Happy birthday, Facebook! I’ve been an user and fan since its 2004 founding year. It was also the year I entered UC Berkeley as a freshman. Now that I think of it, part of my college experience has basically been defined by Facebook. I was talking about this to my friend the other day, and we can’t really imagine what college would be like without Facebook. It’s been a total of 5 years and as you can see in retrospect, a lot of changes have been made. When I joined, there were about 15 or so college networks. Now they have more than 150 million active users. Amazing.
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Since my previous post, it looks like things are buzzing along for Iminlikewithyou, a young YCombinator startup. The NYC-based company has hired Dan Porter as its new CEO. They plan to continue their strategy of pumping out addicting casual games, which has seemed to work so far. However, the new CEO’s main challenge will be bring in revenue for the company.

Porter last worked at Virgin, where he was SVP of Corporate Development, leading the company’s venture investments and starting new companies. Before that, he worked for BMG Direct, part of the Bertelsmann conglomerate, and worked at startups — for instance, he sold TicketWeb to Ticketmaster-Citysearch for $35.2 million in 2000.

It isn’t uncommon for younger startups to hire more experienced people for some “adult supervision.” The previous CEO was its 28-year old founder, Charles Foreman. What will the VCs be thinking with a bunch of 20 year-old’s running around with their $1.5 million? Joking aside, Porter will take responsibility in operations, hiring, and raising money.

Interesting fact: Porter worked as Vice President and President for Teach For America from 1990 (founding date) to 1994.

It’s common saying in the Valley that your idea will fail and constant production iterations are inevitable. However, when taking a quick glance around, all we talk about are the instant successes. Facebook seemed to have taken off from the getgo. Twitter was always about status updates. And Google was web search from day one. Sure, business plans are still in the works (I’ll save that for another post), but the killer feature seemed to have been there from the beginning. This is awesome, yet, at the same time, depressing for the many entrepreneurs who are still out there grinding day in and day out.

While the media likes to highlight the home-runs, there are plenty of startups running the marathon one leg at a time. So, I decided to take a look around at some startups that morphed since its beginnings and are making good progress forward.

Iminlikewithyou.com is an interesting website that gives you casual flash games. The idea started as a flirting/dating site with twist. Originally, users would bid on each other, in attempts to woo the opposite sex. Since then, the founders have refocused the site on casual gaming. My favorite is “Blockles,” where is basically Tetris with items. Frankly, I have wasted hours of my life playing this addicting game. In a nice way, you can still find the original social features still present on the site. You can friend, chat, and connect with people on the site.

Iminlikewithyou has raised at least $1.5 since its founding. While the website is still relatively unknown compared to the other big players, it’s making progress. Surprisingly, my “mainstream” friends discovered the site before I did, and it’s definitely got me as an user.

Chegg is a online textbook rentals company. Never being a textbook kind of a guy (whatever that means), I’ll have to admit I’m not a user of the website. Originally, the site started as an online classified for colleges. In other words, college craigslist. I have been following this site because I started out with the same idea in college. What was especially hard was reaching critical mass within a college. A large public university has about 20k undergraduates, and you would need a big portion of that community for the website to be meaningful.

Now as a textbook rentals company, it’s claimed to have save students $19k (as of Feb 2, 2009). Since its founding in 2003, the site has raised $27M and the co-founder is still there. Again, like many other startups, there’s still work to be done, but I’m excited about its future. I hope the idea works out. I hated paying for all those textbooks.

While the huge success stories are inspirational, chances are you won’t get a home-run right away. Remember that there are tons of other companies out there that are more like you.

As of right now, every search result on Google is marked as malware. Upon clicking through the results, you will land on a malware warning page, similar to the image shown above. You get a big notice, stating “Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer.” I can’t remember the last time Google was this broken.

Not sure what caused this, but some engineers better be on call. Anyone working on an early Saturday morning?

Update: After about 30 minutes, it’s been fixed. It was fun using Yahoo! again, brought back some good ol’ memories.

