the slightest bit negative. Your view of the world is exciting, bright and sunny, full of things to do, places to see and people to meet. You never think of failure and your friends acknowledge that and think you are weird. How do you think entrepreneurs are able to change the status quo in diverse industries because what most people consider hard and impossible is countered by being inherently optimistic. The rest of the world is obviously going to say no, because they aren't going to change it! If you find yourself nodding your head in agreement its because its true. If anyone can, entrepreneurs can.
You identify with passion: You are consumed by things you are interested in and hate doing things that you are forced to do. You play a musical instrument, build cool websites for fun, love writing short stories, collecting beanie babies, you get it, you spend hours on end engrossed in things you enjoy. You have distinct passions. Hours fly by, days seem like minutes, when you are involved in what you enjoy time slows down and the world around you is a blur. Entrepreneurs are consumed by passion too. They find something they love, that's an inherent part of their interests and do something with that passion. You may be passionate about technology, love fashion, think that local bands are amazing. Whatever it is, passion enables entrepreneurs to enjoy every second of what they do, it makes them curious and able to learn. Starting, growing and scaling a company is a passionate endeavour. Now imagine the passion you show for something you enjoy, entrepreneurs feel that everyday.

If you've read this and thought hey that's how I feel, you've identified your inner entrepreneur.

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”

Goethe

Go let it out your inner entrepreneur! And let me know your thoughts.......:)

Steve Jobs on Microsoft

2006-08-04T17:28:00.000-07:00

Here is a classic interview with Steve Jobs in 1996. This was the time when the battle over the operating system market was hotting up after the release of Windows '95. Microsoft are famous for stealing the idea of having a Graphical User Interface (GUI) after seeing Apple's MacOS. Bill Gates is notorious for creative appropriation. Here is Steve Job's interview from that classic era. Whats evident is Steve Jobs' passion for creating truly inspired products, from the heart. That personal style is something I really admire. Enjoy!

After you've watched the video above, watch the intepretation of Bill Gates stealing Apple's idea from the movie "the pirates of Silicon Valley"

A fantastic insight into an incredible era in the first Internet wave.

Sa, Sa, Sa, Something from the comments.....hilarious

2006-07-31T11:48:00.000-07:00

the show with zefrank

Why Students make great entrepreneurs

2006-07-30T06:39:00.000-07:00

Dharmesh Shah of Onstartups.com summarises why Students make great entrepreneurs.

The salient points are summarised below.

1. Starry-Eyed Optimism: Let’s face it, starting a company takes a fair amount of optimism. You have minimal resources, and the odds are severely stacked against you. To overcome this potentially troubling reality, founders must to some degree exercise suspension of disbelief and demonstrate a degree of optimism to take that initial step. I think this is easier to do when you’re a student. You’re more equipped to be optimistic than if you were a corporate drone trudging through life with Dilbertian bosses and having the life energy slowly drained out of you. Students (in general) are happier people and more capable of the optimism that is required to get started. Clearly, there are exceptions to this. I’m sure there are a few people in corporate land that are not faking satisfaction or happiness, and are generally optimistic people. My hat’s off to them. The world needs people like you to help make big companies functional so the rest of us can use your products and services.

2. Trusted Peer Network: One of the great things about being a student is that you have the opportunity to meet and work with a lot of different people. If you do it right, you can get to know some of these people pretty well by working on projects with them and hanging out with them outside of class. This group of people can often make great co-conspirators and collaborators. On the other hand, if you’re stuck in a big corporate world, chances are you’re interacting with a limited set of people with very well defined activities many of whom you may not like anyways. Why is this so? Simple, because in corporate-land you often don’t get to pick who you work with. When you’re a student, to some degree, you get to pick who you “hire” for your social and academic groups. One of the single largest contributors to startup success is the ability for more than one person (however exceptional) to come together and collaborate.

