What’s your problem?
I often wonder, as an entrepreneur, if there is a short checklist in the minds of VCs when they talk to me about my ideas. Since it rarely benefits an investor to mentor you, the competitive and sometimes egotistical nature of investment firms restricts their ability to tell you what’s missing (in their minds anyway) and when walking away from a pitch one might feel they have less information than beforehand.
A couple of quick snapshots below show you a story about startups that’s pretty balanced. They’re having trouble with everything: development, unfinished prototypes, marketing and revenue (and a FT job on the side they are fearful to give up during this economic phase).
The best advice I’d give it is to leverage the eyes and ears of your peers. Ask what they think of your product. Ask what they’d change in it to suit them, or their customers. Most of your peers will be mostly open with you and this is very different from many other industries. Optimistically, I’ll say that we’re in an industry that generally respects progress and favors it to ownership.
tren ding-news.orgHave a startup? Know a startup? What other problems do you see businesses struggling with? From which perspective are you coming; are you a entrepreneur, an investor, a marketer?
A needle in a media stack
It’s very difficult to keep up with new and fantastic mobile applications, let alone the ones that truly make your life better/richer/more productive. It would be convenient for someone to curate those better, we’re still waiting for that day. In the meantime, we can only do so randomly. So, here’s a cool app you might want to make mobile searching easier (and kind of fun). Search a word and swipe through a series of windows showing results from different locations on the web. It’s still a lot of information, but it takes a step at putting the results into understandable buckets (source location or type of media, for instance). Check it out:
As a side note, DoAT, frankly, is a weird name for a company, if only in that it does not lend itself to making employees sound very intelligently consumer facing when introducing themselves. Good to run those names by people until they smile and think the name is cool, rather than keep asking “What’s that stand for?”. The questions you want your customers asking are “Where do i get it?”, or “How much does it cost?”. 
From isell.wordpress .com, a few naming failures:
Direct translations of English texts used in an advertising campaign or exotic made-up names of products may turn into complete failure in some countries. Here is my top 6 of the failed advertising message and product names:
1: An American T-shirt maker in Miami printed shirts for the Spanish market which promoted the Pope’s visit. Instead of “I saw the Pope” (el Papa), the shirts read “I saw the potato” (la papa).
2: Coors put its slogan, “Turn it loose,” into Spanish, where it was read as “Suffer from diarrhea.”
3: Pepsi’s “Come alive with the Pepsi Generation” translated into “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave,” in Chinese.
4: When Gerber started selling baby food in Africa, they used the same packaging as in the U.S., with the beautiful baby on the label. Later they learned that in Africa, companies routinely put pictures on the label of what’s inside, since most people can’t read English.
5: General Motors’ Chevy Nova failed in Latin America. The thing was that “Nova” means “It doesn’t go” in Spanish
6. Ford flopped in Brazil when they introduced Pinto to the market. The problem was that in Brazilian Portuguese slang “pinto” is “small penis”.
Hiring Heresy
Most occupations outside of technology use a standard interview process, whereby the candidate meets with who may be their supervisor, peers, and maybe human resources. References might be called. There is something about the software industry that takes things a step further, and in some cases too far in my opinion.
If you saw The Facebook Movie, you saw the hacking scene where a group of programmers try to win a job at Facebook:
Once during an interview with the CFO of a large publishing company, I was given a piece of blank paper and a pencil and asked to show how many leads we could send each client weekly doing email marketing. He pointed to the computer behind me where he said there was a spreadsheet containing details about how much each client was spending with them. Then he left the office and went to lunch. The computer had a password lock. I didn’t know how many clients they had, nor how much they were spending, I didn’t know what kind of lists we were working with. I wrote “2000″ down on the paper and left. Somehow, they hired me and I would learn later how random everything else was there. Like, every week I was to prepare a presentation, status of the week and what next week would look like. I was to give this to my manager, who insisted that he present it at our executive meeting. Despite changes to dozens of campaigns reaching millions of people, results were very similar each week. However, if the CEO liked the presentation, then my manager would puff his chest out, boasting his accomplishment. If the CEO was disappointed, he would throw me under the bus asking me where I got my numbers, criticizing me my approach, and everyone would buy it. The first time I was stunned, I thought he was having a bad day or something. The second time it happened, I confronted him and said it wouldn’t be so easy the next time he tried it. The third time, I stood up and quit on the spot.
