I feel like i've hit a turning point in my life. Something has happened in the past 6 months, in the past 3 years since leaving Simply Hired & PayPal. I'm not sure when it all clicked, but i've been fortunate to have a lot of wonderful things come my way lately.
Those things include but are not limited to:
working with / investing in great startups like Mint (thx Aaron), SlideShare (thx Rashmi & Jon), TeachStreet (thx Dave), and many others
getting Startup2Startup rolling last year (thx Leonard, Brian, Kat, Saar, & MANY friends/sponsors)
joining FoundersFund this year (thx Sean Parker for giving me a shot)
launching FF Angel LLC and investing in some great startups (thx FF, also Jeff Clavier & many other angels & VCs for great advice)
retooling fbFund & creating the fbFund REV incubator program (thx Cat & folks at FB, Accel & FF, many others)
kicking off GeeksOnaPlane Asia trip (thx Christine, George, lots others)
putting Finance4Founders together & ready to rollout (thx Dan & others)
while this may seem like a laundry list, the one common thread in all of the above projects has been the amazing help of my friends & colleagues. there is no way i could have accomplished any of these efforts without the patience, tolerance, brilliance, and sheer hard work of my home boys & girls. you folks really do rock. (and i know how much of a pain in the butt i am to work with!)
seriously: how lucky am i, to be blessed with so many incredible people in my life, who have given me so much, created such tremendous opportunities... while i remain the lazy, ADD, easily-distracted, crazy sonuvabitch i've always been, who barely manages to make rent each month. i mean, it's nothing short of a miracle that i can find my ass with both hands in the morning, and yet somehow after so many years in the valley i have found a nice little groove. how cool is that.
these days i actually wake up early & excited to do the work i'm doing, happy as a newborn puppy to spend time working on projects with people i like, and i keep pinching myself to make sure this shit doesn't disappear tomorrow. well even if it did, i would treasure the moments thus far...
lastly, i must acknowledge the folks at home who help me find purpose and reason amidst all this insanity... thank you to my wife and our two beautiful kids. you are the light of my life, and your smiles & laughter are precious beyond the treasure and measure of mortal men.
truly, i am a very lucky person. thank you to everyone :)
so i'm just re-arranging deck chairs here, i know... but there's at least 1 or 2 new slides. and a lot more funky colors, for those of you who enjoy my kidnapper-ransomnotefonts & unique style of raping the viewer's attention. Also moved the embed of the original Startup Metrics for Pirates video (from Ignite Seattle / Summer 2007) after slide 23.
yeah, that's a super long-ass headline, i know... it's a personal soundbite from a Stanford BASES E-Challenge panel discussion i participated in earlier tonight over on campus. probably plenty of other people have said something similar previously, but i'll at least claim some original thought.
(note: i've been on blog vacation way too damn long... since before i left for Japan in December really. sometimes if you're not feeling it, you just need to take a break. hopefully i'm back now)
here's my point -- Silicon Valley is WAAAY too infatuated with the ELEGANT IDEALISM of Entrepreneurship (or the GOLLUM GREED of making a shitload of CASH) , rather than the GRITTY REALITY of running a CRAPPY little startup business that will likely GO NOWHERE... which if you've ever been through it, is a tough, painful, low-probability motherfuck of an adventure, aka tragedy. it ain't no merry go round folks (well it is, but not the way you think... probably rollercoasteris a better way to describe it).
now please don't get me wrong.... i'm not here to shit all over your enthusiasm for building a startup. nor am i saying there is anything bad about wanting to make money, or wanting to be your own boss, or to valiantly attempt to defy the odds and create the next Google or whatever.
but i DO hope some of you young-ass whippersnappers get your heads out of your collective asses and get a little more practical about what you're likely to encounter should you decide to do your own startup. and a little more real about what you may face at the end of a rough hand of poker.
to wit: the first time i tried to do my own business, it took 7 years of hard work, below market pay, near bankruptcy (2 or 3 times), broken friendships, damaged relationships, credit card debt up to my ears, ridiculous stress, several missed opportunities for big paydays as a grunt at Microsoft, Intel, Netscape, or Yahoo, all in exchange for a piddly-ass half-million acquisition that barely got me enough cash to put a down payment on a small condo in SF. sure it was a good lesson in learning how to [NOT] run a business, but it was a HARD goddamn lesson. and one i'm pretty sure i never want to repeat. the fact that i still wanted to try and go back out and do another startup AFTER that first effort is prime evidence that i'm either crazy, stupid, or both.
another thing i said tonight is running a startup for the first time is a lot like being a teenager driving a car at high speed -- in fact many high schoolers learning to drive are required to watch a movie about fatal car accidents / drunk driving consequences (WARNING: don't click thru if graphic images disturb you). those movies are sobering in every sense of the word, and they do serve a useful purpose -- to provide negative incentives against doing something stupid that could result in severe harm to you or others.
well most people in venture capital or business school won't tell you this, but first-time entrepreneurs are just as friggin' dangerous as drunk teenagers behind the wheel of a speeding automobile. mostly to themselves, but possibly also to their employees, customers, investors, or family. now every once in awhile, one of them actually manages to make it across the finish line with flying colors... and unfortunately their success may justify VCs throwing their cash away on not just that 1% but also the other 99% who may end up mangled along the side of the road. but that's how it goes -- VC is a hit [and run] business. you just gotta hope you're the Super Model 1% and not the other Wham Bam Thank You Ma'am 99%. Good luck, sucker.
