WSFinder

How to keep Founders around...

Nova Spivak has some interesting commentary about how to keep founders engaged at a startup after they are no longer running the show. This was prompted through a post from Fred Wilson.

Nova's comments are right on the money. I don't know that I can say it much better than he did. Outside CEOs definitely can be necessary to shake things up and get them on a more steady execution path. The culture of the company shifts when this happens and that is never a clean process. I experienced this at Tribe where all of us founders eventually exited.

I have to stress that this is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes founders should not stick around and that's just better for the company and the founders. More value is created that couldn't be otherwise.

Chris

Web 2.0 Conference - Betting on the Hype

I met Stewart Butterfield of Flickr at the conference and he, Ethan Stock (of Zvents) and I had a great conversation about the hype surrounding Web 2.0.

 

Stewart thinks that the hype around this is overdone and that by next year the name is going to have to change. I personally think that things are going to be bigger than ever and that there will be way more hype around it. Ethan has blogged the bet over at Onotech unfortunately, Ethan doesn't use permalinks so I can't link directly to his post.

 

I also had an interesting conversation with Mark Pincus on the subject of hype and his comment was that he saw a bunch of scrappy entrepreneurs going out and making it. He'd call it hype if people were bidding up the price of office space and engineers. He'd also call it hype if there were a bunch of people at the conference walking around who had nothing to do with the tech industry.

 

Chris

More APIs and Examples

Well Web 2.0 has finally wrapped up and during that time there are a few more APIs and examples that have come in. I'll do a wrapup post soon.

 

APIs

Zvents - A great way to find events. Some nifty APIs available. (Disclaimer - I am helping these guys out)

411Sync - An open API for SMS Search. This looks pretty cool.

 

Examples:

eBayTime SMS - Mash up of eBay & 411Sync to get eBay Official Time

Rollyo - Social Custom search - Built on top of Yahoo search and also launched at Web 2.0 conference.

 

Chris

Special Thank You to Toni Schneider from Yahoo

I want to say a special thank you to Toni Schneider who is the VP of Developer Relations at Yahoo. I had a quick hallway conversation with him and the nex day it turns out that all the Yahoo API information has been updated on the site.

Thanks Toni - it's very much appreciated!

 

Chris

Web 2.0 Conference - Talking to 37signals

This is a little off topic from Web 2.0 and APIs but I thought it was worth writing about. I had a great conversation with Jason and David from 37 Signals at the Web 2.0 final reception. I had just heard his excellent talk on doing less and we had a good discussion about how far you could really take it.

 

I made the point that specs were important because they allowed you to think through problems before you started coding and they countered with the fact that you couldn't find all the problems at the spec stage and that I was just wasting time.

 

All in all I think I'm going to keep my specs but definitely look at lighter weight ways of doing it and will seriously look at prototyping directly in HTML so that we can get a better feel for the usability of the things that we create.

 

Chris

Web 2.0 Conference - Pierre Omidyar

John - Disclosure that Pierre invested in my company. Sergei Brin just popped over and we talked about how he got to where it is. Sergei and Larry are still very active but you stepped back. Why did you make that choice?

Pierrre - From the very beginning Ebay was something that I was doing on the side. I knew I would build it to a certain point and then turn it over. It wasn't about whether I thought I could scale it but I wanted to bring in new blood and professional management so that they could take over the core and put it in new directions. I'm a big believer in bringing in people with reverse points of view. I don't need to be in every decision.

At the same time how do we take the learning from Ebay and put it in other areas.

John - You started a foundation like all young moguls. Tell us about that.

Pierre - We did a lot of learning. We started a foundation and invested in non-profits. We started thinking that if you want to have an impact, why do you think you can only do that by working in the non-profit sector. Really had this notion that when you look at Ebay when you think about it after 10 years, in the most generous terms there are 150 million people who have learned to trust each other. Helps people have bigger degree of trust.

We re-organized to Omidyar network to help find business opportunities. It's a little different than VC business but we're a mission based fund.