I interviewed with Google, where 6 people barraged me with questions for 3 hours. No break. I was surprised to get the interview in the first place, since Google has a reputation for hiring heavily those who have higher education. The interview was good, even fun. More fun than hearing that I didn’t get that job. Watch that chicken counting, y’all.
My last story is the thought that provoked my writing this post. It applies to a lot of people but in software and technology I think it holds a special place because the desire is high to be in a startup and just like gambling, sometimes people give more than what they should. Right now, tech isn’t seeing the unemployment that many other sectors are. VCs have money, so do entrepreneurs for that matter, or only have one adult working full-time. This leaves room for several things — first, desperation. Second, distributed advantages on the part of the company (outsourced development or call centers, a TON of resumes to look through, money, and maybe most important — time). Due to these circumstances, a company can ask for multiple interviews (we’re okay so far), across a longer period of time (still okay), and then start asking for ideas they can use regardless of hiring you or not (problem), asking you to go so far as to come and make a presentation to their board or train their sales team (these things bother me). An individual’s time and strategies are what you hire them for. To take advantage of them these ways shows disrespect. Wanting to share strategies is great, but show these companies that you know how to NOT give it away, they will respect you more.
Here are more etiquette tips for the interviewee:
http://comerecommended.com
Sharing habits
It’s why I built Grabbit, and why, 2 years later, the product is still spot on and relevant. The Internet has opened up resources that are now accessible to more people than have even been touched by a technology. You don’t need a Facebook account. Use what you use. Grabbit comes to you (here’s a demo showing how). We started the company in January 2009 following the FriendFeed purchase and the step they took to aggregate social networks and communication distribution. We quickly started drawing out what it would look like and began thinking about the infrastructure and all the possible applications. We were colliding with dropping prices in cloud costs, Amazon S3-type scalable storage, and the beginnings of some innovative steps toward creative eCommerce. The heavy lifting we did back then has finally paid off, but only now as the market has turned to talk more about semantic matching of information and tackling this problem of irrelevant information bombarding our networks and lowering the value of time we spend there. Here’s an infographic showing how people share online:
Geekosystem.com
Quote
“The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.” ~Karl Marx
Valley Versus Alley
Focus
While rents are lower and salaries are somewhat higher in San Francisco, the cost of going public might bite businesses.
What’s with Facebook’s spike in growth? con’t
via Silicon Alley Insider
This time, Facebook is compared with Myspace, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Tumblr.
What’s with Facebook’s spike in growth?
via allthingsd.com
What is the reason so many more people are using Facebook versus Google+? I say, ‘familiarity’. The reason Google+s’ 50 million aren’t racing to it is that they don’t know it’s power yet. Comparing it to f8 is like comparing an infant (Google+) to a 7 year old (f8). In fact, it’s exactly like that.
When I think of Facebook, I also think ‘informality’, ‘fun’, non-techy family sending me chainletters and links to offers unbeknownst to the to be spam traps. I think games, Liking, Poking, looking through contacts photos and learning about them by way of the comments under those photos and on their Walls.
When I think of Google –> Google+, I think of Picasa, a service I left orphaned long ago for Flickr. I think of research, bar bet settling, I think of filtered search results by media type of time range. I think of it more as a tool. Comparing the two, right now, is a premature red herring Citi Investment Research and Analysis published to have anyone conclude they are comparable.
Startup bubble forecast
Gplus.com/memeburn.com
Is there a technology bubble happening? Investments and activities for Skype, Delicious, Facebook, LinkedIn, Color, Groupon, and Twitter are examined here.
