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Feld Thoughts

Brad Feld on Term Sheets is a great summary of the many issues surrounding term sheets and negotiations. Definitely worth archiving.

Technorati Tags: startup, termsheets

Tracking candidate via social network exposure

Techpresident is a great new site tracking presidential candidates and their influence online, particularly via social network. You can see stats on the number of Myspace friends, new items, spending on keywords, etc. Check it.

Technorati Tags: netvocate

Favorite Widgets

This is a real word of blog badge:

Want this badge?

This is a mockup we created at Chipin for the Obama campaign.....

Box.net Widget

Box.net released a killer new widget today. I can't for some reason copy the code using firefox on my Mac, but I sent them an email to see what they have to say.

So why is this widget so cool? Well, it’s a music player. It’s a photo sharing tool. It’s a way to distribute large files. In other words, it’s just an incredibly useful tool with numerous applications.

Beyond its utility, there are a couple of other things to note.

I have not seen a widget that does a better job of enabling new sign-ups (and logins) through the body of the widget. To date, services that require registration have had a real hard time making effective use of widgets. Opening up a new browser window and forcing someone to join or sign in is just so ….. clunky. It sort of defeats the whole point of being a distributed service.

Box.net does an extremely elegant job of making new sign ups fast, easy, and painless – all within the body of the widget. Anybody who has been grappling with how to reconcile forced registrations with widgets should definitely take a few minutes to try out Box.net’s solution. You might learn something – I know that I did.

So what are the implications of this? Let’s say that I’m reading a blog and there’s a music track that I like being shared via a Box.net widget. Without ever leaving the blog, I can grab the music track, join Box.net, and set up my own Box.net widget pre-loaded with that music track. And of course, it doesn’t have to be a music track. It could be a photo, a presentation, a whitepaper. It’s easy to imagine Box.net enabling a rapid spread of files around the Web.

The other thing that I love about this widget is how it fits into Box.net’s business model. Box.net makes money by charging folks for file storage. They give you up to 1GB of file storage for free, and up to 5GB for $4.99 per month. What the widget does is to sign up people for the free trial version of the service, all within the user experience of the widget publisher site.

By providing a one click “Share in my Box” functionality, Box.net is effectively leveraging the content of the widget publisher to propagate its widgets - and more importantly, sell its file storage service. The beauty is that folks don’t even know they’re signing up for a free trial of a file storage service – they are just grabbing a piece of media that they like for their blog. It’s brilliant. From a business model perspective, it’s far more intuitive than say, YouTube’s widget strategy.

So while the debate continues about whether widgets can ever make money, Box.net has quietly built a widget that will drive qualified lead after qualified lead to their revenue engine. c

Web 2.0: Buzz-Monitoring and Tracking | Smashing Magazine

Web 2.0: Buzz-Monitoring and Tracking | Smashing Magazine is a pretty killer blog post on how to measure our blog or any site's buzz online. A definite must read for those that care.

Technorati Tags: widgets, netvocate, buzz, metrics

Hype on Widgets?

Valleywag has a post talking about the hype around widgets. DJI also bags on the perilous business model of widgets. The commentary talks about how "digital bling" as widgets have been described are a distraction to blogs and slow down pageviews. And where's the business model?

I agree that many widgets are bling and that their value comes and goes with the whims of Myspace users. But I have been talking about these widgets as "dumb", they are only glorified banner ads with a feature to allow ease of copying. What is needed is a "smart" widget that takes on the qualities of a simple application. A small intelligent widget can be an amazing tool for advertisers, brand advocates, nonprofits, most anyone that wants user generated advocacy to carry them into the social media space. That is exactly what we are working on at Netvocate and I believe we are going to show that there is a huge business around "smart" widgets. We may even help educate other widgets to raise their status ;)

Technorati Tags: widgets, predictions, netvocate

Secrets of an investor presentation

Ever wonder what investors are thinking when you make a presentation? Following are the questions to address. I grabbed this off a couple angel investor docs given to me over the years I think.. it was an old post on my other blog.

1) WHAT IS YOUR VISION? - What is your big vision? - What problem are you solving and for whom? - Where do you want to be in the future?

2) WHAT IS YOUR MARKET OPPORTUNITY AND HOW BIG IS IT? - How big is the market opportunity you are pursuing and how fast is it growing? - How established (or nascent) is the market? - Do you have a credible claim on being one of the top two or three players in the market?