3. Higher Risk Tolerance: Let’s face it, when you’re a student your opportunity cost is likely lower than most other points in your career (even if you’ve been in the workforce for a little while and decided to go back and get that MBA). When you’re sitting there in class and an idea comes to you, it doesn’t really cost all that much to give things a try. Besides, who needs all that sleep anyways? Students often find it easier to take the initial entrepreneurial leap because the new startup idea isn’t competing with a regular paycheck. It’s competing with classes and academic work. Many academic programs (even the excellent ones) don’t consume 100% of the available energy of an entrepreneurially minded student. There’s time left over for starting companies.

4. Abstract Thinking: In many academic programs (and especially the better ones), students spend a fair amount of time thinking about abstract concepts. This is particularly true in an engineering, computer science or even a business program. Learning about things like microeconomics, data structures or calculus is to learn about abstract ways to think about complicated things. You look for patterns and structures and frameworks to explain the world. As it turns out, this kind of thinking is very useful when it comes to thinking strategically (but objectively) about a startup. Without this, it becomes too easy to focus too much on tactics and execution -- without sufficient thought to the larger problem. Since students are exposed to a fair amount of abstract thinking, it may come a little easier to them to think about strategy, competition and how their offering might (just might) change the world.

5. Applied Learning: As a student, you’re quite often “drinking from a fire hose” and bringing all sorts of new information into your brain. Some of which “sticks” and some of which doesn’t. Along the way, a few of these concepts may shake your understanding of the world a bit and every now and then light-bulbs go off as you begin to understand what all the fuss is about. As a student, it’s often very, very tempting to try and apply some of these concepts that are new and exciting and do something with them. One of the easiest ways to do this is to build a startup that somehow implements or expands on the idea.

Its generally stated that there are two windows in life when the opportunity cost for starting a company is low; when you are a student or recent graduate (18-25) or in your fourties. Don't miss one of these windows, start a company while you study.

Thinking more rigorously about how your company makes money

2006-07-29T06:40:00.000-07:00

For every successful entrepreneur its hugely important to be able to articulate the reason's why your business has value, whether its to sell, to raise investment or simply when expaining your idea to curious, yet smart friends.

Fundamentally its really important to understand the mechanics of not only how your company (or proposed company) makes money but also why there is an opportunity and how YOU mitigate the risk of failure. When i was at Library House, I interviewed hundreds of UK entrepreneurs who hadn't really critiqued their businesses with enough rigour and thus looked quite poor candidates for investment because they weren't able to articulate the nature of the opportunity they were pursuing or why their execution would lead to success. The bottom line is to not only know how your business makes money, but the problem it solves and how defensible your solution is.

Peter Rip of LEapFrog VEntures articulates a great framework and mind map for understanding one's business model.

"The term “business model” has bothered me for a long time. I have always found it to be a glib method of characterizing a company’s relationship with its various constituencies, e.g., customers, suppliers, competitors, etc. The problem isn’t really the concept. The problem is that it’s a complex, multidimensional structure that doesn’t really lend itself to a summary sentence, at least not if you really want to understand the business."

The full article distinguishes the "levers" which generate money and the "enterprise assets" which distinguish the way money is made i.e. the proprietary characteristics of executing that idea. Read the full article here, and the diagram below will be hugely useful too.

Volvo C30: Beautiful Design

2006-07-27T16:03:00.000-07:00

Following the last two design related posts, here's a third. Isn't she a beaut...

From 37signals

Hot Phone: Nokia N93

2006-07-27T15:55:00.000-07:00

See more on Mobilecrunch

Apple files patent for Touchless iPod

2006-07-27T14:43:00.000-07:00

Speculation about just how cool Apple's next iPod will be is mounting. Interesting is the fact that the click wheel will have an interface that doesn't need to be touched, a so-called proximity detctor. Ooh, mystical. Apparently it'll enable a larger screen for the next generation of video ipods.

Just imagine the legions of people on Public Transport perfecting circular hand gestures.

Dude, where's my business model?

