Category Archives: Startups

Are You Evil or Are You Just Lucky?

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Last night I attended the Startup2Startup"s CeWebrity DeathMatch: Jason Calacanis vs Guy Kawasaki on "Is Apple Becoming Big Brother?" and it was a hoot. Watching Guy and Jason rag on each other was pretty hilarious and Dave McClure did a great job keeping the action going all night.
After the main feature, Startup2Startup dinners have a discussion at our dinner tables around a topic, which, tonight, was based on the concept of being evil and whether it was necessary or not. One question that circulated around the table was whether or not doing evil things in our lives was justifiable or not. In a funny way, I was glad that we did not get around to me answering this question because I really didn’t have an evil example in my work past to give.
How can that be? Well I’ll tell you. I thought back through my work history and could not think of a single evil event I’ve ever done. Not in business, not in politics of corporation, not in management. Now perhaps some of my former team may think of evil things I’ve done, especially like during layoffs, but that wasn’t really self orchestrated but rather forced on me by the corporation.
I’ve always tried to live my life to a higher moral standard and in dealing with people as human beings. I’ve never been great at lying, and thus corporate politics totally are out of my realm and I have seen many instances where I would have been totally outclassed in dealing with manipulation and backstabbing of others. I’m also not very talkative during meetings, which I believe has sunk my career because I’ve always let others take the limelight and not myself. The unfortunate by product of this is that if you don’t say something in meetings, people tend to view you as having nothing to contribute and thus are not worthy of attending further meetings or advancement in the company.
This, my readers, is the reason why I got about as high as I could up the corporate ladder and then could go no further. Because I’m an honest guy, don’t play corporate politics well, and just do my job well, that’s unfortunately not a formula for success in organizations.
I thought back to this lack of evil and wondered how I came to be at this point in my life. And I came on one big factor which has carried me to this day – that is LUCK.
In looking back to people I’ve worked for, the companies I’ve been at, the people who took a chance on me when I was just a dumb out of college guy, and then somehow being buddies with right two guys at Stanford leading to me joining the right internet startup at the right time – these coincidences were incredible instances in chance.
Looking back at this path I’ve taken through my career, I could have just taken the wrong step in a multitude of places and gone off totally into another place. But yet I ended up here.
Intelligence had an effect? Perhaps, but a lot of smart people do some smart things, or what they think is smart and don’t get anywhere. And I’m not particularly a genius either. I don’t think I went around and did anything special but just happened on these people as I walked through life. So that couldn’t be it.
While a lot of people poo-poo luck, I’m a big believer in it. The big problem is, how the heck do you find luck? I also think that some people are naturally lucky, and there are people who seem to have no luck at all. To that end, I have some suggestions as to how to increase your luck:
1. If you’re a lucky person, you’ve made it!
2. If you’re totally unlucky, I don’t think you’ll instantly be lucky. However, there could be hope for you. Read on.
3. Hang out with lucky people. Don’t you hate it when some of these people always seem to have great things happen to them and it doesn’t seem like they do anything? These are the people you need to find and become BFFs with. The downside is that lucky people want to also increase their luck, so they will try to find luckier people to hang out with. So you may not be successful in becoming BFFs with these people because they may spot your lucklessness.
4. Get rid of unlucky people around you. These people will be a drag on your life. Don’t hang out with them. Something bad that happens to them may also happen to you despite your luckiness. Increase your luck by hanging out with lucky people.
5. Generally, lucky people are happy, and unlucky people are not. I think that your general outlook in life can help add lucky points to your life, or at least fake it.
6. Don’t go putting yourself in risky situations. Why walk around in the middle of the night wearing expensive jewelry in the bad part of town? Duh. Reduce the chance that your unluckiness might manifest itself. Or don’t use up your lucky quotient for the day by doing inherently risky and stupid things.
7. Place yourself in situations where you can shine. So instead of walking around in the middle of the night wearing expensive jewelry in the bad part of town, go to Startup2Startup and meet some smart people, maybe some VC who takes a liking to you and funds you.
As an entrepreneur or investor, I cannot under emphasize the importance of luck. Meeting the right founder at the right time, being in the marketplace and finding some product that consumers love and it takes off, finding the right business partner who ultimately buys your company, or discovering that in a crowded marketplace that you backed the right entrepreneur (like me joining Yahoo, instead of Excite, Infoseek, or Lycos).
Luck is one of those unexplainable forces in the universe. All I can say is do things to increase your luck as one of those things you can do to help you be successful in life or business….and be very wary of when your luck runs out.