3) DESCRIBE YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE - What is your product/service? - How does it solve your customer’s problem? - What is unique about your product/service?

4) WHO IS YOUR CUSTOMER? - Who are your existing customers? - Who is your target customer? - What defines an "ideal" customer prospect? - Who actually writes you the check? - Use specific customer examples where possible.

5) WHAT IS YOUR VALUE PROPOSITION? - What is your value proposition to the customer? - What kind of ROI can your customer expect by using buying your product/service? - What pain are you eliminating? - Are you selling vitamins, aspirin or antibiotics? (I.e. a luxury, a nice-to-have, or a need-to-have)

6) HOW ARE YOU SELLING? - What does the sales process look like and how long is the sales cycle? - How will you reach the target customer? What does it cost to "acquire" a customer? - What is your sales, marketing and distribution strategy? - What is the current sales pipeline?

7) HOW DO YOU ACQUIRE CUSTOMERS? - What is your cost to acquire a customer? - How will this acquisition cost change over time and why? - What is the lifetime value of a customer?

8) WHO IS YOUR MANAGEMENT TEAM? - Who is the management team? - What is their experience? - What pieces are missing and what is the plan for filling them?

9) WHAT IS YOUR REVENUE MODEL? - How do you make money? - What is your revenue model? - What is required to become profitable?

10) WHAT STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT ARE YOU AT? - What is your stage of development? Technology/product? Team? Financial metrics/revenue? - What has been the progress to date (make reality and future clear)? - What are your future milestones?

11) WHAT ARE YOUR PLANS FOR FUND RAISING? - What funds have already been raised? - How much money are you raising and at what valuation? - How will the money be spent? - How long will it last and where will the company "be" on its milestones progress at that time? - How much additional funding do you anticipate raising & when?

12) WHO IS YOUR COMPETITION? - Who is your existing & likely competition? - Who is adjacent to you (in the market) that could enter your market (and compete) or could be a co-opted partner? - What are their strengths/weaknesses? - Why are you different?

13) WHAT PARTNERSHIPS DO YOU HAVE? - Who are your key distribution and technology partners (current & future)? - How dependent are you on these partners?

14) HOW DO YOU FIT WITH THE PROSPECTIVE INVESTOR? - How does this fit w/ the investor’s portfolio and expertise? - What synergies, competition exist with the investor’s existing portfolio?

15) OTHER - What assumptions are key to the success of the business? - What "gotchas" could change the business overnight? New technologies, new market entrants, change in standards or regulations? - What are your company’s weak links?

Here's a great ebook from Seth Godin on Really Bad Powerpoint (and how to avoid it)

A couple startup pointers online

Genuine VC: Seven Common Tactical Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make in their Initial VC Pitch which are Simple to Fix

Genuine VC: Seven Founding Sins: ""

Allen's Blog: Ten Commandments for Entrepreneurs 1) Meet with the right partner at the VC firm. Try to get your idea and meeting with the person that has the most appropriate background for your idea. 2) Be on time! Duh! Actually be early so you can set up your laptop, hook up to the projector, get access to the wireless hub, have a glass of water, and breath 3) Tease. Don't cram several meetings into one. The objective of the first meeting is to get a second. Tell them you have a great technology idea, being implemented by a great team, and attacking a huge market in the midst of a transition. Crisply and clearly reduce a complex business message into a short set of slides that intrigues the audience and makes them want to find out more. The same tactic with the Exec Summary. 4) Know your audience. Either read up before the meeting or ask questions about domain experience, companies in their portfolio, etc. Don't get surprised by who knows what and bore them with redundant background info. 5) Get to the point. Tell the audience what you are doing right away. “What problem is my startup solving?” 6) Describe your idea by analogy. Compare it to what else has been in the market. Google adwords for widgets. 7) 13 slides. Check out Guy's 10/20/30 rule for presentations 8) Know, but admit when you don't. 1) know a lot, (2) know what you don’t know and (3) admit it when asked -- will get you a lot farther down the road. 9) Know your competitors and list them. Be intimate with strengths and weaknesses. 10) Listen well to questions and answer quickly. Don't play the ego game and followup on points in dispute after the meeting.

