I just found Russ Beattie's blog post where he talks about shutting down his company Mowser.
The post is a really mature analysis of his situation and reminds of when I left the first company that I started. I'm not an expert on his space, or on his company but I have been in his shoes before staring into the abyss.
Russ - best of luck in the future. I hope you'll find that the experience has made you strong and that you do try again someday.
I haven't been posting much lately. A lot of that is related to busyness at work. The two seem to be inversely related.
It is interesting to me this whole meme about blogging can kill you from the NY Times. It made clear to me the very big gulf between professional bloggers and those of us like me who are just messing around with it. If I was a pro-blogger and very busy then you would see my posting volume increase.
I don't think that you have to make the majority of your income from blogging in order to be a pro-blogger like Mike Arrington or Robert Scoble but certainly those who do blog regularly - Fred Wilson, Brad Feld etc. have an economic interest in doing so and put a lot of time/energy into their blogs.
It became clear to me about the time that Aggregate Knowledge really started to take off that I would have to make a choice about how much to blog. Spend time blogging or spend time making the business grow. In my case, the two aren't mutually compatible. Me blogging and participating in the conversation going on in the blogosphere isn't going to move my business forward that much. So I don't do it that often.
I sometimes think about the people who blog a lot the same way that I think about people who go to a lot of conferences. Don't you have a day job you should be doing?
My friend Kevin did a session at SXSW on Breakup 2.0.
http://www.cnettv.com/9742-1_53-32479.html
Unfortunately CNet won't let me embed the video on my blog. :(
This year Courtney and I headed out to China to visit my parents again. We go back every few years and I'm always struck by the amazing amount of progress and change that greets us. The pace of change in China is like that on the Internet but in the physical world.
3 years ago when we were in Guangzhou (located about 3h from Hong Kong) we flew through what would be considered a pretty typical airport in the US, this year as we flew a brand new
Since the last time we were in Hong Kong in December of 2006 a brand new Ferry terminal awaited us and the race was on between Shanghai and Hong Kong for the world's tallest building (neither city will disclose the height of their buildings yet).
Change and modernity are viewed as not only positive but as necessities. Growth is taken for granted in a way that it is not in other parts of the worlds including North America. As much as the US might have been the home of capitalism once that mantle has been taken up by China now.
China is willing to prioritize for growth and doesn't think twice about it. For example, think about all the rules and regulations that govern what can be built here in the US. How often does the skyline change in our cities? I have lived in San Francisco for 7 years now and with few exceptions there has not been a large amount of change in our skyline. Yes, there's a new building going up by the Bay Bridge but it is the exception that proves the rule - it's one building in 7 years and it has taken a long time to get done. There are an incredible amount of rules designed to keep things as they are instead of allowing htem to grow.
China also has access to a labor pool that is rapidly becoming more skilled and higher value. In contrast, the US is wracked with indecision on what to do about immigration. In my mind the answer is clear. We must enable a young dynamic workforce in the US. Many from Central & South America who are looking for better lives need to be allowed freer access to our markets to help build the economy. Failing to do this means that China will have an important lever for growth that we lack. It won't catch the US now but in another 20 years it could be a devastating difference.
This amount of change is driven by a fearlessness in the culture. In many ways it is easy for them to be courageous because they have little to lose and the alternative to continued growth is terrible and immediately obvious. We in North America have much to lose and so it is easy try and maintain the status quo. You can see these attempts in everything from our zoning policies, to what we subsidise, to who we do and don't let in the country.
Ironically it is these attempts to maintain it that will slowly but surely erode it.
I thought that this company reviewed by Duncan Riley on TechCrunch was a joke but evidently not...
From the Digital Telepathy website:
"The Design Products take you from concept to fully-functional online business in only 90 days."
"You bring the great idea and give us a few weeks of your time. We'll bring our veteran team and our proven process. We'll then head into the kitchen and mix up a "Biz In A Box" that'll be ripe for the market."
