Quote of the Week

Jul 10, 2009 in Entrepreneurship, Quotes, Startups

0

"The idea that you cannot build an important tech company outside of Silicon Valley is 'a crock of shit'."

Fred Wilson

Quote of the Week

Jul 03, 2009 in Business, Quotes

1

"The rich keep getting richer because they keep doing whatever it was that made them rich. Ditto for the poor."

Neal Boortz

Quote of the Week

Jun 26, 2009 in Entrepreneurship, Quotes, Venture Capital

0

"Build a company for the long term. Control your own destiny."

Justin Fishner-Wolfson

In his presentation Term Sheets 101 below.

The Liquidity Event Proceeds Calculator, developed as a joint project between the Atlanta Technology Development Center and Siavage Law Group, is a nice tool to figure out the affect a funding round might have on your particular situation.

Quote of the Week

Jun 18, 2009 in Quotes

4

"'Social networks' may be a popular buzzword these days, but the whole concept of the internet was based on social networking from the start -- going all the way back to bulletin boards, email, and forums right up to today's blogs, social networking sites, and, yes, Twitter. As far back as 1978, bulletin board systems were essentially doing the same thing that modern networks are doing. The big difference now is that the usability and usefulness of the newer networks are infinitely better."

Jason Clark

I made my way to Jason's article via an eMarketer piece called "Time to Write Twitter's Tombstone?"  I don't think that's the case.  I do think that social networks are fashion.   They come and they go.  Jason believes that Google Wave will make Twitter obsolete.  Perhaps.  I like the concept of Wave a lot.  Keith McGreggor and I came up with a concept very much like Wave.  We called it The Greatest App Never Built.  Here's the pitch:

The Greatest App Never Built will solve the information overload problem of all your Internet communications. It will take your email accounts, RSS feeds, social networking communications into a simple interface and then sematically sort them not based on date or read/unread status but by how much attention they deserve based on your past behavior.

Still a good idea.

But back to my point.  Social networks are fashion.  People tire of them.  They are too hard to manage.  All the marketers come in.  They get spammy.  It is easier to move on to the next thing instead of scrubbing all the stuff within a particular network. And just leave it there.  An artifact of a bygone era.  Social networks have no staying power.

There is something else that is going on as well.  Something that Jason confused a bit.  Below is Jason's history of social networking graph.

There is a difference between the application layer of the Internet protocol suite and an Internet application.  Usenet (NNTP), Email (POP3, SMTP & IMAP), and Internet relay chat (IRC) are part of the core Internet application protocol suite.  Therefore they have tremendous staying power.  All of the social networks that have emerged since 2000 are not part of the core Internet application protocol suite.  All these social networks applications are built within the HTTP Internet protocol.  The social network applications are not as fundamental as the earlier Internet protocol suite applications.  Take another look at the chart.

Internet protocol suite applications are like underwear.  Have not changed much since the 1980s.  Social networks are like fashion.  They change every few years.

Quote of the Week

Jun 12, 2009 in Quotes

0

"The cheaper you can live, the greater your options."

Mark Cuban

In a blog post entitled "Success and Motivation 2009."  He wrote in the context of people.  It applies to companies as well.

Quote of the Week

Jun 05, 2009 in Quotes

0

To Quote or Not to Quote

Jun 03, 2009 in Customer Focus, Fun, Personal, Presentations, Quotes

0

That is the question. 

One of the mainstay features on FoG over the past two years has been the "quote of the week".  It is a post that appears every Friday at noon (I tried 3:14 for a period, but noon works better).  It started as a throwaway, something to get a quick and easy article up at the end of the week.  Quotes are easy to find if you are looking for them. 

It has evolved into a pretty popular series.  One of the quote of the week posts generated more comments than any other article in the history of FoG.  Heck I even used the quotes to create a presentation called "Startups in 12 Quotes" that generated over 2,700 views, 18 favs, and 9 embeds on slideshare.

But with the break from FoG I have also been thinking if I wanted to continue with the quote of the week feature.  But instead of deciding by myself in some misguided self-absorbed vacuum, I thought I would ask the audience via a poll.

Please take a moment to take the poll. And comments beyond the poll are of course welcome.

Quote of the Week

Apr 17, 2009 in Quotes

0

"...spend the majority of your time getting to know your early users."

Sean Ellis

In this insightful article entitled "Indifference is Your Real Competitor".

I just stumbled upon the Startup Marketing Blog this week.  It so loaded with excellent content that it immediately made its way to my blog roll sidebar.  Sean coined a term that captures something that I have always believed and practiced, "metrics driven customer development."  Marketing is much more about math and metrics than creativity.    I am a big believer in metrics driven marketing.  Basically applying measurement to every facet of marketing in the same way you would sales or operations. 

But more to the point of the quote, I can not tell you how many times I have asked an entrepreneur what a customer or potential customer thinks about their product offering only to receive back a blank stare. 

Launch something, get somebody to use it, and engage them to improve until you have something that a lot of people want.

Quote of the Week

Apr 10, 2009 in Quotes

0

"Technology is changing the whole fabric of social interaction. We're absorbing our machines in a symbiotic way, evolving to become one with our own devices, and that's going to continue indefinitely."

James Cameron

In the current issue of WIRED where he discusses the Terminator series and his predictions of machines in our future.  T4 is coming out in May.  I am eager to see Christian Bale play the role of John Conner.

Quote of the Week

Mar 26, 2009 in Quotes

3

"The more options for entrepreneurs, the better."

Brad Feld

In this article discussing Spark Capital's (coolest VC home page yet) new seed investment program, Start@Spark.

The program is setup to provide seed stage investments to Boston and New York based companies in sectors that fit Spark's profile.  The standard Start@Spark investment will take the form of convertible debt up to $250,000 at a 20% discount to the follow on round. Spark retains the right to at least provide 50% of the financing of the next round.  What Spark has created is an outward manifestation of what I have been hearing.  Even though times may be bad at the moment, venture capitlist firms have a deep need to fill their pipelines with seed stage companies so that they have expansion stage companies down the road.

Start@Spark does not consider itself to be competitive with concept/pre-seed focused startup accelerator funds such as Y Combinator or TechStars (Start@Spark is seed stage).  And there is a slew of accelerator firms sprouting up this spring including Capital Factory, DreamIT, LaunchBox (in its second year), TechStars Boston, and Shotput Ventures.

From an entrepreneurs perspective I agree 100% wtih Brad's perspective.  But from an investor's point of view the story is quite different.  Assuming that each of these new funds is looking to bring in a class of ten with an average funding size of $20,000 all of a sudden you have $1,000,000 being invested in 50 concept stage startups on top of what LaunchBox, TechStars, and YC (with it's recent $2 million investment from Sequoia Capital) are already doing.  That's a lot of startup concepts being funded.  Regardless of where an accelerator fund happens to be based I tend to agree with Paul Graham, the founder of YC, these accelerator funds are all drawing from the same national applicant pool.  They are going to have a quality supply problem.  Which is not to say that they will be unsuccessful, they just need to fight to obtain raw materials, which in this case is intelligent and driven teams.

It's a good time to be an entrepreneur.