Focus Focus Focus

EarlyStageVC How to Double Your Valuation That got your attention, didn’t it? Maybe I learned something from all those enlargement offers in my email after all. Now, let’s get down to business. I re-learned something last week. Focus sells. Duh. I'll be specific. Last week I saw two remarkably different pitches, both from companies with great technology. One sold the generality of what they could do, telling a Big Story. The other told a Focused Story about an existing customer base they were going to serve better. .They explicitly avoided in the pitch any mention of where else their technology might apply. That was the voice over in the conversation around the pitch. All other things were equal -- limited management team, pre-launch, working alpha. I struggled with the Big Story Company, befuddled about who would really use this. I jumped out of my chair (metaphorically) to chase the Focused Story, because I could envision so many more uses beyond the first beachhead market. VCs are great at imagining a big Future, but most of us want an anchored Present. The Big Story Company was hoping for a valuation $10M pre-money. The Focused Story already had a term sheet at $20M when we met. There is an enormous temptation in startups to think and talk expansively about a long-term vision centered on the technology of the Company. That vision often includes the word enable as in we will enable … That’s your first clue. Enable is one of those value-halving words. So are Discover, Context, Create, and Build. All those words really say, The proof of value is left to someone else. That applies equally to the valuation. The proof of value is left to someone else because we can't articulate it. Companies started by technologists routinely fall into this trap. (I mean both business and engineering technofiles, BTW) They don’t start with the intent of solving a specific problem. They start with the intention of “leveraging” a specific technology. The fact that the technology is a piece of many potential futures seduces the team to think they have a big opportunity. It is uncomfortable for the team to commit to a market because they don’t know the end user. There are two solutions to this. Turn inward and build technology, or turn outward and recruit people who do understand the solution. It is dilutive, but if it doubles your value, you can’t afford not to do it. Years ago I was on the board of a company that had phenomenal technology for building predictive models from text or data. The team had identified potential applications in CRM, online advertising, search, database marketing, customer support, and others. The CTO referred to the product as a bolt-on brain, because it made many existing applications much smarter. The problem was that the technology was 10% of any given solution, even though it was the piece that differentiated the rest of the system. Capturing the other 90% required domain expertise not present in the team. The Company never went deep, straddling several potential markets. They were eventually acquired for the team and tech, not for the book of business it created. It was an unsatisfying outcome for nearly everyone. It was positive, but vastly under the potential. So how do you double your valuation? Pick one application; serve one type of customer and be in that business. Show how you can conquer a specific set of competitors by virtue of the technology, but don’t be in the technology business. If you can persuade your investors that the first beachhead is attainable and interesting, you will get credit for subsequent applications and the big, horizontal play. Tell a story that shows you understand who your customer is, how to get to them, and why they will buy or use your product/service. Show how powerful the technology and team are, but stay on message about the focus. Let us imagine the Future. * Don’t enable – solve * Don’t provide context – provide conclusions * Don’t ask customers to build – ask them to use Technology is raw material. Create finished goods. Enhance your value with this Vi@gr@ for startup companies. Your partners will love you for it.

Bling for your Blog

The New York Times just posted a story about widgets... this really is going to be the year of the widgets.

Online Activism

Online Activism: "

Pew: 14 Million Online Political Activists in U.S. Today | Personal Democracy Forum.

23% of campaign internet users has either posted their own political commentary to the web via a blog, site or newsgroup (8%); forwarded or posted someone else's commentary (13%); created political audio or video (1%); forwarded someone else's audio or video (8%). 'That translates into about 14 million people who were using the 'read-write Web' to contribute to political discussion and activity,' the study's authors Lee Rainie and John Horrigan write.

* The most common use of the net is to find out candidate positions on issues or voting records, followed by efforts to check the accuracy of claims made by them or about them.

Imagine a political candidate in 2008 using Chipin (Netvocate) to publish and share his/her positions via video/audio. That could be updated depending on the site the widget is located or the viewer....

