TIL: Most Startups Are Actually Multiple Businesses

by on December 20, 2011 in Wisdom

When startups are really multiple businesses

So many times I’ve encountered fresh startup ideas from entrepreneurial types that incorporate multiple businesses in their pitch.  Most people don’t even realize that that’s what they’re trying to do. They just combine ideas, trying to find something that will be unique, or will save them money, but it ends up being more than can be reasonably handled.

Not a revolutionary thought, but something most non-MBAs might not be familiar with (I certainly wasn’t). And it further strengthens the case for getting at least another co-founder on board with a different set of skills than yours. Write code? Wonderful. Get a designer to complement you. And if you can get someone with hardcore marketing chops, you’ll do awesome.

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Is The Startup Community Ageist?

by on December 20, 2011 in Opinion

Interesting article on the apparent ageism in the startup community. If you were to go by what the media says, all startup founders are young, hip, and likely to model for Gap. The author, Daniel Markham, hypothesizes that it is a matter of risk:

If you’re 20-ish, you can take on a lot more risk than if you are 40. Venture Capitalists can hire on a hundred startup founders for pennies, they work like dogs, and at the end of the day you get a few winners which makes the numbers work.

and commitments:

There’s also the standard answer that people have more commitments as they get older. A spouse, a mortgage, children, student loans — life quickly throws you all kinds of things that you don’t have the option of escaping. When you’re 22 you might live on 500 bucks a month. When you’re 32 your bare minimum salary could easily be five times that.

I’ll agree on both counts, even though I won’t buy into the bias against older people in the startup world. Being young, you probably have much more energy, far fewer commitments, and a greater penchant for risks than someone tugging along a wife, two kids, and a $250,000 mortgage. But at the same time, you have much less experience and your understanding of the problems in an industry is likely to be more shallow than someone who has spent 20 years working the same beat. Which is probably the reason why you don’t see a lot of 20-somethings running enterprise startups.

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Skyword Soars With $6M in Funding

by on December 19, 2011 in Funding News

3928200642_4fb3dda462_m Skyword, a Boston, MA based content production and distribution company has taken flight with a $6M funding round, led by the Cox Media Group.

Think of Skyword as a ‘distributed Demand Media. Much has been written about Demand Media content production strategy which enables the company to churn out thousands of new articles each month on subjects as varied as health and Manga on its network of websites by leveraging the power of freelancers spread across the globe. The Demand Media approach is based on crafting content based on search queries – as best exemplified at eHow and LiveStrong.

Skyword essentially applies the same approach and lets different brands tap into its network of freelancers and search query/keyword research data to create content that drives traffic through search engines.

This approach has its fair share of detractors, and I’m one of them (in fact, ‘detractors’ would probably be too soft a word to describe my feelings towards it). The end product of such an approach often tilts towards ‘spam’ – as any visitors to eHow will attest – and is designed to drive pageviews, not engagement or influence. Internet marketers – those dreaded spammers who throng the ‘Make Money’ forums – use the same approach, albeit at a smaller scale. Skyword is just ‘corporatizing’ it.

As an aside, this funding round was facilitated by Progress Partners – one of the more rare occurrences where I’ve seen a funding advisor actually succeed at landing a large investment.

Via FinSMEs

Image Credit: X-Ray Delta One

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“Nothing Works Better Than Just Improving Your Product” – Joel Spollsky

by on December 19, 2011 in Wisdom

tumblr_lveeyh1bRO1qz6pqio1_500 Via: StartupQuote.com

Context:

Joel Spollsky Interview at “Founders at Work”

The one thing we learned over 5 years is that nothing works better than just improving your product. Every minute, every developer hour we spent on any one of these crazy things—although they had some marginal return on the work that we put into them—was nothing compared to just making a better version of the product and releasing it. If we had taken all the effort we put into these crazy schemes and put it into moving our software development schedule ahead by the equivalent amount, it would have paid off much more.

An in-depth, very education interview with Joel Spollsky who ran his company, Fog Creek Software, through the dark and turbulent post-bubble days in 2000 to profitability without taking a penny in outside investment. That Fog Creek has been a massive hit would be an understatement; besides its core products such as Trello, WebPutty, FogBugz, etc., it is also the publisher behind the perennially popular StackExchange.

There are more than a few things you can learn from Joel. Treating programmers like rockstars isn’t the only one of them.

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The Beginning of the End for RIM

by on December 19, 2011 in Opinion

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Years later, I bet RIM’s saga will make for a fascinating HBS case study. How a once-mighty smartphone manufacturer failed to see the writing on the wall and tanked like a coughing manatee in the face of a fastidious Apple and a surging Android is a story for all ages.

Asymco’s Horace Dediu has some insight in the parable of RIM. Over the space of a few hundred words, he offers what can possibly be the most damning denouncement for any company and management team:

Stepping back, the biggest surprise is that the company seems to have had no plan for sustaining itself.

To understand, turn the clock back by a few years, say, back to 2005.