John - What is the mission? There are cynics in the room.

Pierre - We are about self empowerement. Political, business etc. Ebay put tools in people's hands to put things in a level playing field. There's skin in the game. Economic empowerment that is unprecedented.

John - What are the contours of the fund? Money? Who from? Who's been invested in?

Pierre - $400M of my money. Treating it like a new VC fund that will be deployed in 5 years. 30M in the last year. A third in for profit companies. Looking for businesses that can only be successful if they foster individual self empowerment. Business can be a force for good.[Crowd applauds]. What the people in the room are doing is that. You're building tools to create technology that brings tools to individuals.

I think about Adam Smith and how he thinks about economies. I was struck by his analysis. Given the right environment, the pursuit of self-interest leads to an increase in the general welfare. You can look at the profit that is generated is a way of looking at improving general welfare.

[He talks about why business is good]

What is the enviroment that needs to exist for this to be true?

John - How do you tell if the company will be consistent with those values?

Pierre - Is there a level playing field? Is it open access? Does it foster communication and connection? Do the participants have a sense of ownership in what is going on?

Then look at the business model. Is it a model that can only be successful if it maintains those values. If you're trying to create a business about trade and it requires trust and is predicated on that, then the business can only be successful with a social benefit.

John - How long have you been doing this?

Pierre - A year and a half.

John - Depending on the investor there can be a little rigor or a lot of rigor. Where do you fall on that line?

Pierre - Very rigorous. It has to be a mission fit for us. It naturally limits the raw # of investment opportunities.

John - How do you measure the social impact?

Pierre -there's a lot of work on measuring social impact. How many people did we feed is an easy measure. Unfortunately it's hard to measure the big impact things. If the environement is right and the business can only be successful if there is a social impact then evidence of the success of the system is profit.

John - Are we getting to another bubble? Joe Kraus is saying that he's seeing bootstrap fratricide. Perhaps there will be venture fratricide. Everyone will compete for the niche.

Pierre - I think what's really interesting about the environment now is that tech has advanced to such a point that they can invent innovative things they need less capital to do that. That will mean that there are more people after the same opportunity. The more people that are engaged the better the result will be.

John - Can you invest as much as you want?

Pierre - Because of our constraints it is a challenge to invest as much as we want.

John - As an investor, entrepreneurs are concerned that Google will be akin to Microsoft that Google might go do it and cut off the VC funding. Do you ask this question? Are you concerned?

Pierre - If you're any company like Google you do have to be careful. We want to foster innovation. The best way to address that is to talk about Ebay does. There is an API program with 20k individuals who are part of that program. 45% of listings comes from that program. Ebay is trying to foster innovation outside of the company's walls.

It's great that we're really bright but there are people outside who are innovating as well. We want to foster more and more.

John - Are you pleased with how Ebay is doing as part of the criteria you have?

Pierre - absolutely. It's been 10 years and people have found that there are more things in common than different with people. If I went to a non-profit they couldn't accomplish increasing trust.

Question - You talked about your criteria around. Do you invest in multiple teams that go after the same concept?

Pierre - we look at ability execute in management team. I have less concern about we can only invest with one in this space. It might concern you if your investor is investing in your competition. There are some practical concerns around that. The reason that we're doing it though is that we believe that you're going to make the world better.

Question - What about the environment that exists?

Pierre - I think it's critical that there has to be competition for things to improve society. There have to be no externalities that are not priced into the product. The commercial sector can make the world a better place. Public sector must properly regulate to make sure that commercial sector does their job.

We want to work with government to help make that clear to them.

Question - I'm fascinated by companies that can do good as part of the business. How does it scale? how does social good scale with money?

Pierre - An org that focuses primarily on social good instead of ROI has more difficulty scaling than for profits. That's why I've chosen to focus on finding a business that can maximize profit only by doing the social good. There's the full confidence that as they are providing return to share holders that they are making the world a better place.

Question - What do you do about disasters?