Advertisers Are Also Your Customers

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I was just reading this post Techcrunch Europe: The long lost formula for start-up success. No, really by Nigel Eccles and found it to be a great summary of Steve Blank’s Customer Development methodology. But one thing stuck out for me which was a rather short two liner:
For apps that are supported by advertising, your customer is the person who hands over the cash. That is the advertiser, so the criteria still holds.
So much insight packed into these two sentences and yet no further discussion on it!
This was something that we discovered through the dotcom bust years at Yahoo!, and really didn’t become something more apparent until we were down in the dumps in revenue after the crash of 2000-01 years.
For years, Yahoo! built its products on the mantra of always taking care of the users. Do what users want and traffic will come, and with it all the rewards including revenue. It really did work great, and arguably Yahoo! became the powerhouse it did back then amongst users because we had a single focused view on users’ needs. It seemed to us that no matter what we did, money still came in and the product teams largely ignored any extra effort in taking care of our advertisers who were paying our bills.
This was exceedingly apparent in the ad banners that we ran and refused to change for years, which was the 468×60 banner. When traditional advertisers started toeing the internet advertising waters, they looked with disdain on the small rectangle that sat on our pages, which, when compared to the traditional ways of doing advertising, provided no where near the capability of producing “wow” for their clients. Our technical specs didn’t help either; while they protected users from downloading huge files and slowing down their web experiences on Yahoo!, they severely limited what advertisers could do in those little rectangles.
And so it was that we went through the dotcom boom to bust period, saw its primary sources of ad revenue die away – the OTHER hugely funded dotcoms – and with traditional advertisers who really didn’t want to put any time or effort into producing ads for Yahoo!, but were looking elsewhere at sites who were beginning to use other ad technologies like floating ads. It wasn’t until Yahoo! started loosening up its standards and allowing different and new ad technologies on its pages that traditional advertisers started coming on board Yahoo! and trying internet advertising.
We realized that we actually had another customer besides our users, which was our advertisers. We also realized that our business was like a three-legged stool. The first leg was the company, which benefitted from having users and revenue from our advertisers; the second leg was our users; the third leg was advertisers. All three legs must be in balance or else the stool tips over. In our early years, we really only took care of two legs, which was the company and our users. The third leg existed, but we didn’t really do anything about it because no matter what we did, revenue poured in, and mostly from all those dotcoms that had way too much money to spend on advertising. These dotcoms just wanted to get exposure to users and fast, to build their businesses quickly and get out ahead of their competitors (never mind that their business models weren’t sustainable). So they spent a ton of money advertising on Yahoo! to do that and Yahoo! didn’t really need to do anything else to get them to come on board.
When these dotcoms died, so did the revenue and we realized that we really didn’t do much for people who had been doing advertising for years, well before the internet existed. So we worked hard to remedy this and bring our advertising technology to a place where it could support what traditional advertisers were looking for. The three legged stool became truly balanced and Yahoo! launched ahead of its competitors in the years following 2001, as we went out and wooed advertisers with much improved ability to create “wow” (as well as all the other important things like advertiser sales, support, and operations).
I think too many startups today don’t think enough about the three-legged stool. They focus on their company and their users, and then slap ads on their pages and get frustrated when they pull in a small amount of money every month and wonder why their CPMs are so low. Or worse, some companies build their businesses solely for advertisers and forget that their users need to have a product or service that helps them, and not just advance the wishes of advertisers. Thus the three legged stool becomes unbalanced yet again.
Not suprisingly, users and advertisers go hand in hand. Advertisers look for users to market their products to. But not just any users; they want exactly the users that would want their product. Just giving a bunch of users to advertisers means giving what is called remnant inventory to them; it’s the lowest cost inventory that they’re willing to pay for since you haven’t been able to tell them what kind of users they are reaching. So sites need to find a way to deliver those exact users that advertisers want to see their ads.
Users on the other hand, tend to hate advertising because most of the time it’s irrelevant to anything they want or need at that moment, can be annoying, and a lot of it can be interruptive of whatever it is they are doing at that time. Aspirationally, companies need to find ways of delivering the right ad to the right person at the right time. Tough job, probably tougher than figuring out what kind of users you have to sell to advertisers.
However ignoring the third leg of the stool is just folly. If a site is going to ad supported, startups should realize there is a third customer for their site, the advertiser, and put steps into motion from the very beginning to take care of this customer. As we learned at Yahoo!, doing it later on is potentially painful – you don’t want a downturn, or watch your startup’s bank account run down to zero, to shock you out of the realities of what you should have been doing.

