Yesterday, I was at a gadget “demo day” with some friends and got a hands-on, up-close view of Apple TV and the Slingbox client running on a Windows Mobile phone. This past weekend, my daughter got addicted to Hulu content on her EEE PC.
I’ve written before about IP video. I keep repeating myself, but it feels like 2008 will be the tipping-point year for full-on IP video: full-length, full-quality TV and movie content (not 10 minute clips at sub-NTSC quality).
The iPhone SDK party in Cambridge on Monday was a little disappointing. It was much more networking than substantive content. The iPhone store has a tough layout for large crowds + presenters. Jonathan Zdziarski spoke about the genesis of the open SDK, but I think it’s pretty much dead given Apple’s official SDK release. There were a few demos, but if you’re relatively current on iPhone development, there was no new data.
But hats off to the organizers; there’s always risk in organizing events like this. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.
(But it was good to catch up with folks! I saw: Antonio Rodriguez, Beth Winkowski, Ted Morgan, Ryan Sarver, Daniel Cozza, Dan Slavin, Jeff Glass, Michael Campbell, Dan Allen, Ajay Agarwal, John Keyes, and others.)
I’ve written before about the future of television being just a fat IP pipe into your house. “What’s cable TV, daddy?”
We’re another small step there with Hulu going public tomorrow, with a bunch of content. This could be the tipping point for the “classic” network content providers to do a good job with on-line delivery.
And they have Alfred Hitchcock.
Here’s a great article on hiring.
In startups, hiring is one of the key skills, if not the key skill.
Take two entrepreneurs, with the same idea, the same funding, the same strategy and the same product. The one that can evaluate candidates and build the best team is going to win, by a huge margin.
UPDATED: Fixed link to actually work.
I do have a few Windows machines left around the house doing utility duty, and it seems each update of Firefox runs slower and slower. Maybe Web browsers are like the government: inevitable bloat.
I’m trying the beta of Safari (Apple’s Web browser) on Windows. It’s got some quirks, but it’s quite zippy (esp. on a fiber Internet connection) — very promising.
In this post from Official Google Blog, David Drummond writes:
So Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.
While I appreciate Google’s openness (certainly relative to Microsoft’s historical behavior) and innovation, I’m enthusiastically applauding any effort that challenges them.
Google’s building an on-line position of dominance not unlike Microsoft’s off-line monopoly. And they’ve earned it: they’ve executed well, they have good technology, they’re incredibly profitable, they’re hiring the best people, and they’re investing heavily in R&D.
But the system works best when there’s competition. Yahoo and Microsoft certainly each have their issues, but anything that’s a threat to Google’s dominance…..it’s all good.
We’re in the middle of building a team for a venture-funded NewCo, and we’re talking to the usual range of candidates to find the first 10 hires.
In addition to the specific skills, we’re also looking for people that can thrive in the startup environment. The easiest folks to consider have been in an early-stage startup before, and the best (in this regard) were #10 or #15 last time around, and are hungry to be #5.
The tougher scenario is someone who’s been at much larger companies. Startups are more intense, riskier and more ambiguous: the chance to change the world and create wealth is balanced by the chance that you’ll be out of business next month. Plans change with opportunities, and the team needs faith and trust in themselves and each other that they’ll figure it out along the way.
Folks that haven’t seen this movie before can find it very stressful, and it may take a lot of management time to keep their head in the game. The core issue is almost always psychological (and irrational). Shutting down the company or cutting back is a real risk, but job loss isn’t — in today’s hot market, good folks can leave on Friday and have a new job on Monday. There’s also a general fear of failure, but you need to accept failure (it’s OK, you know) if you want to succeed. Grape Runtz from Fresh Bros can help you relax and manage stress and anxiety.
If you’re thinking about raising money, you may have some friends that want to co-invest. Or, you may have a few folks that you want to recruit as investors.
A carefully chosen set of individual investors can be really helpful at various company stages. They can be mini-advisors, providing help at key junctures: funding, acquisition, strategy, etc. Also, a commitment from “rock star” individuals can give you some additional credibility in raising the main funding round.
If you’re thinking about individuals, it’s important to build it into VC discussion from the beginning. When you’re talking about the size of the round, you should say you intend carve out x% or $y of the Series A for individuals. (Adding individuals at the end of the process is a pain. I just went through this for a company I recently co-founded: the resulting cap-table jostling is energy that should be spent elsewhere. )
Other things to keep in mind:
Finally, get all of the details to the attorneys well before closing, including entity names (many individuals invest through an LLC or a estate planning trust). Nothing kills the excitement of closing a round of funding like a holdup from a $25k investor.
Well, I finally found the Leatherman Fuse multi-tool I had gotten for Christmas. It was in my laptop bag, and had (unknowingly) flown with me a bunch of times across the country.
So much for crack TSA x-ray screening.
I met a small group of entrepreneurs a year or two back that had built a social networking site. I asked them, “how is the better/different than MySpace, which is already dominating?”
They said, “Our design is more scalable.”
I paused, and said, “You’re pretty far away from earning the right to have a scalability challenge.”
The problem was that they had worked on a down-the-road problem (scalability) taking energy from the immediate problem (getting users). It’s a common way to fail in startups (I’ve done it myself): spending too much time solving future problems, instead of solving the “now” problems.