Pierre - haven't looked at disaster preparedness. I think there are great challenges there.

Question - John a lot of people want to know about what business is starting. Pierre - how does that investment jive with teh social impact.

Pierre - I'm going to let management speak.

John - Aggregate high quality blogs. Like a music label. 4 people. I won't hype it. I think it'll be fun and I am very pleased that Omidyar network would agree. It's a very small amount of money that will stretch.

Pierre - Web 2.0 is about putting tools in people's hands. Making the tools widely accessible. Let people share and collaborate. Collecting people together is fantastic. More rich connections than ever before. This will change the world. I applaud all of you for making that happen.

Question - I founded a social enterprise to build online social networks. There is whole ecology around networks building around open source platforms.

Pierre - There's an ecology of business around communities of interest. People can pursue their self interest and it's really exciting. I'm a big fan of markets and competition. I want to focus on create the right kind of environments and rules that have the right characteristics. It will inevitably lead to really great results.

Chris

Web 2.0 Conference - Konstantine Guernike

How do you take your network of business relationships onto other sites.

People are looking to recruit there, do due diligence etc.

Did a mashup with jobs. 3 big monster, hotjobs, career builder. How many got it through a connection. This is how it really works.

Do a search on Career Builder. Use the linked in sidebar to connect you. The linked in sidebar seems pretty cool.

Chris

Web 2.0 Conference - Scott Cook

Take the complexities of life and make things simple.

We were the first people to take accounting and make it simple.

We watched people use turbotax to do their own taxes.

A good example is that someone wrote a check to a charity and we asked if it was cash or non-cash. Well she thought it was non-cash because it was cash.

Now it says Did You Give Money? Then has an explanation. Then a link for more help. Then a link for video.

Key was to use English to drive usage.

[Then went through a demo of some of their Enterprise stuff. Sorta boring. Mostly interesting that it's a usability win.]

Experiment is putting social network into Intuit. [Marc Canter needs to talk to these guys]

Medical billing is a big problem. They launched a big medical expense problem.

[Very cool!]

Chris

Web 2.0 Conference - Mark Phillips

I met Mark earlier in the conference and he's a really cool guy. I'm glad he's doing the stuff he does.

Mark - Edutainment is implicitly learning through gameplay. We all do it. I call this serious gaming. I'm going to take you to virtual Baghdad. Level of fidelity is just getting off the ground. The military is taking the gaming community really seriously.

This is the marine corp deployable training ground. They can rehearse a battle while on a ship going to a deployment.

Games themselves are closed systems. In the DoD everything is open. Game X plays with Y which plays with Z. We don't have to market. CNN does the marketing for us.

If you think war simluations are away then think again. The new soliders are from the twitch speed generation. Gamers are the majority. The future combat system is all about land and air based robotics.

DoD is building a Global Information Technology Grid. They want to build virtual cities. They are doing mashups. They are providing weather in the cities, putting traffic in. Want to provide suspension of disbelief.

Challenges. Need realtime webservices. Things need to be real time and real fast. Things are distributed but aren't computing enough. Data is key and the door is locked.

Here comes the demo with Forterra which is a demo of Iraq.

Looks very cool. Basically like Half Life 2 quality. It's a virtual tactical training center. Avatars have natural gestures. 1KM of virtual Baghdad for checkpoint training. Everything is happening in realtime.

Gestures are very important. Suspension of disbelief. Very cool VOIP happening. People are all around the country.

Running a checkpoint operation.

Car comes up. Asked to step out of the vehicle.

The avatars are really talking it looks very cool. It's really realistic how they do this.

One of the Iraqi's pulls a gun and they shoot him and have to evacuate. At this point the audio cuts out.

[I think it's a great way to train people on procedures and hat to do]

They use sattelite imagery to build the buildings. He is flying around in a helicopter.

Was interesting that things were early days. The differnce between what happens here and what games are is that the folks who play that do it for real.

Chris

Web 2.0 Conference - What do teens want?