Combining Startup Investing and Distribution

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A while back I wrote about “me-too” products and that one of the biggest issues facing early stage internet startups is the lack of distribution to get their product out there. After going to Ycombinator yesterday, I, again, felt that similar feeling when I wrote my post many weeks ago.
I thought that some of these were really great, but most of them were much-improved twists on what was already out there. In this crowded world where people already have multiple ways of doing things, I thought it was a damn shame that many of these startups would fail not because they weren’t better, but just because they could not get enough customer exposure before their bank accounts ran out.
Just the other day, I had lunch with a buddy of mine at a small publishing company and the topic of distribution came up again. We talked about how valuable the traffic they had on their site was to all these little startups who had none at all. From this conversation, an idea emerged.
Here’s the idea, and it’s one that is best executed by people who have traffic, like a Yahoo or a Google, or even a NYTimes.
Any of these companies and their like all have done venture investing. But it’s been very much like a investor-startup relationship, which is we give you money and you go out to make something big out of it. To me, I think this should change. I think there should be a way to give both money and distribution. To an emerging startup, a firehose of traffic could be worth its weight in gold, in addition to the money.
Suppose at the bottom of every page, which is not worth very much to advertisers since they want to be at the top of the page, there was a row of links which was labeled, “New things to try:”, or “Cool startups:”, or even something more explicit like “Check out our new ventures:”. Then for each startup you invest in, part of the deal is to gain a place in that row of links. You could have permanent placement, or rotating placement if there are more startups than link slots.
Then just let them run. I think you’d be surprised at the amount of traffic the bottom of the page can generate. Certainly, even 1000s of clicks per day driving to a new startup would be extremely valuable. At Yahoo, we did some exploration on placing links down there. At Yahoo traffic levels, they were driving a tremendous number of clicks to Yahoo products and services each day! But yet that space at the bottom of the page wasn’t really being monetized otherwise, or of any use to users after the main content of the page had ended.
So why not give it to the startups you invest in?
Today, startups are in a fight for attention. The only way for most startups to get noticed, induce trial, and thus get true validation from the marketplace that they are better, is to point a firehose at them. SEO is too slow, SEM is expensive – what else is left – perhaps partnerships with companies who can give them exposure. But I think that while it is possible, it is a lot of effort to do a BD deal for distribution. As an investor, I would think that it would be easier to just give it them ourselves, right? If you can firehose your investments to show the world they exist, induce trial, really prove out their models, wouldn’t that take a huge amount of risk out of your investments and increase the chance of a startup being successful? Of course it would also show whether or not you chose wisely or not….
So c’mon big media companies – work with your venture arms. Invest AND offer a firehose. These guys need it, and, aspirationally, we do want some of these products which ARE better than what we have out there now.