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One More Reason to Not Be a Dominating CEO: Mike Suster Will Hate Your Guts

by on December 19, 2011 in Wisdom

donald_trump Ah, the dominating, arrogant, self-obsessed aholes of the world, you get no respite, do you?

Your self-entitled, pompous, domineering self was unfit for a 9 to 5 job, so you hitched a ride on the startup train, seeing how it was apparently overrun by the egotists of the world.

And now you hear from 2x entrepreneur, prominent VC, and largely a Person-Who-is-Right, Mark Suster, that you probably should let your team talk a little too. What a bummer.

What occasionally happens is the CEO introduces his team giving a brief overview of who everybody is. I hate this. I want to hear everybody speak – to get to know the team. What purpose could there be to having the CEO talk on behalf of everybody?

Another thought you can put squarely in the ‘makes sense’ category. There is no other reason why you would want lug around a bunch of team members to a VC meeting if you didn’t intend for them to speak at all. And “Straight from the horse’s mouth” always sounds better than “Shot from the Jockey’s lips” (whatever that might mean).

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Siri for TV Might be Seriously Annoying

by on December 19, 2011 in Opinion

Cue the ‘Why so Siri-us’ jokes.

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The rumors of Apple launching an all out assault on Samsung and Sony’s home front with a new Apple TV refuse to die down, with the WSJ reporting that Apple execs have been in long discussions with media executives over the future of television. This comes after the entire blogosphere has already dipped its ink in the rumors, dubbing an Apple TV as the next logical step in the company’s all conquering agenda of disrupting every industry in the world. It already has the hardware, the technology, and most importantly, the sheer balls to take on the world’s TV manufacturers after hits that include every product on your Christmas wishlist.

Then the Gizmodo weighed in today that the Siri might actually be a beta-technology meant for much, much bigger uses.

At present, Apple is collecting millions of queries, testing its technology on thousands of accentsand dealing with all manner of crazy requests. Take all that data, and it puts Apple in a perfect position from which to develop a voice recognition system to beat them all.

In effect: with the Apple TV and prospective future products, you could very soon be talking to your TV instead of getting a finger workout on the remote, courtesy of Siri’s wonderful voice-recognition technology.

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Funding News in Rhyme: Profitero Raises €750K From Bank of Ireland

by on December 19, 2011 in Funding News

profitero_logo_web

Funding news can get terribly boring to write about. But it’s an essential part of writing about startups. To make things a little interesting, here’s a funding report in the heroic couplet.

All startup things are subject to raise

Initial rounds of funding, subject to praise

Profitero’s at it too with a round 750k in size

Based out of Ireland – Dublin to be precise

(The figure’s in Euros, lest you construe

This reporting misleading, this rhyme abused)

And yonder over the tubes you hear those rattling cries

‘What does the company do, was the investment wise?’

“Pricing intelligence for retailers, and spot new opportunities too”,

Said Vol Pigrukh of Profitero, “That’s mostly what we do!”

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“Write the Site You Want to Read”– Dan Frommer on Being a Better Blogger

by on December 17, 2011 in Opinion, Wisdom

dan-looking-like-zach-galifinakis

Dan Frommer just about sums up the kind of tech blogger I would like to eventually evolve into (and I’m still evolving, by the way). Perhaps I was living under a rock (I wasn’t), but I wasn’t aware of SplatF’s existence until two weeks ago. I have no excuses to offer other than my own ignorance.

I’ve been digging through the SplatF archives over the past two weeks, and while there are more than a few gems I would like to link to and talk about here, this one – on being a better blogger – stands out, mostly because I’m slow and it’s in list form, and because it contains my quote of the week: “Write the site you want to read”.

Frommer’s list doesn’t offer anything you didn’t already know about being a good blogger, but it doesn’t offer anything you should not know about being a better blogger either.

1. Above all else, factual accuracy and attention to detail. That’s the easiest and best way to build and maintain trust over the long-term. If a fact is wrong, fix it and don’t be shy about it. If an opinion or prediction is wrong, learn from it and consider explaining how you got it wrong.

This is probably the right approach, lest the neckbeard trolls desecrate your 2,000 word blog post with links to Wikipedia and ‘learn to read, asshole’ in the comments.

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Design is Horseshit…Not

by on December 17, 2011 in Opinion

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Yongfook gets a lot of things right, a few things wrong when he politely proclaims in this post that design is horseshit.

This talk of designers as the new kings of startups is becoming increasingly overblown. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. Design is merely the barrier to entry to your product not getting lost in the primordial soup of startups. It is simply your ticket to a seat at the table of possible contenders.

In a nutshell,

No more pretty, shitty startups.

That’s a manifesto I can get behind. From this perch, I’ve seen more than my share of shitty startups that look prettier than Scarlett Johansson’s behind but are more useless than Paris Hilton in a physics lab.

But to dismiss design entirely as horseshit is pushing a point a little bit too far.

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