Fractals of Change: Web 2.0 - Greater Initial Investments Required

Tom Evslin write today about why it takes Web 2.0 companies more money to get started than the $2000 for Digg or the small initial investments to launch facebook or YouTube. Fractals of Change: Web 2.0 %u2013 Greater Initial Investments Required

So, if you’re just now starting up, don’t get blinded by the successes of the first people to realize a platform could be built and operated on the cheap. You already missed that wave. Now, unless you are extraordinarily lucky or well-connected, you aren’t going to succeed in publicizing your new service and getting up to a critical mass of content or subscribers or both unless you raise or have enough money to create initial awareness or value. There is too much clutter from which you must emerge.

The Meaning of Badge Proliferation

The Meaning of Badge Proliferation: "

It seems that the number of conversations I have had in the past two months and the number of articles/blog-posts I’ve read about online badges has skyrocketed. By ‘badges’ I mean small snippets of HTML code which consumers cut and then paste onto their blog or social network profile. (I am not necessarily talking about ‘widgets,’ which contain richer interactive functionality and often reside on the desktop, though I do realize that the definitions and manifestations of the two blur together quite a bit.)

For example, Fred Wilson posted last month about his ‘new blog bling.’ The number of badges has exploded so much recently in that Pete Cashmore asked earlier this week, ‘Are there any startups that don’t plug in to MySpace these days?’. The importance of for the industry of badges and widgets for MySpace pages was highlighted with the recent scramble after the mandate that all Flash-based ones be upgraded to newest version from Adobe.

Tim Post coined a very apt term, calling these badges, the ‘flying seeds of the internet’ and has an excellent blog entirely devoted to the subject (it’s a must read on the subject which I’ve poured through extensively). In a conversation he and I had the other day, we discussed how badges are a unique combination of marketing and technology, like interactive stickers for the web. They are becoming another method for self-expression in and of themselves. Bumper stickers for the internet generation to communicate to others in ‘traffic.’

Just like those sticky pieces of paper slapped on the back of a car, online badges can and will allow people to express affiliations with schools, groups, locations, brands, bands, and much more. But unlike static stickers, online badges (like those created by Badgr) possess the ability to be personalized. And they’re not just for people - Brian Phipps has an interesting post about ‘widgets as brand pipelines,’ which can easily be applied to badges as well.

Beyond the above affiliations, badges have the capability to communicate about individuals’ relationships with products. As many long-time readers of my blog know, I have a keen interest in ‘social commerce’ sites (see a post from last December), as I have a vision where they could provide consumers with rich social context and relevancy to the purchases which they are making. The current crop of social shopping sites are experimenting with badges as a way to promote their service. StyleFeeder, Wists, Nabbr, Kaboodle, Sprout Commerce (the creators of MyPickList and FavoriteThingz), and StyleHive - just to name a few - give consumers the ability to express themselves via products in various ways. It’s a very powerful notion, especially as it introduces the notion of monetizing these badges as forms of advertising. It remains to be seen, however, if any of these services can attract significant enough consumer adoption.

Resulting from my recent exploration, there are two questions which I am currently contemplating and learning about:

1. What are the best practices for marketers to harness the power of these badges to promote services, brand, or products?
2. What are the business models for the services that enable and create these badges? Or are they just another marketing tactic for services as opposed to something to develop a business around? Are they a means to an end or an end in and of themselves?

(Via Genuine VC.)

Ten video sharing services compared - DV Guru

Ten video sharing services compared - DV Guru: ""

Surfing Video

Ok.. sometimes I get too serious and it is all work and no play. Well it has been over two months since I surfed, but I can still dream of it. Check out this video... [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFkSzJ0khgk]

How to Get in TechCrunch

How to Get in TechCrunch:

Here’s a video of Guy Kawasaki in an interview with Mike Arrington of TechCrunch.

The salient question that Mike answers is, ’How do I get my company in TechCrunch?‘ The short story is:

1. The ‘standard answer’ is to send an email to editor@techcrunch.com and take your chances. Thirty pitches come in per day this way.

2. The most effective way is to get a referral from a venture capitalist or someone ‘known’ who can speak on your behalf. Ten per come per day this way. Thirty plus ten equals forty, and he runs four stories per day, so you might think that ten percent make it. However, many of his stories are internally generated (followups, reports on what big companies do, etc.), so the actual percentage is much less.

3. The key is how good the company is, not the ‘slickness’ of the pitch. For example, an unpolished pitch for a great company will get through. Also, a great pitch for a lousy company won’t. Basically, you should assume that the bull-shiitake detector is always on.