The Problem with Early Stage Me-Too Product Startups

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I believe the universe of internet businesses has become extremely crowded in the last few years. In the early days, you could come out easily with something new because there weren’t that many competitors out there. Now, it’s hard to find somebody who isn’t working on something similar to what you’re thinking about. So competition is fierce and many times you’ll find entrenched competitors with a lot of product inertia and a great head start.
The other huge problem is on the consumer side. Consumers are deluged by new products and services all the time. They have overload and just keep to the products they know best, and need to have a really good reason to change and move from another service to a new entrant. We saw this first in the past with email addresses; Yahoo Mail users were hesitant to move because the cost of changing your email address was super high and thus user retention was very high. Now add what makes up our digital lives on services like flickr (all our pictures that we’ve uploaded for half a decade now), or facebook (our friends are all here, plus their interconnections), or linkedin (our business connections are all here, plus all their historical connections). The cost of moving has become so high because we’ve invested so much time and effort into those services and we don’t want to redo that, let alone adding the cost of learning a new service.
As an early stage investor, I’ve found that this makes picking companies exponentially harder and it’s a shame. I meet a lot of smart entrepreneurs with some really great ideas, but then I do some research online and find that there are others who are working on something similar or in a close enough space to be competitive. Then I start to get worried about their prospects.
You can find tons of books on the subject of competition and winning despite having entrenched competitors. In general, I have found that entrepreneurs are doing what they should be doing to attack a crowded market. These are things like (my thanks to Andrew Chen for helping me with this list):
1. Innovate on the product experience (ie. Posterous vs. WordPress).
2. Business model changes, where you are going free (or freemium) for a product that’s usually subscription (or fixed charge).
3. Changing the market where you’re going long tail instead of hitting the larger market (ie. casual games versus hardcore games).
4. Change in distribution model, where you are delivering something as a service rather than a download, or bundled into an existing thing (ie. Facebook app) instead of a standalone thing.
5. Change in branding. An example is where you cater to an upscale prestige market or niche market instead of a mass brand, or vice versa like taking a niche product and making it available to the masses.
6. Create a business that is better, out of a larger part of another business (ie. Lefora created a message board hosting product for those who don’t want all the bells and whistles of a full social networking product).
7. Innovate on design, which appeals to those who want a similar product but one that looks/feels better.
8. Offering more features on a product, or customization on product.
And the big, traditional way of taking a new entrant into a crowded market:
9. Mass advertising to gain broad awareness and induce trial and adoption of new product in face of existing competitors.
So I am not saying it’s not possible to win against a crowded marketplace. My issue is with early stage startups: in order to win in a crowded marketplace, early stage startups often don’t have enough resources to last long enough to compete effectively and win. While a lot of the above can be implemented, growth time is limited by whether or not you have enough capital and revenue to survive until you run out.
To me, if you’re developing a me-too product, it’s ultimately going to boil down to a marketing game more than in any other situation. You can develop the best product or service, but if nobody knows about it because they’re busy using something else, then you’re still dead.
So distribution for a me-too product is critical. In the past and present, large corporations could do this because they had lots of money to launch large advertising campaigns. They knew distribution channels and could insert their new product there. They had contacts in their market and it was straightforward to get word out that they had a new product even if it was similar to existing products.
As a new startup, you may not have those channels and contacts established, and certainly you don’t have money to spend on advertising plastered on the Superbowl, magazines, online, and elsewhere.
However, once you finish your product using one or more of the strategies above, you need to jump to strategy number 9 as soon as possible and get it out to consumers. You don’t have time to wait until people notice you; you need to get noticed.
Some possible ways of doing this:
1. Buy advertising. As an early stage startup, this is the least viable unless you somehow have enough money to do this. Lead gen advertising can be better than CPM based advertising as you’ll be able to pay only on a referral, but still this costs money. Let’s move onto cheaper alternatives.
2. Marketing that involves barter space. You trade something of value for advertising space on their side. Something of value can be advertising space on your site, or donation to their cause for charities.
3. Word of Mouth Marketing. Contact bloggers, magazines, users and get them to try and talk about your product. Getting in the NYTimes is a big traffic driver, as well as many other national circulation magazines. Online publications like C|Net and The Huffington Post can also be great. Twitter is also a great up and coming means for getting your word out.
4. Get distribution partners. Existing companies can add your product on their sites and can help you promote it. This is usually in deeper partnership such that it goes beyond just buying ad space. You look for exclusivity in contracts and features that your product has that enhance an existing company’s product and prestige.
5. Viral marketing. This is a very hard avenue to execute, which is to start with a few users and then it blossoms outward to many. Determining how your product can be viral can be an elusive game and if you don’t hit on it early, you could waste a lot of time tweaking and hoping that something you create will be virally popular and spread.
In working with a few startups, I am disheartened by the fact that the importance of distribution is still not well understood. The leading thought is that “if I build something great, then everyone will come find me.” Unfortunately, that is rarely the case in this crowded marketplace, and most early stage companies don’t have enough time to let people just wander around until they find out about the product.
They did not do enough work to go out and contact bloggers. They didn’t go out and try to woo corporate partners to see if they would help them get their message out. They just waited for users to come and they didn’t come in great enough quantity to support their business by the time their money ran out.
So don’t let your product fail simply because you can’t induce trial. Remember, you have developed a me-too product, one that users already have a solution for and switching costs and barriers may be too high for them to take action to look for a better solution. You need to get them to know that your solution exists, and attract them to try it out – and since you’re an early stage startup, you need to do this ASAP to give yourself enough time to let consumer adoption grab hold and ultimately take off, all before your money runs out.

