Yesterday, I wrote a post about unconventional method of sharing ideas. My idea was about building a better way to meet someone new. It has actually sparked some interest, so I’m excited. Just the fact that people are reaching out means that there is a demand to talk to someone you’ve never met offline.
Similarly, my friends over at MyMomIsAFob are trying doing the same, by making wiki’s with the good ol’ pbwiki. I like their initiative so I figured I’d help spread the word.
The first one is College Tweetup. This is a list of people on twitter and which colleges they go to. Tired of A-list bloggers not responding to your tweets? Twitter is much more fun when you can find someone who actually replies to your replies. Moreover, I think twitter is more meaningful when you actually have some information about the person’s background. Like I said before, Facebook is not really a good place to meet new people, at least for the way the young people use it. However, Silicon Valley folks seem to use it like teens use MySpace, add everyone. Anyways, follow a fellow college student or add yourself on the list.
Cal Startups is the second wiki, aimed to connect Berkeley students who interested in finding other entrepreneurs. The general consensus is that the campus is too big, and it’s hard to meet others. Let’s get the programmers and UI designers together, and make something happen.
Well, that is all. Goal of the day: talk to a stranger.
Every founder is protective over his ideas, and he has every reason to be. For example, Steve Jobs will let Microsoft down for supposedly taking the GUI. Thinking of an idea is hard and many founders believe that they are the only ones working their ideas. More often than not, there is another founder thinking exactly the same thing. Naturally, I would feel the same way, but a part of me also knows that great work also come from collaboration and feedback.
One person believes in sharing the idea is Jyri Engeström, founder of Jaiku, now part of Google. When I spoke to him during Gigaom’s Mobilize conference, he told me basically got his startup off the ground by posting his idea on his blog. He shared his idea, people thought it was cool and joined. His logic was simple: it’s the execution, not the idea. If someone really wanted to copy you, it’s going to happen. Moreover, if someone was working on the same idea, it’s better to know now than to find out cluelessly after months of hard work. TechCrunch took a similar approach with its $200 laptop endeavor.
I’m not sure how comfortable I’d feel about going public with ideas from very beginning, but what the hell. In spirit of the post, I figured I’d throw out an idea I’ve been thinking about.
Meeting Strangers. Facebook is good for managing all your real life friends, but not so good at meeting new people. MySpace is more suited for it, but still awkward and not meaningful. Currently, only dating sites seem to dominate this category. However, if you think about it, we are already meeting people online, just not through any one destination sites. One example is bloggers. You think Robert Scoble got to know Dave Winer just randomly? No, they blogged about each other and then started communicating through other methods.
My vision is not to make a centralized social network, but to make a decentralized network that helps people engage in one another. I am not interested in a Robert Scoble’s profile pic, I’m interested in his online activity: his blog, his flickr, his facebook. I want to build a widget that you can plug into any site, allowing to network to any other site with that widget. It seems like Deluux might be doing something similar, and if they are, awesome. I want to be able to discover other small bloggers who are interested in tech. Or, I want to find a person who chat with about photography and DSLR’s. Almost like a discovery network. As you can see, it’s all brainstorming right now, but I would love to hear some input; don’t be all secretive.
I’d like to invite anyone interested to contact me or leave a comment. We can get a virtual team to work on it for fun.
YCombinator’s winter cycle applications were due on Friday. As Paul Graham explains, YCombinator received “more applications this time than ever, and by a large margin: 10%.” In case you don’t know, YC is an unique fund that focuses on seed investments, usually attracting a younger crowd. They don’t officially disclose actual application numbers, but we can easily assume hundreds. Roughly 20 startups get funded in each cycle.
In tough times, this could be a good indicator that people are still interested in starting businesses. Or, it’s just that YCombinator is becoming more widely known, possibly even international applicants now? Looking at the Compete.com’s YC statistics, the number of visitors to the site rose clearly more than 10%.
All in all, it’s going to be more competitive this year than ever before. However, the startups that will eventually make it are not the ones who depends their entire strategy behind YCombinator. Ask yourself if you have the dedication to keep going even without it. YC will give your the PR, money, and connections, but it will not provide you the execution of the idea. At the foundation, it’s the team that makes the difference. In conclusion, I wish all the applicants the best of luck! I look forward to all the cool ideas on demo day.
Most college seniors are sweating now due to the economic downturn: How am I going to find a job? But maybe there’s also a bright side to all of this. As bad as it might seem to do a startup, right now might be the time to do so. You might be thinking, “What? Crazy!” Well, let’s look at some of the positive things for young people.
1. Less Competition. As VC cut back their funding, many companies are going to die. Layoffs are in now. Moreover, fewer people are going to enter the industry. If you’re a younger person or a college student working on a project on his spare time, chances are you are not funded anyways. In a sense, it levels the playing field. You are more competitive now.
2. Real Products. I think a lot of young people try to make products that are neat, but probably aren’t that valuable. It doesn’t solve any problems. For example, do we really need another superpoke 2.0? Often times, this is driven overvalued acquisitions spurring unrealistic motivations. Hard times forces you to think, are we solving a problem?
3. Buy. Like Warren Buffet’s philosophy, sell when everyone is greedy, and buy when everyone is in fear. Similarly, Paul Graham explains that you are investor in your own company.