4. Speaking of bull shiitake, specifically don’t use descriptions such as ‘revolutionary,’ ‘Web 2.0,’ ‘huge,’ ‘change the way you’ll use the Internet,’ and ‘disruptive.’ This is what Mike calls ‘cheap adjectives,’ and they are kisses of death in Michael’s eyes.

5. To describe what you do, you should provide a tangible frame of reference instead of using the usual bull shiitake. For example, one pitch that worked is 'YouTube for PowerPoint.' Many entrepreneurs are loath to mention other products and prefer cheap adjectives. This is a mistake.

6. Finally, only the first two or three sentences count. If you don’t capture him that quick, you’re hosed.

In short, you should approach TechCrunch as you would a venture capitalist except that TechCrunch doesn’t write checks, but it can get you in front of 250,000 or so people.

(Via Bona tempora volvant--by Guy Kawasaki.)

The Charles River Ventures Quickstart Calculator

The Charles River Ventures Quickstart Calculator: "

Reader Dave Lavinsky has created a nifty calculator for entrepreneurs wanting to know how their seed and subsequent rounds affect their ownership in a start-up.

He calculates the seed round on the ‘QuickStart’ formula popularized by Charles River Ventures, which we wrote about last week. CRV is writing small checks in return to start-ups in exchange for getting a discount on an investment in a company’s first round.

The calculator allows up to 5 rounds of financing and shows the equity that the management team, CRV (in this case), and other investors get. You can view the calculator here.

"

(Via VentureBeat.)

Knowing when to hold 'em

Knowing when to hold 'emis a great article by Evan Williams today... his post follows: "

Barry Diller actually said something Tuesday at Web 2.0 that was pretty good. In response to a question from an entrepreneur, apparently about whether he should sell his successful web enterprise, Barry said: 'Don't sell. The way you build equity is to hold on.'

Which got me to thinking about lots of web companies that have had 'successful exits' and wondering if maybe they shouldn't have been so hasty.

What if Flickr hadn't sold?


What if del.icio.us hadn't sold?


What if MySpace hadn't sold?


What if Blogger hadn't sold?


Apologies, again, for using Alexa graphs to demonstrate a point. But it's safe to say that all these properties have grown dramatically since their sale. If you imagine these are stock charts, you would probably conclude that the sellers would have been wise (/lucky) to hold on a little longer.

Now, that's rather simplistic, isn't it? You have to ask yourself several things before coming to such a conclusion. You have to ask, first:

How much was the acquiring company responsible for the growth following acquisition?
This is easy to conclude in the MySpace case: hardly at all. Does Fox even have the capability to bring measurable traffic to MySpace? Perhaps in the form of massive TV commercials, but that hasn't happened.

But in the other cases, obviously Yahoo! and Google have the ability to introduce these fledgling products to many millions of people. That's definitely part of the promised benefit of these deals. But does it happen?

On the Yahoo! homepage, there's a link to Yahoo's product that competes with Flickr. And on their entire site, only a few obscure mentions of Flickr are found.

Same with del.icio.us.

Perhaps they've done other things I'm not aware of, like free ad campaigns or emails or marketing dollars (but marketing dollars doesn't really count as using their distribution). I'm going to go out on a limb and say that very little of these services' growth was due to Yahoo's massive distribution power.

How about in the case of Blogger? Blogger is linked on Google's 'even more' page and, in the Google Toolbar, if you go to Options / More, you can turn on a BlogThis! button. Other than that, again, a few obscure mentions. They once ran a homepage promotion for Blogger on non-US Google sites, which had a nice impact for a few days. And the toolbar button brought in quite a few users for a brief while in 2003, when it was on by default, before they hid it. The 'even more' page does not have a significant impact.

No, Blogger has grown, for the most part, without tapping into Google's huge reach.

But the second question you have to ask is:

Have the acquirers stopped imminent doom from happening?
This isn't as obvious of a benefit of getting acquired as distribution, but it can happen. For example, if rumors are to be believed, YouTube may have melted under the pressure of lawsuits had the awesome power of Google's attorneys not come in to save the day.

For the services mentioned above, although you never know what's going on behind the scenes, but it's hard to imagine such a scenario. I'm assuming, in all cases, that these companies would have acquired reasonable funding had they not sold. (Flickr and Blogger had offers on the table, and Delicious had just raised some.) That being the case, most problems are solvable.