World Domination Plan

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I love it when I hear entrepreneurs are working on a world domination plan.
I see a lot of entrepreneurs arrive with pitches that are limited in scope. They talk about how the world needs this function, how great it is, and how current products don’t have these features. Usually, they really are great ideas. When we get to revenue, sometimes there is a plan and sometimes there isn’t. But many of these revenue plans only seem to get to a few million a year at most. This may be a great small business, but for an investor, we need to ply our limited resources into those opportunities that will grow into huge businesses, and not just a million a year.
The need for a world domination plan is important to me. I want to invest in businesses that will grow into huge businesses, which will maximize my return on investment. I don’t want to invest in businesses that will grow into small businesses, even if they are great small businesses. I only have time and resources to work on so many projects and need to maximize my efforts.
The plan needs to be believable to both me and the entrepreneur. It’s not enough that I just believe it’s possible; the entrepreneur must also believe the plan since he is executing it. If only I believe in the possibility, that’s not good enough. To me, it’s a form of personal deception; I see the idea, I see its potential, and it doesn’t matter who works on it – it must build into a big business as I believe, right? It’s not that simple even if I wish it was. I’m not the one executing the idea and doing all the ground work. The entrepreneur must believe in the idea and be able to do all that. If he does not believe in the idea and/or cannot execute it, it’s going to fail.
Some people have enough resources to invest in experimental projects, meaning that there is no clear path to success at the beginning. I unfortunately don’t have enough resources to deploy like that. Thus, I need to at least have some comfort that both the entrepreneur and I believe there is a world domination plan (and yes I know there is a great probability that this will change).
What is your world domination plan?

Still Lots of Interest in Incubation Out There

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In the last few months, I’ve encountered at least 3 people who are thinking about incubating. On the one hand, it’s amazing that the topic still comes up, but on the other hand, it’s not so amazing.
Clearly the news about the spectacular failures of incubators during the last Internet bust hasn’t deterred anyone from trying to build incubation operations. We can even find examples of incubation-type operations that are arguably working like Ycombinator and similar operations in other locales, like Techstars and LaunchBox Digital.
People keep wondering themselves why they can’t just build stuff, and keep building stuff until something works. Or setup something like Ycombinator/Techstars/LaunchBox. It seems so cheap and easy to build a web site/service and get it out there. Why not just build lots of things quickly and try them until something works?
I believe the answer is YES you can. But before you do, I would point you to my two blog posts about incubation, which were gleaned from conversations from many incubator operations both personal and groups in the present and in the past. At betaworks, I took on the project of finding out as much as about incubation as I could, to inform betaworks about the best way to go about coming up an idea (or ideas), how to get them built, and set them up for later success. I then went out and talked to people incubating and distilled what I learned into these two posts:
Incubation 101
Incubation 201: Should You Incubate?
Words of wisdom/caution to those who want to do this:
1. Generally, professional investors run away from people trying to raise money into incubators, because of lot of them were around when the dot-com incubators all collapsed and they remember that. So calling whatever you’re doing an incubator has been found to be a detriment to fund raising.
2. Find your benefactor, woo someone who believes in you and what you’re going to do and has cash to fund your operation.
3. Be aware of destroying incentives that will hinder people from working their butt off on their projects. These are things like paying people full salaries and benefits, and not tying the ownership of the project deeply enough to the people working on them, among other things. Keep people hungry and motivated, that they think their entire future and life depend on the project they are working on.
4. Transferrance of an idea is SUPER HARD. Don’t think it’s easy to just be able to explain an idea to someone else and they will understand it as intuitively and viscerally as the idea originator.
5. Keep costs as low as possible. This will keep everyone’s runway as long as possible. It will also add to the hunger.
6. Figure out what you’re good at, and leverage that in developing the incubation operation. Paul Graham loves smart hackers and is really good at filtering for that. So Ycombinator teams are always composed of super smart hackers because his strategy is based more on having super smart hackers around than just the idea, because often times where you start is not where you end up, and smart people will find a way to success no matter what. What do you believe will generate success and how will your strengths help that strategy?
7. Following on 6., I would advise you not to compete with Ycombinator or any of the other incubator type operations out there. Don’t call yourself Ycombinator 2.0 either in name or messaging. Only Paul Graham can pull off Ycombinator in the way he is doing now. Be yourself and build your own brand.
8. Out of respect for the kind folks who shared with me their knowledge and wisdom which cost them a ton of time and money in legal fees to figure out, I am not publishing anything about what I learned about company structure or legal matters. You should go find a law firm who has worked in this area before and they can help you figure things out. As a hint, some of that has to do with the SEC Investment Company Act of 1940.
I wish you well in your incubative endeavors. May you build something truly great!