2006-07-23T15:18:00.000-07:00

While a lot of other blogs talk about one questionable company after another, asking the same question about how they make money, i've decided to stick to advocating that while the internet is a vast exanse of opportunity, trying to change the world might require the need to make money along the way. For all of those who are just thinking about the money or what cool feature will make the front page of techcrunch this will be useful.

Fred Wilson, of Union Square Ventures coins the king of Web business models, Freemium:

"Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base."

Succesful examples

Skype – basic in network voice is free, out of network calling is a premium service

Flickr – a handful of pictures a month is free, heavy users convert to Pro

Trillian – the basic service is free, but there is paid version that is full featured

Newsgator – the web reader is free. If you want to synch with outlook and your mobile phone, that’s a paid service

Box.net – you get 1gb of virtual storage for free, but you have to pay for more than that

Webroot – you can get a free spyware scan, but for full protection you need to pay

With the cost of distribution on the internet freemium is the optimal strategy for bringing money back in, particularly if you've built something truly compelling. This is key, if someone pays for your service they become obligated to use it thus reducing switching cost. This is another reason to discount not having a business modelThe most successful Freemium sites will ultimately be those that have nailed the user experience thus differentiating good entrepreneursa from the also rans.

Fred also makes some valuable points which illustrate the operational nuances of the freemium strategy which are essential for any serious web entrepreneur to get their head around.

The salient points are:

Require as little as possible in the initial customer acquisition process. A customer is only a click away and if you can convert them without forcing them into a price/value decision you can build a customer base fairly rapidly and efficiently. Asking for a credit card even though you won’t charge anything to it is not a good idea. Even forced registration is a bad idea. You’ll want to do some of this sort of thing once you’ve acquired the customer but not in the initial interaction.
Eliminate all barriers to customer acquisition. Don’t require any downloads to start. Don’t require plugins. Support every browser with any material market share. Make sure your service works on various flavors of Windows, OSX, and Linux.
Whatever the customer gets day one for free, they are always going to get for free. Nothing is more irritating to a potential customer than a “bait and switch” or a retrade of the value proposition.

Fred summarises excellently with some valuable advice:

"The best examples of this business model are when the customer implicitly understands why the paid service has to cost money. More storage costs for photos or virtual storage are good examples. Termination costs on other carriers networks in the Skype model are another. When it is just additional features that don’t carry an incremental cost to offer, it may be harder to convert free users to paid users. But if your free service is loved and you do a good job articulating the value that comes with the paid service, you can convert to paying users with good results."

Not having a business model isn't cool anymore. Go on, show me the money....

Internet opportunities in India

2006-07-23T04:01:00.000-07:00

India's Internet population stands at 38.5 million and is all set to grow to a 100 million by 2007-08 according to the IAMAI. As the internet demographic becomes more mainstream India is going to a prime battleground for internet business over the next five years.

Sahad P.V. of VCCircle.com, an excellent Indian VC blog, has a great post on Indian Online Businesses You Can Bet Money On

It makes for facinating reading as many of the things highlighted fall into two main categories:

1) Transactional websites which provide more variety to the indian marketplace 2)Informational websites which streamline flow of information to a particular group.

As opposed to the current trend in the U.S and to a lesser extent in Europe of aggregating as many users as possible and making ad revenue. Because mainstream internet penetration in India is pretty skewed, "mainstream" web 2.0 sites have less potential. On the otherhand transactional or informational websites (e.g. jobs listings) have business models from the get go and have growth potential too as there is greater internet penetration.

"Sucess is bound to follow in some non IT ventures with an online model where there is:

1) Scalability
2) Faster, efficient, customer-delight service
3) The same similar offline business model sucks and customers are looking for an alternative mode of doing the transaction

Five businesses growing at a fast pace in India that come to my mind are:
1) Online Trading
2) Online Recruitment Services
3) Online Ticketing Services
4) Online Realestate/Wine Websites
5) Expatriate/NRI Centric models "

At the moment mobile growth is outstripping internet penetration with Java games, Ringtone and Content services becoming the focus for some very interesting companies (see IndiaGames.com). However as growth and access to faster connections and mainstream adoption the opportunities for online/offline convergence will be huge. The so-called generation-x of hip, young early adopters will be expected to lap up youth oriented content/ mobile social software and new forms of expression. This lagtime means that many services which have made waves now in Europe and the US will be mature enough for the Indian population (with obvious localisation etc) for 2008.