One of the promised benefits of going to a Yahoo! or Google is scalability. Maybe they'll save you from doing a Friendster (which probably would have been better off selling). I don't know about Flickr, but I know del.icio.us is moving, or has recently moved, to some Yahoo! infrastructure that is purportedly quite nice. (If they have moved, it wasn't very long ago.)

As for Blogger, this was definitely something we needed and looked forward to. There was no way our codebase in early 2003 would support the load of today. However, until the most recent version, which is in beta now, Blogger has run on 90% homegrown code. Not code that we came there with, but code that was written specifically for Blogger (and the same database). There just wasn't any magical Google scaling device we could port to.

Of course, we ran on Google hardware and network, took advantage of Google libraries here and there, and had great Google-recruited engineers working on it. Also, as I'm sure with all of these services (save MySpace), we had parent-company ops and security folks who may have averted a disaster or two. But these aren't the core things that tend to illicit or prevent growth.

So, this is pure speculation, but it's hard to say that any of these sites would have been taken down, or seriously hindered, were it not for getting acquired.

As long as you're asking these questions, you should probably ask:

Would they have grown even more had they not been acquired?
Who knows. But it's not beyond the realm of possibility that these sites have been hindered after acquisition by a lack of flexibility or by having fewer resources to do what they needed to do than they would have otherwise, because they had to compete for them internally instead of buying them on the open market.

Just a thought.

Am I saying these companies shouldn't have sold?
No. There are still many other things to consider. For example, if you traded one stock for another stock that grew even faster, that would still be a good deal from a financial perspective. Also, from a financial perspective, it's possible that your further funding may have diluted you more than your growth made up for.

Or, not the case for any of those mentioned above, but if you just got offered a ridiculous price, despite not having a lot of substance to your business, you might regret not taking it.

Or if you just don't want to hack it out on your own—which I know is the case for some tiny startups that have gotten acquired by Google before really getting going—that's a legitimate reason. (In the vast majority of cases, the opposite is true, and founders beat their heads against brick walls in the big company for a couple years until escaping.) Or if you're just not interested in your thing anymore and want to move on, it can be great to find a stable home for it (not that acquirers don't often kill entrepreneur's babies on a whim).

All I'm saying is that you often hear about companies that should have sold when they had the opportunity, but you rarely hear about companies that shouldn't have.

And that Barry Diller has a point: Sometimes you should hold on.

Addendum! Kevin Fox writes in with several excellent points, not all of which I had thought about, but all of which I agree with. From Kevin:

An additional aspect that's important to consider is to what degree predicted performance is built in to the offer price. Even if Alexa traffic charts were accurate measures of traffic over time, they alone tell us nothing about the estimated future traffic at various points along the way. Thinking about Web 2.0 timing is much more like buying and selling tech stocks than it is trading commodities.

Take any significant Web 2.0 acquisition and try to estimate what the annual growth would have to be for the price paid to be a fair price. How much will Myspace have to grow to pay back Fox for its half-billion dollar bill? While P/E and PEG ratios are part of the standard vocabulary when valuing stocks, their equivalent (most 2.0 acquisitions are still in the red, rendering these numbers undefined) is just as important as their current web footprint.

Finally, hindsight usually favors waiting since people forget about the companies that didn't sell when their growth estimates were higher than their actual outcome. Just like mutual fund companies that start dozens of funds a year and only keep the ones that perform well, the persistence of memory (or lack thereof) is a confounding factor. There will always be success stories, and there will always be failures. I would guess (and you would have more experience than I in this) the ability to hedge your bet and cash out weighs heavily on the minds of founders of promising companies with negative cashflow.

Of course, another factor is often a founder's desire to be an eternal entrepreneur. There comes a point when you want to do something new, whether it's changing to a different project at your new parent company or leaving to start the adventure all over again.

This is an attitude I admire. ;-)

Right on. So, in conclusion: You never know.

"

(Via evhead.)

Talk with Guy Kawasaki today

Talk with Guy Kawasaki today: "

Michael Arrington took a break from the Web 2.0 Summit this afternoon and went down to Microsoft Silicon Valley HQ to meet with Guy Kawasaki. He is an incredibly charismatic guy. They spoke for about an hour about startups and blogging. The video is here. TechMeme buzz is here.