The Importance of Revenue at Early Stage, Now More Than Ever

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Revenue is important. DUH.
It seems as though we forgot about that through the internet years. People were willing to put money into startups to build up a user base and put revenue generation second before that. They didn’t have to deal with revenue because they knew that they could raise their next round based on tremendous usage and on the assumption that if you had a gazillion users, then you must be able to monetize them somehow.
That did work for many startups through the dotcom boom years, and even after the internet bust it still worked for many years, right up until the economy took a nose dive.
The world changed, and now that second round is just about non-existent.
So I, along with just about every other experienced investor out there, have started to demand revenue as soon as possible (better) or want to see it at the outset (best). We have turned away just about every early stage company that has no revenue or no firm revenue plan.
While we’d love to be optimistic and place a bet on a startup that only has user building potential, but no clear revenue plan, it’s just too risky right now. Or, if the entrepreneur has not created a firm revenue plan, or does not plan to turn on revenue generation as soon as possible. Any of those are too risky for me right now.
Why? In the economic climate of today, 99% of the funding sources won’t even touch a startup that doesn’t have revenue showing, when they hit their next round. I’ve seen it happen multiple times for companies trying to raise money today. Thus, if you don’t have your own source of cash (a.k.a. revenue), then you’ll end up dying when you burn through your initial cash that you’ve raised. You just can’t count on that next tranche of cash to appear when you need it most.
So in investing in you, I want you to survive. I want you to build a great business. I DO NOT WANT YOU TO DIE a few months or a year from now when you run out of cash, just simply because you put off revenue generation until the very end and it’s too late to generate enough cash to support yourself. To me, that’s a waste of not only my money, but of everyone else’s money as well. Think about that if you’re going to take your friends’ and family’s money. In today’s funding environment, you might as well be tossing it out the door if you don’t start revenue generation from day one.
Before the internet, startups were always created to make money. Entrepreneurs always thought about building businesses to make money from day one. And many of them would drive themselves into the hungriest state, risking their homes on additional mortgages and their relationships with divorce. Their unwavering belief in their business idea coupled by their need for cash to sustain their lives kept them going until some of the biggest businesses of today were built.
Somehow we lost that when funding sources were willing to bet on ideas that didn’t have obvious monetization early on. It took the economy to dive into recession to bring this “create a business to make money” philosophy back into the forefront.
Perhaps it never should have gone away.
I’m only looking at startups with revenue or will turn on revenue from day one now, but I also wonder about what I will do when the economy recovers. Would I go back to placing bets on some ideas that may not have obvious revenue plans, or are generating revenue immediately? I think that we’ll have to take a look at the funding environment and the startup ecosystem to see if we’ll ever go back to supporting businesses like that.