The full article makes facinating reading, particularly because the Indian market is more western in its values meaning that opportunities for mainstream web 2.0 services are more apparent and easier to translate into compared to the chinese market. I'll be blogging a little more about interesting Indian web start ups over the near future. Stay tuned.

Starting Projects are easy, Finishing them is harder.

2006-07-22T12:05:00.000-07:00

Once you're in the entrepreneurial groove starting projects and getting them up and running no longer becomes the difficulty. In fact, i've always found that things take three times longer than predicted leading to even more delays than expected. This all stems from the fact that starting a project is the easy part, how do you know what to do to make sure that you finish on time and don't let things languish?

Keith Robinson of Blueflavor.com suggests 12 great steps to being able to tame that project beast.

Don’t Start What You Can’t Finish
Know The Goal At All Times
Know Your Role At All Times
Leadership and Control
Prioritize
Tackle The Small Stuff First
Constant Communication
Find Time To Work and Eliminate Distraction
Chip Away
Don’t Get Hung Up On Mistakes
Perfect Is The Enemy of The Done
Know When To Quit

Read the full article here

While a lot is quite intuitive I think some of the key points are not to overanalyse, be willing to compromise and minimise meetings. Very much in the style of Getting Real.

Execution is everything

2006-07-19T16:02:00.000-07:00

Undoutedly what differentiates great entrepreneurs is their ability to execute. Frankly with the pace of change on the internet and the probability that someone else round the world is having parallel thoughts about a market you are about to go after , if you can execute better thats going to be your key.

Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital has an excellent blog post on what he looks for in entrepreneurs he wants to invest in with regard to the way they execute.

"One of the most important criteria I need to asses is the entrepreneur's ability to execute. Can they do what they say they are going to do? If I am truly investing in chefs (not ingredients), then I need to be comfortable that they can really cook.

So - how does a VC get comfortable with an entrepreneur's ability to execute? When I look at my current investments -- and try to separate those companies that are thriving versus those that are struggling -- a few things stand out.

There is greater risk (and variability) in first-time CEOs than in serial entrepreneurs.
While there are some first-time CEOs in my portfolio that are doing unbelievably well, there are also some first-time CEOs that are struggling. The serial entrepreneurs in my portfolio, on the other-hand, tend to have less variability in their performance. So while past performance (or experience) is not always a determinant of future success, it sure helps!

Just say no.
One of the most challenging jobs a CEO faces is to determine what opportunities/projects to say "NO" to. Given the limited resources that a startup has, it is critical for an entrepreneurial CEO to have real discipline in prioritizing projects. If a CEO can't make tough trade-offs, it has a direct impact on the company's ability to execute.

It's all about the team.
The first 25 hires at a startup are CRITICAL! They will set your culture. They will be the reason you reach (or fail to reach) your milestones. They will be responsible for hiring everyone else. One of the most dangerous mistakes a CEO can make is to accept "compromise" candidates because of time pressure. A strong team is critical to strong performance.

A culture of accountability.
Is there a culture of accountability? Is there clear operating plan with monthly/quarterly/annual goals/milestones? Does the CEO hold him/herself and their team accountable for commitments? Is there a dashboard to track key metrics? Are they disciplined about forecasting (using a waterfall revenue forecast)? There is a clear correlation between CEOs who hold themselves accountable to goals and their ability to execute."

Josh's point have particular significance for Young Entrepreneurs. Particularly relevant is the need to build up a track record of execution when Young. Most successful entrepreneurs such as Joe Kraus of Excite and now JotSpot or Fabrice Grinda of Zingy had a successful track record of entrepreneurship while at college. They may have been small ventures but the operational experience was invaluable.