The most bizarre thing is that Duncan (who should know better) makes the following statement:
Prices range from $15,000 through to $250,000, although each project is calculated on a per startup basis. It may sound like a lot of money, but it’s a lot of service for your buck, and it is competitive.
It seems a little ludicrous to me that some company is going to go figure out your business model for you if only you have a great idea. If it only was so easy to have a "Biz in a Box"!
Ok so everyone knows about the news that Microsoft paid $240 M for 1.6% of Facebook. Terrence Russel at Wired thinks it was a good deal and I do too but for different reasons.
I did a little checking on Google Finance and there's something interesting that happens. Once the Microsoft / Facebook rumor gets out and is judged to be serious the stock jumps 1%. It then jumps another 1% in after hours trading when the announcement is confirmed. On a market cap of about $290B that means that MSFT was valued at an additional $ 6B after the deal.
I'll admit I'm not an expert on the market but it sounds like turning $240M into $6B is a good move.
My friend Nova Spivak's company Radar Networks is coming out of stealth mode! They are launching Twine.com which is a consumer facing semantic web site.
I'm very curious to actually get to play with it as I've heard about it for a while now but he's been keeping the details very secret.
Some more details by Martin LaMonica, Nick Carr, Download Squad, Wired and ZDnet.
I won't be at the Web 2.0 Conference Summit this year.
It's not because there's a bubble on as the NY Times thinks or because the Web 2.0 phenomena has jumped the shark as Om Malik suggests or even because my friend Nova is now calling for Web 3.0.
The main reason I'm skipping it this year is because I'm busy. Really really busy.
It's hard for me to justify 2 days to go to a conference to hang out with friends and have interesting conversations.
Not as hard for me to justify going out drinking and hang out with people AFTER the conference though!
I came across a great post by Dave McClure about how the process through which you get to a signed termsheet is way too complex and I TOTALLY AGREE. His comments about VCs and lawyers needing to innovate and remove the reams of paper and make the terms simpler to understand are spot on. I wish that it would happen but I think that there are huge barriers.
The big problem is that the alignment of interests is really off. The level of complexity advantages both the VCs and the lawyers.
Dave talks about how VCs are advantaged over entrepreneurs because they do these transactions all the time while entrepreneurs only go through the process only once every 5-10 years.
The piece he didn't talk about is that lawyers are incented because they get paid hourly to make things complicated. They are also incented even when capped to show how good a job they do by generating reams of paper.
The stack of paper - It's impressive. You feel more justified paying your bill. Too bad its not useful.
My good friend Dave Schorr just sold his company Weather Bonk to the Weather Channel. It's a perfect fit.
Weather Bonk began as a labor of love for Dave. He wanted to create a way for his wife Michelle to see where the fog line in San Francisco was before she went running. Over the years he kept doing more and more with it until it moved from being a labor of love to a full on obsession.
It's great to see him part of a larger organization that can help support his dreams of extending and improving the site!
Interesting - I'm back to being #1 when you search for Chris Law on Google. I was blogging before about how that had changed. Maybe I'm just more popularly clicked on when
Ethan Stock was noticing something similar around this phenomena as well.
This has had the unfortunate effect of knocking me down from being the first result when you search for "Chris Law" to the fifth. Must stay on first page!!!
I admit that I have a weakness in that I check what people are saying about Aggregate Knowledge on Technorati on a fairly regular basis. Usually things are pretty quiet since most our customers are large media or retail companies that don't really blog about their experiences with us, but we do get spikes when we do conferences like SuperNova. We participated in the Connected Innovators session with 12 other companies (one of them fake). Here's a round up by Rafe Needleman and another by Sean Ammirati.
This is my long winded way of getting to a post by Jennifer Woodard Maderazo about the conference. In general her tone is pretty negative and she seems skeptical in general of what's going on. Who can blame her? The Web 2.0 hype machine has been going full blast for two years now. I can't say I disagree a lot with some of her observations.