One of the best panels I heard...

Safa Rashtchy + 5 teenagers (I don't know the spellings or names so please forgive me).

Safa - If you want to know what the next big thing is. Ask people. The age group of 12 to 24 year olds is 25% of media consumption. They spend 30% more time than the next age group. Important for you to understand what they want.

Daniel Labeaux - Junior in high school. I usually stay on the phone all day. I spend a few hundred dollars a month on ring tones, games and downloads.

Shawn Spidiacci - I'm a senior. I get home from crew and go on the computer I go on myspace and talk to people on instant messenger.

Sethi hyatt - 17 from belmont. Spend time on myspace and livejournal. Keep updated with friends lives and parents lives. My dad is retired.

Sasha Volkov - Freshman at Cal - Spend an hour or 4 hours online I do facebook and myspace. Mostly I use it for resarch.

Jake Rumblock - Senior. I spend time researching with google. Spend some time on myspace and play some playstation too.

Safa - Let's start with myspace. You don't ask them to use myspace. Do you know anyone who doesn't use myspace.

Daniel - they started and they

Safa - how much time do you spend on myspace.

Shawn  - I wait for people to leave me a message. When I go to sleep I wait if there are any notifiers and then I check myspace.

Sethi - 99.9% of my time on myspace because all my friends have it. I nkow one person who doesn't use myspace. I use it to keep in contact with people I do know.

Shawn - I know about Facebook and it's a big college one but I have a lot of friends on there that I know of.

Sasha - once you get to college myspace isn't a big deal anymore. Facebook is what's important. it's much easier than myspace.

Safa - Where do you go to search, whether it's homework etc.

Daniel - Google - type in what I need to find.

Shawn - I use google to search and use google images. I use powerpoint for presentations. When I look for music I got itunes and then I goto bittorrent website. OINK.

Sethi - Use google for images. Usually webcrawler or Ask Jeeves.

Safa - why do you use ask?

Sethi - I can type in an actual question and that's more convenient.

Sasha - I use Google. I goto itunes to check things out. I have thing called DCP++. If you exceed bandwidth it shuts you off. I've gotten 50 songs in a day. I don't pay for music anymore.

Jake - I use bittorent to get Chappelle show. If you leave things on overnight you get amazing amounts of media for free which is sweet. I use Google because I like having just the single box and not the directory.

Safa - Let's talk a little more about music. Who has an ipod (4/5) How much of it is downlaoded or free.

Shawn - I like the idea of downloading music for money but bittorrent is so easy. You can get the whole album in 30 minutes. I'd rather wait 30 minutes. My computer crashed. I went to my friends iPod and used a program off of download.com you override the iPod security to get the music.

Sasha - I have hundreds of songs and I've paid for 10. It's been a while.

Sethi - I have never paid for downloading a song. When I do download stuff for my ipod I go to my friends because they paid or their internet connection is faster. I get all different music from my friends.

Safa - Tell me about these companies as I say their names.

Daniel - I like AOL instant messenger. I use it 24/7.

Safa - Instant messaging

Shawn - Use AOL because my friends are on it. I use Yahoo too.

Sethi - I use AIM and depending who uses it I use MSN.

Sash - I use AIM but I use MSN for friends in brazil.

Jack - AOL instant messenger. I used to use the browser. I met a lot of people on MSN.

Safa - tell me about your cell phone.

Daniel - sidekick 2 from tmobile. I use AIM on the phone.

Safa - Yahoo.

Daniel - I use Yahoo to search or chat.

Shawn - Yahoo for me didn't exist didn't really exist because I didn't like their search or the layout of their webpage.

Sethi - I don't use Yahoo much but I made my friend an email account.

Sasha - I have an email account there for an internship but I don't really use it. I go as an alternative if Google isn't helping me.

Jake - Email is prety cool on Yahoo. One thing that I really like is News. In terms of region it helps to get news from Cuba there.