Becoming a serial entrepreneur takes time and starting small and building successful, cash generative businesses give enough operational credibility to gain serious investment. Similarly bootstrapping creatively while building a customer base from nothing gives credibility. There are so many opportunities to do that, so the key is get on with it and produce tangible results if you want to move onto the next stage; raising good investment and doing something with impact. The bottom line, make it real.

Goldman Sachs objects to Website Goldmansex.com

2006-07-15T08:26:00.000-07:00

Hilarious example of Brand Paranoia. From Reuters.

"Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the blue chip investment bank, wants a Netherlands man to change the name of a sex-themed Web site called goldmansex.com.

"Goldman Sachs last week submitted a complaint to the National Arbitration Forum (NAF) arguing the Internet domain name goldmansex.com would cause confusion and contained links to objectionable "adult" material. The NAF mediates corporate disputes including those over Internet domain names."

Whats amusing is the Dutch Owner's response to the attention.

"Rob Muller, 32, who founded goldmansex.com and is its sole employee, said "Goldman" was a nickname given to him by his friends because "People thought I was always lucky in my life." The Web site provides links to strip clubs and escort agencies"

"Would their clients really think this is some sort of new product line?" he said."

Stressed out drones in the Investment Banking division may disagree.

The Entrepreneurial Learning Curve

2006-07-12T09:22:00.000-07:00

Good entrepreneurs never stop learning, listening, iterating and relearning - fast.

So how do you learn difficult subjects quickly, and more effectively? Paulstips.com has a great synopsis

"Here's a strategy I've found useful for learning dry and difficult material quickly. At various times, I've used it to build up my knowledge of subjects like economics, investing, writing and computer programming languages. Some people have been surprised at how fast I can learn these kinds of skills, but I think anyone can do it with the right plan. Of course, you can use this to teach yourself interesting things as well, but most people don't have any problem learning stuff that's fun."

Okay, here are the steps...

An excellent summary is here
from PaulsTips.com.

In summary:

1)Step 1: Bombard yourself with information
2)Step 2: Identify the key concepts and make them yours
3)Step 3: Only memorize what absolutely has to be memorized
4)Step 4: Get some feedback on your understanding
5)Step 5: Bombard yourself with some more information, but from another source
6)Step 6: Get some real-world feedback

Read the full article now!

Bebo Shuns $550 Million Acquisition Offer

2006-07-11T03:22:00.000-07:00

The rumour mill is churning.
From Techcrunch

"San Francisco based social network Bebo, which recently raised $15 millionfrom Benchmark Capital, rejected a £300 million ($552 million)acquisition offer from British Telecom Group “a few weeks ago”,according to an insider on the transaction. Bebo’s asking price? Northof $1 billion."

Social networks like Bebo are aggregators for a hard to get at audience. Look at it as buying a very potent Tv channel. £300 million is a lot of money but its likely that the exit multiple for Benchmark (who recently put in $15 million) would have been good enough. They have big plans for Bebo, so when they do sell, they will definately find the right buyer and the right valuation. Go Bebo. Bebo is incidentally run by an Imperial guy, Michael Birch.

Friendster wins Patent for Social networking

2006-07-08T09:59:00.000-07:00

In a move that could be damaging to many social networking sites on the internet, Friendster, an early social networking pioneer, has won a patent referring to a “system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks.”

Friendster, who launched in 2002, have long suffered dwindling user numbers and network attrition for a while in the face of stiff competition from fresher, more specialised sites like MySpace, Tagged, Bebo, Facebook and international competitors such as Cyworld. However the aftermath of having this patent granted could see Friendster trying to claim royalties from these sites due to Patent infringement. It has been touted that the first target would be LinkedIn.

It appears that Friendster, who have not been profitable in their existence, are going to use this as a cheap shot to boost their earnings. This should be music to the ears of their investors, Kleiner Perkins who probably never thought they could get a return on their $15m investment. After a failed attempt to sell the company last October for $500m, it appears that a strategic acquisition of Friendster, could be a key move as the battle for online social networking hots up. In this context, the only competitor with enough clout is NewsCorp owned MySpace. Mr Levinsohn, cheque please.