State of the World and Where Recovery is Going to Come From

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A reporter asked me some thought provoking questions about the state of the world and whether Silicon Valley will play a large role in recovery and building new companies and employing tons of now-out-of-work people. I gave a rambling reply which also caused me to think deeper about how things are and my dissatisfaction with many things in the past, which I hope will be fixed. Since it was an interesting thought exercise for me, I thought I’d share it with you (with a bit more embellishment):
3% is the new 20%
Greed has played a large role in how broken the system is. I now say 3% growth is the new 20%, which means that expectations have been totally out of whack in the past. When I was at Yahoo, it was ridiculous to have investors continually push for 20% growth quarter over quarter, year over year. It’s unsustainable. and when Yahoo fails at this, or any company for that matter, the investors knock the stock down. When the stock goes down, the investors get in an uproar and scream bloody murder, try to get rid of the current management team, cause a huge ruckus which is hugely distracting and doesn’t enable a company to respond in the way that is best, which sometimes takes time – More time than investors are willing to give. The short term mindset of investors which drives the short term mindset of companies doesn’t let any company plan effectively for the long term, but only for next quarter’s earnings call.
Stock market driven by emotion
The whole stock market is driven by emotion which is really bad in general. Whatever happened to what I learned about stock investing way back, when the stock price was a reflection of the actual value of the assets a company had, not what emotion drives what we think it should be?
Is incremental innovation enough?
Lots of innovation is definitely in the form of incremental innovation but that is true in more established technologies. We see this in bulk on the internet, but on the other hand, we still see a lot of truly weird new stuff that nobody is working on before. I think a lot of people think they can merely do something better and that is enough to get to a good place, or become number one. the main problem is that users have services overload; ex. how many social networks do we really need?
This is a big problem for us internet startup investors. We see a lot of me-too products and while something may be truly better, there are so many factors out there that inhibit the establishment and growth of a me-too product, even though it’s better. Users have lots of inertia in products they know; they learn, get used to them, then are unwilling to switch. Users also can’t determine what is truly better or not – when two things work in the same industry or product area, users aren’t going to spend time to dig into every new product’s details to figure out which is better; they don’t have time. In the past, large marketing campaigns to drive awareness could get a new entrant a place in the marketplace, but “firehoses of users” aren’t easy to find or establish to get enough trial such that natural growth of users starts to happen.
Where’s the next big industry creation going to happen?
If i were a betting man, I would say cleantech is the next big area for large scale innovation that creates big companies and factories, that employ a wide variety of skills and skill levels – it’s an area that will require lots of capital to start and get going.
Internet tech only employs a certain type and set of skills – as a veteran of the internet and investor in the area, I still think there will be lots of innovation there, but it will come more slowly and the big returns will become more rare, but lots of smaller companies will pop up. It’s still an interesting area and think it will be for some time. Capital requirements are virtually nil for internet startups now.
Statistics says that Silicon Valley can still drive a large portion of company creation and thus, help in the recovery
I’m biased. I live in the Silicon Valley and in living there, versus visiting elsewhere, I think that innovation and new business creation still happens a great deal in the valley. Why:
1. Even in the economic downturn where we’ll see many of the venture funds die, the greatest concentration will still be in the bay area. No other region in the US can claim the sheer number of funds and greatest concentration of angel investors too.
2. The economic downturn will kill off many dumb ideas and leave the strongest to survive. This puts back a constraint on startups which had gone missing in the boom years: gotta make a great business that can make money. duh!
3. Still people flock to silicon valley to start businesses. This inertia isn’t going to go away instantly. It would require many years of failure to reset this in peoples’ minds that Silicon Valley isn’t the right place to be.
4. Being in the Valley means you are surrounded by tons of other like-minded startup people. It would be hard to find some other place like this, except for perhaps NYC or maybe Boston (even those two would still be dwarfed by the sheer number of people in Silicon Valley). Everywhere else has a much much less dense concentration of people who can help you and who have done it before.
5. I personally still look at deals and those that kind of are sub-standard, I tell them (as does everyone else) to go back to the drawing board and come up with an idea that can make money. This kind of feedback is just one more iterative step in getting people to the right place.
6. So eventually some great ideas will make it through the filter, but you have to wait for time and effort to pay off. Statistics says that the greater number you have to play with, the higher the chance you’ll get something new and big. With the sheer volume of stuff that goes on in Silicon Valley, that says to me statistically that you’ll get a next big idea faster than in any other place in the country.
The next big breakthrough employing 1000s of people won’t happen overnight