Safa - Tell me about Ebay

Jake - I used to buy baseball cards and videogames. I have used it 5 times. There's always that risk that someone is going to rip me off.

Sasha - Use it occasionally. My mom uses it. I'm afraid of being ripped off. I buy from Amazon for books and music.

Safa - anyone else use ebay. Amazon?

Shawn - I bought school books and CDs off Amazon.

Safa - Let's assume I give you each $100. You can spend it online or offline. Go to a bar ( laugh )

Shawn - Put it away to save it for a surfboard. I'd buy the surfboard at a used search shop. I wouldn't go online because I want to see it and touch it.

Daniel - Cellphones. Spend the money on ringtones and Games. I spend $50 and $60 on games.

Sethi - I get concert tickets or shoes. I buy shoows at Tru in San Francisco on haight street. I don't like paying for shipping and handling.

Sasha - I spend on food and clothes. Dorm food is horrible.

Jake - I spend it on burritos and gasoline. Gas is too expensive.

Safa - Shopping online this time. Buy a new phone online. Where do you go?

Daniel - I go to tmobile online. I like tmobile.

Shawn - I go to verizon becuase I don't know where else I would go. It gets a vcast on a phone but that seems cool.

Sethi - I goto sprint because family has sprint and friends do.

Safa - Let's say you want to buy a cd player.

Shawn - shakes head. CD player?!

Safa - digital camera

Shawn - I look at sony or look at download.com and look at reviews. I buy things on Froogle because you get cheap stuff.

Daniel - Probably go to Sony. I would serach for it and see what comes up.

Sethi - I don't know. I would go to best buy.

Sasha - I'd do a search for what's out there and best. I'd go to ebay or amazon.

Jake - Compare the major places that sell like Amazon, Ebay, circuit city and then froogle.

Safa - Think about the web and things you do with it. Think about 5 years from now. What do you wish you could do with the web that you can't do now.

Jake - Get rid of all that spyware. Please. Get on that please.

Sasha - I want to read books online. I don't pay for things. The more free stuff that you can come up with.

Safa - Who watches TV and how much.

Daniel - I watch TV a lot. Lay around at home watching TV. I spend the same amount of time on TV as online. I am online and watching TV at the same time.

Shawn - I don't have a lot of time to watch. I use the computer. My family is addicted to it. Can you stop watching that.

Sethi - I don't watch that much TV. I'm on the computer a lot. I watch maybe 1 show. I watch law and order svu or 24.

Sasha - I watch the cooking channel.

Jake - I am addicted to really bad TV. Laguna Beach, OC, Chappelle Show. Office. Daily Show. I watch cable news sometimes. With Fox News you have to know your enemy.

Question - I'm from FreeWebs. Feedback is awesome. We have about 15 million members. We've noticed you're very finicky. When you say sites like myspace put ads everywhere does that turn you off.

Shawn - Google does a lot of ads but they're really behind the scenes. Myspace has ads in so many spaces. When you have those pop ups it makes no sense. Hit they guy to get an ipod.

Sasha - Ads are so obnoxious. No one pays attention to them. Google is the best. It's too cluttered in other places.

Question - People are trying to build the next generation of portable devices. What do you want on that device? Phone + video + music?

Shawn - Do it. that sounds awesome. Put that all in one. Video iPod would be awesome.

Sasha - you should do that. TV shows.

Safa - would you pay $3 per video?

Sasha - I'd pay if it was quality. I'd pay if I couldn't avoid it.

Question - In your daily life where do you go for news or finding out what's going on?

Shawn - go to reuters. podcast npr. cnn. multiple news sites because I don't trust anybody.

Daniel - I go to newspaper sites. cnn.

Safa - does anyone read the newspaper (2/6)

Shasha - MSN or CNN. Video clips are really good.

Safa - Tivo? Skype?

No One knows skype

Question - What more would you like out of IM?

Shawn - you're just putting ads on it, I hate it. I'm trying to talk to my friends.

Daniel - I like to have ti on video so you can have IM when you see like a web cam.

Chris