Indeed the key success factors for online social networks that are emerging now revolve around creating something compelling for a more specialised, loyal audience as opposed to the generalist "lets-stick-everyone-together-and-see-what-happens" approach that Friendster took. This is set to evolve again on the internet as social networks become more of a tool in building a community around other functions while blending different streams of multimedia entertainment and user generated content to keep things dynamic.

Friendster is about to make to make a load of enemies. I think its definately time to visit Snubster instead ;)

Classic Quotes from a legendary Venture Capitalist

2006-07-05T15:33:00.000-07:00

A great article in Business 2.0 outlines the philosophies of Vinod Khosla - one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems and principal at Kleiner Perkins, one of the best known Silicon Valley VC firms.

The article's excellent but i'll pull out some pertinent quotes, which i think are spot on.

Khosla on solving hard problems

"Since one fails often, address markets that make it worthwhile when one does succeed."

Khosla on "boom mentality"

"Just because you get funded does not mean you are successful."

Khosla on Bootsrapping

"Khosla himself has always been a famously tightfisted backer. More than half of his investments during the boom involved sums of less than $1 million. Khosla explains, "My friend Mark Leslie, founder of Veritas Software, says that the more money you give a company to start with, the less likely it is to be successful. The more money the founders have, the more confident they get about their business plan, the less they experiment."

He goes on, "The right way to build a company is to experiment in lots of small ways, so that you have plenty of room to make mistakes and change strategies."

He's right. To be a Very successful entrepreneur you've got to 1) address the hard problems 2) Do it with a small amount of money 3) Experiment. The result, huge upside and a large barrier to entry to competitors. Disruptive technology entrepreneurs take note.

Read the article here.

And Kudos to Evan Williams for pointing this out on his Excellent blog.

Blogged with Flock

Cellfire: Mobile Discount Coupons

2006-07-01T05:05:00.000-07:00

Californian Startup Cellfire has just launched a service that pushes discount coupons to the consumer via your mobile phone. The service has just launched nationwide in the US after initial testing in California and offers a limited number of discounts for national retailers like TGI fridays, Hollywood video and 1-800 flowers.

Founded after CEO Brent Dusing kept losing his paper discount Coupons, Cellfire aims to make the lives of Consumers and Retailers a hell of a lot easier. Cellfire users simply download a Java client to their phone and are pushed new discount coupons as they arise. The cost to the user is simply the data charges to update their coupons. After usage the coupons expire but with new coupons arriving each day, Cellfire does seem like a clever way to manipulate users into impulse purchases. If Cellfire does reach critical mass than it can be forseen that having a buy 1 get 1 free offer on a particular day for hollywood video could lead to a serious surge in demand, which could have serious consequences. A so-called "Digg effect" for retailers.

However a number of factors will make sure this isn't happening soon. Firstly, Cellfire does not work with all handsets or networks (being restricted to Cingular) and also the number of retailers is rather restricted too. How many more discounted Pizzas can you take?

The exciting thing however is more the Global promise of the idea. According to Minh Do of Chinawhite, a chinese Tech Ventures blog, particularly in Japan, China, Korea and East Asia in general where mobile penetration is abnormally high and data charges are inclusive in all-you-can-consume mobile plans, Cellfire is a killer idea. Indeed in Europe where data charges are quite high but mobile penetration is good the idea would definately work. However, while the idea holds promise, one main problem with data intensive mobile applications is the fragmentation in service providers and handset compatibility.

Cellfire is definitely in the right place but true revenue potential is in local advertising, which according to eMarketer is going to be worth $2.8 Bn by 2008. Zixxo, another San Franscisco startup, actually has the technology to enable Local businesses to create coupons. A combination of Zixxo coupons on cell fire, together with GPRS or discovery on Yelp.com would be a very powerful combination in local search advertising. I'm hoping these companies take note ;)

Jajah Launches Free Phone Calls Globally

2006-06-30T06:10:00.000-07:00

JaJah, an austrian built-california based startup, has just launched free global calls via its website.