Divvyshot founder, Sam, is looking for a co-founder to join his startup, a new type of photo sharing website. The company is in the current winter session of the YCombinator program, which spans from now until April. Apparently, the deal is that his current co-founder, John, has a full-time job (founder of ipodrip.com) and will be going back to school in the fall. The startup currently operates out of the “Hacker House” in Palo Alto, currently the home of 3 YC startups and the creator of ShoveBox. (I actually want to visit that place one day.)

Here is a sneak peak from their product:

From what I can tell, the product they are making allows you to easily sync up your photos from the cloud to your client. In other words, it looks like Dropbox but for photos. I haven’t been able to try out the product, but I think it would be something I find extremely useful. Sharing photos with friends or family is one of my biggest hassles. For example, after a family reunion, people always say they will burn a DVD copy, but never do. Sure, you can upload to Flickr or Facebook, but their automatic resizing of images does not do the photos justice.

From the job post, you would need to be familiar with “at least two and proficient in at least one of the following: Objective C/Cocoa, Python/Django, Javascript/jQuery, VB Studio/C#.” However, it looks like the potential candidate will be working on the client-side.

This seems a great opportunity for any aspiring entrepreneurs to get involved. Given today’s market conditions, it seems like a lot of great talent are out looking for a new job. Moreover, YCombinator is a great program and investor, and will definitely get you off the ground if you have the potential.

As reported by ComScore, the world-wide internet population has surpasses 1 billion as of December 2008. While it is quite a big number, the data also mean another 5 billion people are not online. Having grown up with internet since elementary school, I cannot imagine life with out it. ComScore broke the data down to the top 15 countries with the largest internet populations.

The top 15 countries seemed to pretty obvious to me, so I decided to find out what portion of each country was online.

China is in #1 with the biggest internet audience, but their numbers only represent 13.5% of their population. The room for growth is still tremendous. I can’t even imagine the number of chinese websites that I will never come across. The most surprising figure, however, is India’s percentage. With a booming population of 1.1 billion, only 2.8% are online! While the internet industry in both countries are not as mature as the US, the talent and potential are there. There’s no doubt we will experience a good dose of competition from abroad, if not already.

On the hand, the figures of South Korea and Japan make me scratch my head in wonder. Both countries have been praised as one of the most connected countries in the world. Their wireless and mobile technologies surpass the US, yet the numbers still show about 50% are online, which is about the same as the US.

We live at an exciting period in time, and opportunities are still wide open to internet entrepreneurs world-wide. Oh, and happy Chinese New Years Here’s to another billion.

Update: One caveat I overlooked: “Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.” The internet population in Asia is probably way bigger than the data states.

Today is the day when history will be made. Record numbers of Americans are flocking to DC to celebrate the inauguration. Among many things, I am excited that Barack Obama will arguably be the first “Internet President” of our times. From his Blackberry to the Youtube fire chats, Obama has effectively used the internet to communicate. Consequently, you will be sure to find wide coverage from the social web.

In its spirit, I decided to write a round-up post, listing some websites that will be covering today’s event. It probably won’t be the same as standing out in the freezing DC morning, but this shall do. The world is watching.

Ustream.tv

You can find more coverage at:

• Hulu
• Facebook/CNN
• 12seconds.tv
• Flickr
• Tumblr
• Microsoft Photosynth

Part 1:

Part 2:

It’s pretty clear now that “getting users” isn’t a simple thing to do. I came across a presentation that addresses just this. It claims that startup’s focus too much of their early attention on product development, and not enough “customer development.” As a result, startups fail not because engineering was broken, but because their offering is just not valuable enough to the customers. Rather relying on a “launch” and hoping users will just come, the author explains that there should be a long and iterative process beforehand that validates that you can actually creating something that people wants.

For instance, during the early stages, there should be a back-and-forth process between customer discovery and customer validation. The presentation wants you to keep in mind that the “facts are outside the building, opinions are inside.” In other words, you might think your idea is valuable, but you won’t really know until you verify with the market. From the concept, see if you can make a repeatable sales. If not, go back to the drawing board.

I find the structure that the author lays out to be pretty useful. However, how you decide to mold or change your idea is the hard part. No one has the answer to this and you’ll never really know until you try it.