I doubt that any idea could move that fast and with the economy so down, it will be even harder to see a company grow to such size in those conditions, even those with some momentum. So in that sense, it may be that the government’s massive infrastructure projects may be the ones that will employ a lot of people in the short term while the other companies fight off their investors by laying off people just so they can get their revenue numbers looking better.
What if we didn’t layoff anyone and just waited it out?
What if companies didn’t sucumb to the pressure – what if they kept paying people but were OK with zero profit? We all know we’ll pull out of this downturn at some point – but we have to make a whole bunch of people suffer by laying them off just so a company can look good to investors. Again, the short term focus will weaken companies and place a lot of good, experienced workers out of work. OK OK I’m not totally correct because maybe some companies will make less than their expenses so they will no longer be break even, so maybe they should cut dumb projects and fat off their staff. On the other hand, we’ve seen time and time again where companies would layoff people in downturns, and then just re-hire them later during good times. We don’t need them – we DO need them – this see-sawing back and forth costs people in time, money, and effort.
What if we just didn’t fire them, made less or zero money, and just waited it out since we would have hired them back anyways?
Another thing I learned along the way: being loyal to a company is a thing of the past. A company exists for the survival of itself; if that means that people should be let go, it will do so in order to survive. It doesn’t care about the people, even though it should. As long as the people help a company survive, it will retain those people. Anybody who doesn’t contribute to its survival get cut. I don’t see people having any say or power in this decision. Thus, we have to prepare and take care of ourselves in case it happens.
People are resilient, and will drive new business creation
In a downturn, people tend to be resilient. I read somewhere that during these times, people start their own businesses because they’ve been laid off, sulk for a while, then pick themselves up and go and start new sustainable businesses because now they are free from the corporate mess to do so, whereas they may not have felt that freedom before….?
Entrepreneurism is under attack
I agree generally with this statement. I think the capital mkts are closed, but only for a while. The evidence is that the recovery steps are taking hold but it will still be a few months before things are more back to normal. There will be a shake out in the venture industry. IPOs will still be tough until SAOX gets fixed, which I heard people are working on.
Education could use some serious improvement in the US. But still many kids come out of college wanting to do a startup instead of taking a corporate job. so while we essentially closed the doors to international talent, I think that there is plenty of talent ready and willing to go with just a little experienced handholding.
Basic research is declining I hear. People aren’t encouraged to take science; they want to make the quick buck so they become stock traders. So less ideas come out that way, but still there are many untapped. I met a guy who had a line to the DARPA funded projects in universities. He raised a small fund to help these projects become real businesses. Real scary star wars stuff he was telling me about. Pretty cool.
The search for exits is a problem for the whole venture industry. Tt does foster this attitude of building a business for the exit and not for sustainability. This needs some re-thinking. I admit I even suffer from exit-itis as an angel investor. But we also need to figure out how investors can profit from supporting a company and being able to cash out their investment.
Silicon Valley downturn not as severe as other parts of the country..sort of
Still lots of wealthy people running around, although a lot of Valley companies laying off 1000s of people. And I think parts of the Valley are experiencing downturns but not all, as evidenced by housing prices, etc. Still, it’s probably not as bad as other parts of the country. But as for contributing to the entire country’s recovery, I think you’d have to make people move to the Bay area to look for jobs, or have those companies expand out to other states to get cheaper labor. One problem is finding skilled workers in the areas that high technology requires in other states. Sometimes, you just can’t find those people there, or get people to move there because the quality of life is not what they want (who doesn’t want to live in California haha?).
I read an article in Venture Hacks about American Apparel. This is the innovation that is required in the US; to stop throwing jobs out of the country and figure out how to do things here, so that we can employ Americans and pay them what we need to pay, but also do it in a cost effective manner to be competitive.
California is well poised to recover
I think California has a great chance to recover by itself: entertainment industry in southern California, tech and other stuff in northern California. As in other years, I think there will yet again be a migration to California to look for fortune, as companies get created and are looking for skilled people, and that will draw skilled people from states where jobs are lost.
Do you agree or disagree?

Startup Vocabulary: RENVY, RENVIOUS

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RENVY
[ren-vee]
noun, verb
-noun
A feeling of discontent or covetousness with regard to another startup’s revenue, especially when you have none:
Green with renvy takes on new meaning when we’re talking about money.
-verb
To regard with renvy:
I renvy company Y reaching breakeven; if only we had went for revenue from the very beginning, we wouldn’t have to go beg for more money.
RENVIOUS
[ren-vee-uhs]
adjective
-adjective
Full of, feeling, or expressing renvy:
We at company X are renvious of company Y’s $100 million dollars of revenue last year and are planning to take them out in beer pong on Friday night.
This startup vocabulary lesson was brought to you by the folks at Loudwater Labs.