JaJah is basically a simpler Skype alternative enabling cheap voice communications over the Internet and works simply by inputting your number and the person you wish to call on its website. JaJah simply connects both these numbers and reroutes the call through its servers to lower costs. Once you've clicked dial, JaJah rings the other person's phone and once they have picked up rings your phone and connects the call. You can imagine inputting the numbers of two people who rarely speak to eachother as a possible prank, but anyway its a pretty useful service as long as it stays free.

JaJah's mission and its positioning relative to Skype revolves around democratising voice over IP for the mainstream. With no software downloads, no headsets and simple search box type functionality that even you mother could use JaJah seeks to be a Skype killer. But the question is why would that make a difference when you still need to go to their website everytime you wanted to dial? In fact, true democratisation is already happening behind the scenes on your normal BT landlines as network switches are being migrated to VOIP, leading to more "free" calling plans and better profit margins for Incumbents.

Pete Cashmore of Mashable.com has a useful commentary.

"The free service applies to mobile phones and landlines in the United States, Canada, Hong Kong, China, Singapore and Taiwan. The plan also includes landline calls in Australia, the UK, Germany, France, Italy and other European countries (I assume you can also call between all these countries for free). The free service only applies if both callers are Jajah users - if not, Jajah charges “less than 3 cents per minute” for the call. However, Jajah monitors the length of your calls and reserves the right to curtail excessive use, which sounds ominous."

Free global calls are definately a way to boost its registered user base but this does follow Skype's move in the US to offer free calls to mobiles and landlines. At least while its still free its worth a try, then i'll just go back to Skype. In between, give me a call on JaJah.

David Beckham's goal provides a £100m boost to the UK economy

2006-06-26T15:11:00.000-07:00

According to the Independent today David Beckham's quality freekick against Ecuador in the World cup will provide a £124m boost to the UK Economy.

"According to analysts, such as the Centre for Economic and Business Research, at least an extra £100m will be spent in the UK in the six days before the quarter-finals on Saturday, when England will play Portugal."

"The British Retail Consortium - which predicts a windfall to business of £1.5bn from the four-week finals - is even more confident. Richard Dodd, its spokesman, said: "We believe an extra £124m will be spend on food and drink for every week England stays in the tournament."

Providing England keep winning, and play a hell of a lot better, I'm sure more than one drink (or seven) will be consumed by the British public.

Nailing Meetings - don't waste your time

2006-06-24T12:46:00.000-07:00

Meetings are undoubtedly the most unproductive part of any start up. Its easy to run over, talk loosely and go off on a tangent. How do you get more out of meetings without compromising productivity?

A great article By Chris Brogan of lifehacker.org sets the scene for getting maximum output.

Meetings can have lots of loose flow to them. They start a little late because people show up a little late. There’s that spot where you haven’t seen Jumpha in a while and you ask about her children. You pass out the agenda and people face-down a while browsing it and shuffling papers. Some folks are reading and answering mail via their BlackBerrys.

I think that’s all crap. Meetings are often like dental visits. You should go in, get scraped, picked, rinsed, and cleaned, go home with a toothbrush and a sixth month appointment and that’s that.

Read the article here. I'll be incorporating Chris' suggestions in all my future meetings.

Learning from failure + Entrepreneurship

2006-06-24T09:11:00.000-07:00

Too many people gloss over what they learnt as an entrepreneur through failure. However failure, experimentation and continuous iteration of one's actions are what differentiates successful entrepreneurs from those who want to be successful.

Brad Feld of Mobius Venture talks about this valuable point on his blog.

"I’ve noticed a pattern in many of the VC and entrepreneur blogs I read – very few people ever talk about failure.

