Guy Kawasaki is one of my favorite entrepreneur/VC bloggers and I also highly recommend his latest book. This list of 7 things are a must read for every entrepreneurial type out there right now and I highly recommend them. If I may, I'll add a #8 to the list: don't reinvent - if someone already built it (e.g. wordpress, a CMS, video serving, analytics), don't try to build it yourself - just use it!
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Just got back from speaking at Marketingsherpa's Email conference in Miami so not much time to blog right now. You can read some summaries here though and I will post more on the conference later.
In the meantime, a few great links about entrepreneurship for the day: Darren Herman writes a great summary of starting up in New York City and IInovate has a podcast with a Kleiner Perkins partner. And to round it all up, Fred Wilson writes a good post about his take on widgets and how he'd like them to evolve.
Enjoy!
It's 2007 and there are a bunch of no-revenue, good idea, 2.0 Internet startups out there that haven't really spend too much time thinking about their business model. The secret (or not so secret) hope is still that Google or Yahoo will come in with a bag full of cash. Henry Blodget the famed former analyst who predicted Amazon at $600 has an interesting opinion on how a Wall Stret crash could end the party. It would definitely deflate some of the valuations (Youtube anyone?) but probably not have a major impact. For you startups out there- think about the revenue model, not the Goohoo money.
Urbandaddy recommends a great new service for all of you out there who tend to lose keys in the Big Apple. It's a company started by two enterprising ex waiters called New Your Key. They lock up a copy of your keys in a secure vault for only $30 a year - and deliver them to you wherever you are for only another $20 when in need. Sounds like a great service to me!
Good post on this by Darren Herman today. He highlights some of the options for offshoring/outsourcing programming to developing countries. I've also done some thinking on this recently and I agree with Darren that you have to have very tightly written specs and I think most importantly - a strong head of IT who can manage offshored relationships and business expectations. The CEO of a social networking startup I talked to recently has offshored 50% of his IT team via Rentacoder and so far it's going fairly well. I'm also interested in this from a big-company point of view - how do you do this without alienating your internal IT department and managing it successfully.
Great little tool by our friend Dilbert. Save your time and effort and quickly create a powerful mission statement. Have fun!
Just saw this great video of Guy Kawasaki's speech at TiECON 2006. It's 40 minutes long and definitely worthwhile watching. You can also buy the corresponding book The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything
Freezing temperatures didn't keep about 120 New Yorkers from flocking to a Cinema in the Village last night to meet Tim Westergren - the founder of Pandora. The session was mostly Q&A and the crowd consisted predominantly of music/Pandora enthusiasts so most questions focused on enhancements and better music selection.
Some interesting facts/trivia about Pandora (which I consider one of the most useful launches of the last few years) though:
- Guy Kawasaki provided the initial seed money for Pandora
- They went through 3 years of bootstrapping before finally getting some money from VCs in 2003
- The day they went to "Free" they got 250,000 visitors
- They're now at 5.5MM registered users!
- Revenue model will remain advertising - Tim is convinced of that
- 90210 is the most popular ZIP code (hint, hint: you have to be a US resident to listen)
- the DMCA enables and restricts Pandora in what they do - so you won't be able to listen to Madonna three times in a row here...
And now the good news - they're adding 15,000! new songs every month and classical music is coming soon!
Cheers to Tim and the free T-Shirt!
On Friday I attended a lunch plus presentation event with Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist. It was organized by the folks at Ibreakfast together with NYU. What's striking about Craig is how genuine he is. You really get the feeling that what you see is what you get with him. No hidden agenda, no public face, no attitude - he's just a straight out nice guy who wants to do good to the community. He describes his job there as (his title is "Chief Customer Representative" or something like that as this:
1) Listen to your customers' wishes
2) Try to help them
What a great way to approach a company - so simple and yet true. And now pair this with the temptations of a 6bn monthly page impressions "empire" - all the power to Craig and his fellow listers for keeping it so real!