The piece of her post that I do want to pick on though is a refrain that I have heard from not only her but from many VCs and other industry pundits. You're a feature not a company. You're just going to get acquired. Here's a couple of paragraphs from her post:
The panel, which included Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital, entrepreneur Julie Hanna Farris, and entrepreneur and blogger Paul Kedrosky
seemed to agree with my take, saying that the applications presented were “FNAC” — “features not a company” — likely to fall short of transforming the way people do things and destined to be “merely acquired” by some giant like Google.
I can’t help but think that most of the entrepreneurs in the room would be fine with that. The mass acquisitions of late seem to be fomenting not creativity but a drive to create what’s most likely to get bought.
When you're an entrepreneur you get this a lot from people. In fact, assuming that your idea passes the sniff test of having a decent market and being executable, the most likely criticism you'll get is that you're just a feature and that you'll get acquired.
Most of the time this criticism is right.
Most companies fail, some few get bought and a very very few will make it and become great companies that transform the way people do things.
The problem with using that generalization comes when you're evaluating individual companies - you'll always miss the great ones if you assume if you apply too tight a filter.
There definitely were companies on that SuperNova stage that are aspiring to change the way that people do things. Companies that won't necessarily be thrilled to get bought. Not all of them will make it but I do salute all the other entrepreneurs for taking a shot at it. Most will fail, some few will get bought and maybe one or two of us will go on to really change the world.
One last thought - I think that all the companies up on stage were less than two years old. Would anyone have predicted that Google would be where it is now back in 1999 when they were a two year old? Weren't they just a feature that would be acquired?
Yikes - it has been tough to get enough time to blog about this stuff! First post about Starting Aggregate Knowledge is here. I'm going to try and tag all my startup posts with startak.
Along with doing your homework I'd say that another important facet of starting a company is doing it in the right environment.
Paul and I had the good fortune to meet up with the folks from NetService Ventures. We had a memorable first meeting with Ethan and even though I thought he was crazy, we hit it off with them. They have a little office at the corner of Sand Hill Road and Santa Cruz where they managed to cram in a bunch of interesting startup people. They have a great consulting business that pays the bills and they also find interesting small companies to put money into. They currently have 3 venture funded companies that have come out of this little "incubator": Aggregate Knowledge, 3Jam and Zvents.
It definitely felt like we were a garage startup. We squatted in whatever conference room was free at the time and had to move whenever someone needed it. Highlights included trying to do conference calls and having Hiroshi fax things through the same at the same time. The conditions weren't exactly what you'd find in a well running office!
There were a few advantages to hanging out there a few days a week though.
It may not be the case for everyone, but I definitely appreciated having a spot where we could meet regularly that was not our homes. Getting into a regular rhythm for me helped me be very disciplined about getting things done and feeling accountable for making real progress on figuring out the business.
Of course the most important part of our NSV experience was hanging out with great people. It's a cliche because it is true but hanging out with great people elevates your thinking. The fact that the NSV folks are terrific thinkers who would challenge assumptions and occasionally call us idiots (thanks Rich!) is really important in evolving the thinking. It lets you iterate through ideas and discard ones that don't pass the smell test quickly.
Another important factor was having other entrepreneurs like Tyler & Ethan from Zvents and Andy from 3Jam who were going through the startup grind. For example - the fact that Zvents was six months older than us allowed us to observe what was working well and not well for them firsthand. It gave us insights into everything from the funding environment to the mindset of customers, to the hiring environment. I'd like to think that we contributed a little thinking to them along the way as well.
I'm always a little wistful when I think about that time - it was crazy and I was vastly underpaid, the ups and downs were totally nutty but I have to say it was a ton of fun. I wouldn't trade that experience for anything right now.
Bill Gates' Harvard commencement speech is a great read and reminds me of the responsibility that people who are fortunate have towards those who are not. I've linked to the full transcript which is available here because as of this blog post Google's search results are miserable for the phrase "bill gates harvard commencement speech"