Failure is a key part of entrepreneurship. As an entrepreneur, angel investor, and venture investor, I’ve had lots of success, but I’ve also had lots of failures. So has everyone that I know that has accomplished much of anything."

The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams

2006-06-21T14:56:00.000-07:00

The new internet wave brings with it a whole array of enabling technologies and in turn a whole set of large problems to attack and build a business around. So, your ready with your idea, its scalable, has a secure revenue stream and you are about to make tens of millions of people happy.

How do you build a successful team with the right core competencies? This article by Jesse James Garrett of usability experts adaptive path puts exactly that into perspective.

Every Web team has its own take on dividing up roles and responsibilities and implementing processes for design and development. Formal titles, job descriptions, and reporting structures can vary widely. But the best teams I’ve encountered have one important thing in common: their team structure and processes cover a full range of distinct competencies necessary for success.

I've just used this in my own team building recently; invaluable if you are building a team thats going to take that cool web app you've been thinking about to the next level.

Craigslist's love for the user

2006-06-20T14:01:00.000-07:00

As the 7th most popular site on the Internet you'd be surprised that Craiglist's revenues aren't in the same ballpark as other heavy hitters of the internet (Facebook, MSN, Yahoo etc)

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Craiglist's unwavering stance on community has dictated its decision not to monetise its userbase to full potential.

"One industry analyst has estimated that Craigslist could generate 20 times [its 2005 revenue of $25 million] just by posting a couple of ads on each of its pages. If the estimate is to be believed, that's half a billion dollars a year being left on the table."

Now in times of questionable internet business models, Craigslist's loyal fan base can be directly attributed to its desire to please its Community. Die hard loyalty is the key to its popularity and for a listings site the key to liquidity and future performance.

Loyalty is something that cannot be bought and by sacrificing revenues Craigslist has effectively obtained this loyalty. This is the trade off; concentrate on building a profitable business but don't forget the reason you got there - by foccusing totally on the user.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

2006-06-18T12:38:00.000-07:00

Cool Quotes

2006-06-18T02:46:00.000-07:00

"For the true entrepreneur, reality is the superior teacher; and school is an excuse to delay failure"

Andrew "Flip" Flipowski, Chairman and CEO of Silk Road Equity

"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it"

Goethe

"The imagination of nature is greater than the imagination of man"

Richard Feynman

Both the first quote and the Goethe quote illustrate that the power of entrepreneurship comes in action. Don't procrastinate, do as action is a powerful drug. The quote by Richard Feynman is particularly valid in Technology entrepreneurship because the most elegant solutions are adopted by nature. Evolution is a powerful force which has refined far more elegant solutions than we can achieve technically. True disruptive innovation therefore should strive to learn from existing solutions in nature in order to make genuine advances.

A lifetime of opportunity

2006-06-17T13:00:00.000-07:00

I hadn't blogged since November 2005. Why? because i sufferred a serious accident in December 2005 in which i completely paralysed my right arm from the shoulder downwards.

Its taken 6 months, a serious operation and physiotherapy to get back on track and thankfully everything is back on track but i've been through the depths of emotion and back over this.

Injury has put a new perspective on life and i think i'll take two lessons (amongst many) which now provide the impetus for my new era of entrepreneurship:

1) Your health can leave you at any instance, so take every value out what what ever you do each day because you could be restricted at any point

2) Opportunities will pass you by. Take them, and sieze them because serious entrepreneurs are opportunists and what you may dismiss, someone else will do. Don't just talk, do. Don't just think it, realise it. There are hundreds of opportunities, don't lose them take them all.

Onwards and upwards.

Sharpshoot's back

2006-06-17T11:08:00.000-07:00

New Blog. New Era. Sharpshoot's back.

I've haven't blogged for ages but now i'm back. I'll be sounding off on my views on technology, entrepreneurship, life and my new adventures.

I was blogging at
whatissumondoing.blogspot.com, so i'll migrate over those posts and get this blog off the ground.

Hopefully, i'll be entertaining!

Sumon (aka sharpshoot)