"

(Via CrunchNotes.)

Beth's Blog

Beth's Blog has a create series of stories about the state of widgets online. Definitely worth checking out if you are new to the whole widget thingy.

Wet T-Shirt World Cup

Wet T-Shirt World Cup: ""

Something probably not appropriate for the office, but an amazing example of what can be done with time and creativity.

So little time

From Adam Justo's blog:

"I’m reminded of how difficult it is to create something that people want to use while simultaneously making a profit from it.

It’s easy to create something that people want, whether it’s a product or service. The question is, are people willing to pay, and, if so, how much? If they’re not willing to pay, can you translate the bodies/eyeballs into a workable business via advertising revenue? If you can, how much work will it take to make that process happen, both in terms of finding the advertisers and figuring out how to make their advertising pay dividends so that they continue to want to be associated with you?

In many startups, especially Internet startups, the first step is in building the offering. If it’s good enough to attract attention, you then have to convert some of that attention to actual money. And while you’re trying to get to a healthy monetization level, you still need to provide all the things you provided to begin with that brought you the visitors/customers in the first place. And you have to do this double work with the same staff you had when you were doing half the work, which already seemed like more than twice the work that most humans could reasonably handle.

Even more difficult, if your business has ramped up to a decent level but not home-run territory, and the money’s starting to run low, you may have to shift gears to monetization before you’d like to, thus forcing you to somewhat take your eye off the ball in terms of providing the service or product that brings you customers in the first place.

It’s no wonder that sometimes the details get lost in the shuffle, or that as a business owner you simply have to choose what is the most important thing that needs to get done at a particular time, and live with the fact that there is something else that needs attention but will not be getting it at the moment.

And yet everyone wants to be an entrepreneur these days."

The Art of the Executive Summary

So what happens when you start one company and stumble into an entirely new opportunity that in some ways is many times larger than your original concept. Well, you build on what you have already done and be agile enough to realize a new opportunity. We are still very much focusing on launching chipin.com and have a product roadmap to enhance the system once it is launched for our core client base. But in order to raise the VC level Series A we need, we have to show why we are the next big disruptive business. Well, Netvocate is going to bit it.

So I am now reworking our preso, exec summary and bplan. Of course to keep things in perspective, I had a quick look at Guy's short article on what should be included. I have found there is no such thing as a template, but by looking at several resources it helps create a check list of what I want to include.The Art of the Executive Summary: ""

Also... blogging for change!

A simple post about leadership

A simple post about leadership: "

I'm reminded -- and I need to remind myself -- that leadership is made up of many things.' One component that I want to emphasize today is simplicity. Leadership is about making things simple. The world is a complex thing. In fact, the fourth law of business is that businesses tend to complexity.' The leader of a business must fight this complexity -- and communicate simplicity to the world, to customers, and to employees.'

"

The woeful story of Friendster, and lessons

The woeful story of Friendster, and lessons: "

Gary Rivlin, of the New York Times, has just written the best overview yet of the terrific bungle of social networking company, Friendster.

Jonathan Abrams, founder of Friendster, had a great initial vision, and sparked the social networking revolution by allowing friends to hook up with others. The company had an amazing lead, and potential.

But when he took money from high-profile venture capitalists, he paid a high price: These mostly ‘50-year-old white guys’ had their own ideas about how to run the company, and they got more heavy-handed when they realized how much Abrams was ‘over his head.’ In short, everyone was a fault, and it is a great lesson for entrepreneurs.

Here is the tragedy: Had one coherent vision won out, either Abrams’ initial vision for the more ‘closed’ version limiting people to communicate with profiles of their friends, or the more open model adopted by MySpace, the company may have succeeded. Had it forcefully implemented the ‘closed’ version, with conviction, it would have learned, like Facebook did, that gradual opening to others made sense. It could have evolved as it learned. Instead, it seems, the company was mired in indecision. Each executive change (happening every six months to a year) meant a new strategy, a change of course. And once Abrams was out — however arrogant he may have been — so was Friendster’s soul.

Aside from caution, the story also offers hope: If you’ve got a good idea and vision, you can succeed against a seeming formidable competitor that has all the money and best minds at its disposable.

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(Via VentureBeat.)

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