4. Taking some time off. For many, it’s tough to find a job right now. Chances are you will some weeks, or even months submitting applications and interviewing. Why not take some of this time to code something you are passionate about. If things don’t work out, saying you build something and putting on your resume will not hurt you.
I think the hardest part of doing a startup is the psychological factor. During conferences, there are always panels about raising money, bringing together a world-class team, and staying competitive, but there’s little talk about the founder’s lifestyle. However, before you get going on a building that killer app, you have to have heart for the startup life. There will be up’s and down’s, and you are own your own.
Here are things that I think are important, and not really talked about.
1. Be Confident – When you’re running your startup, what used to seem like a great idea may not be so after a few days. Or, suddenly, you find two other competitors who are doing exactly the same thing as you. Or, you’re simply tired of living off ramen for months. A founder needs to have the confidence to believe in himself. Moreover, you’re going to be the one motivating your team. That’s a lot of positive energy for a person to have.
2. Don’t Be Cocky – On the other hand, you’re not always right. Sometimes, it’s hard to cut out features or change business models. But the reality is many entrepreneurs go through many iterations in their product before it becomes successful. In the worst case, be prepared to fail. The reality is most startups fail; it is better to accept it, learn from your mistakes and become a better entrepreneur, than being too big for defeat. This seems to contradict point #1, but it shouldn’t.
3. Go Out, It Motivates You - Go to the local startup events. Go network with other founders. Humans are inherently social people. I believe the reason there are so many startup events is that founders are lonely people. They are trying to do something completely different and not many people can relate. Okay, that sounds kind of sad actually. Also, it is a great way to get feedback. For example, YCombinator companies meet weekly to discuss their latest work. Fellow entrepreneurs will usually ask harder questions than friends and family.
4. Discipline and Balance – When you are your boss, you set your own agenda and work life balance. Especially if you are young, you aren’t yet used to work hours. I think it’s bad if you just try to work like mad all day. Your hours will easy get messed up and it gets harder to track your productivity. It’s also likely you will get burnt out. This is especially true if you are trying to work out of your own home. Set a time when work is work and life is life. It will also decrease your overhead.
Anyways it’s 3:43am, I think it’s a good time to sleep. What a great way to just contradict myself, lol.
SeedCamp, a week-long event targeted at young entrepreneurs, is now fully underway. The program chooses up to 20 companies and provides them mentorship as well as connections to VC, marketing, PR, the whole package. Five companies will be selected as winners and given funding. All in all, it’s a European event trying to replicate the big self-boasting community, which calls itself the Silicon Valley. All joking aside, it looks exciting and I’m trying to follow it from this side of the Atlantic.
I still remember at TechCrunch50, when Yossi Vardi was giving Ron Conway a hard time about not investing abroad. SeedCamp shows that there is no lack of talent internationally. Sure, Silicon Valley is the world capital of tech innovation and probably will be for a long time. However, as the cost of infrastructure diminishes, there is less of need to raise massive amounts of money from Silicon Valley VC’s. People also argue that it is easier to find programmers in the Valley, but all the companies seem to be interested in bringing in better programmers abroad.
I had always wished universities would host SeedCamp-like events to bring a different perspective to the students. But, SeedCamp did say they were going to coming to the “Valley”, right?
Keeping with the theme of my blog, I decided to look up the founders with some of the companies I know of. I was excited to find out that some of the most well known startups/websites are led by young and driven people. Some of these people you probably know of already, while some, probably not. Here’s a list:
The answer is the zero, of course! Any company with a compelling enough idea can be chosen to present. However, financing plays factor into how well a company performs. Over the previous decade, the amount of money it takes to start a company has decreased dramatically. I went on the TechCrunch50 website and decided to put all the funding data into Excel.
The TechCrunch50 Finalists are the cream of the crop, the best companies of over 1000 applications. Forty-two of them provided how much investment they took, while ten did not. Let’s look at the stats.
16 of the 42 reports took $300,000 or else in investments.
21 of the 42 reports took $500,000 or else in investments.
27 of the 42 reports took $1,000,000 or else in investments.
The average amount of funding of the 42 reports was $1,499,523.81
The lowest amount of funding was $40,000. (Though possibly 0 for the 10 companies that didn’t report)
The largest amount of funding was $10,700,000.
The total amount of money invested is $62,980,000. Wow.
Slightly over half the companies took in $1,000,000 or less in funding. The better news is that over a quarter of the companies only took in $300,000 or less. I would say this is pretty impressive for the level of caliber of these companies. Most of these companies are probably angel-backed. In my opinion, the best thing to do is to take as little money as possible. I think the data serves as a good comparison to curious entrepreneurs on what the landscape is like.
Here is the list of companies:
While money is important, execution and team dynamics are even more important. The determinant of whether or not these companies will succeed in the years to come is how well they can iterate. Launching, at however big the event, is only the beginning. Let’s see if they can turn the $63 million dollars invested into $630 million. A couple of these companies should have billion dollar potentials. Right, ev?
Edit: The 10 companies which didn’t report funding data are BlahGirls, Yammer, Connective Logic, Burt, Mixtt, me-trics, mobclix, Postbox, GazoPa, and iamnews.
All joking aside, it looks exciting and I’m trying to follow it from this side of the Atlantic.