(um dave: wtf does this have to do with your headline dude? hold on buddy, i'm getting there...)
ok, so i have i put the Fear O' God in ya yet? good.
now, if you're still with me at this point, you must be serious about being an entrepreneur. only crazy, ignorant, passionate people would still be reading this, thinking that startups are worth all this hassle.
so when i say "PASSIONATE", what i really mean is PASSIONATE about SOLVING A PROBLEM, and PASSIONATE about BUILDING A GREAT PRODUCT or SOLUTION. it does NOT mean you're infatuated with the idea of being an entrepreneur or a great leader (yeah, bullshit... i know you're still in L-O-V-E LOVE with yourself, but maybe after i've kicked you in the startup balls a few times you'll be less likely to engage in this mental masturbation without a little reality check).
hopefully, being PASSIONATE means you are driven to make someone's life better by understanding their PROBLEM, and perhaps helping create a great SOLUTION to that problem, and possibly even making a buck by actually DELIVERING it to them (... at the cost of $.99 or less, we hope).
yeah, i know it's gonna be tough. and the credit crunch / downturn / whatchamacallit has already changed the balance of power from entrepreneur to investor in less than a month. if you are lucky enough to *GET* financing, your term sheets are gonna suck ass (learn about liquidation preferences & protective provisions). if you are running an existing startup, you are probably going to have to cut spending, cut hiring, and you may even end up firing people / doing layoffs. and then you pay taxes and then you die.
sorry, life's a bitch.
but listen up:
Silicon Valley isn't Wall Street.
Internet Startups are not mortgage finance companies.
and... Entrepreneurs are not supposed to be ClarkKent.
in other words... WAKE. the FUCK. UP.
if you came to Silicon Valley to do a startup (or to join one), it ain't always fun & games. this isn't Disneyland, or a Harlequin romance novel (unless of course you're Tom Perkins). you don't always win every hand of poker, you don't always get a free lunch, an Aeron chair, or free child care.
the popular [mis]conception of startups being free rides to a pile of cash and/or stock options is just so much horse shit.
twenty years ago, i moved out to Silicon Valley after graduating from college. i did not do so with the intent to get rich quick, but neither to live among sheep. i came here for geeks & technology, ultimate frisbee, and a free-wheeling, entrepreneurial spirit that has electrified the valley since The Traitorous Eight walked out of Shockley Semiconductor over 50 years ago and started a Revolution.
while i don't profess to understand credit or capital markets, i do know that internet startups cost less money than ever to get started. and unless i missed something, there are more people online now than ever, spending more money online than ever. and i doubt any of these trends will likely reverse in the long-term -- lower costs, more people online, more e-commerce. doesn't that seem like a pretty good environment for building new online businesses? if not, then what the fuck are you doing here? go back home & get a safe job in insurance or mortgage appraisals (oh, wait a sec...)
the long-term macro trend of growing global internet e-commerce has been the foundation of my own personal startup bets, and why i plan to continue to invest going forward. the companies and people i bet on HAVE to be both optimistic & opportunistic, if only because THE ODDS AGAINST STARTUPS SUCK ***ALL*** THE TIME, not just in downturns. you damn well *better* have a positive attitude, or you're just never going to get out of bed in the morning.
you mean the current market environment scares you?
try making payroll on credit card advances when you're carrying over $100K in personal debt (been there). try dealing with your servers being stolen on new year's day while you're in the middle of trying to close an acquisition (yeah, that sucked too). try looking yourself in the face every morning, knowing 10-20 people depend on you for their jobs & families & kids, and feeling like you're completely inadequate to the task and can't hide it (every day for 3 years).
being an entrepreneur is a friggin' FEAR FACTORY, and a living nightmare every day of the week. this is nothing new. 4 out of 5 small businesses fail within the first few years, and the odds aren't that much different for startups. you are going to be embarrassed, ashamed, labeled as an idiot, shunned, ridiculed, and occasionally driven from the village with pitchforks. on average, YOU ARE GOING TO FAIL. MULTIPLE TIMES, in NEW & INTERESTING ways.
GET USED TO IT.
in fact, the more you are used to failing -- and failing fast, with data on how you fail -- the better off you will be. for a great presentation on how to use speed & fast failure as the ultimate startup weapon, check out mike cassidy's presentation on SPEED: The Ultimate Startup Weapon.
and while we're at it, let me take on this issue of "conserving cash". personally, i think it's the wrong message. the point is not to spend less cash. the point is to FIND YOUR FRIGGIN' BUSINESS MODEL. if you know which direction you're going, it's ok to RUN... on the other hand, if you have no friggin clue where you going, it doesn't matter how slow you crawl you ain't gonna get there. you can slow down your spend until you figure out your business, but once you DO understand it, then by all means
STEP ON THE GAS! use your cash effectively to build product features,
expand marketing, and hopefully use cash-flow positive arbitrage to
MAKE MONEY.
to put it more succinctly: in a down market, it's even more important for you to understand the fundamental metrics of your startup, how activation & retention work, how customer acquisition & referral work, and how to make money. these were always important, just more so now when people are looking harder at #'s.
*PLUG*: for more about how to learn more about Startup Metrics, see our recently completed STARTonomics conference.
Silicon Valley has never been without risk or fear. in fact, quite the opposite -- Silicon Valley is rife with fear & paranoia. and yet GOOD entrepreneurs somehow manage to overcome their fear, somehow make their hopes & dreams bigger than their fear, somehow manage to find imaginative solutions to problems whilst being backed into a corner by a guy with a .44 Magnum who outweighs you by 75 lbs, and nothing in your pockets but a butter knife and a paper clip. it doesn't matter.
Robert just penned a pretty good post on how to tune up your resume for the "economic slowdown". He gets it mostly right (write?) -- do your best to stand out, write a regular blog -- however, i think he's a bit long-winded on his recommendations and overlooks some fundamentals (which he actually does practice, but doesn't mention so much).
So as i commented on Guy Kawasaki's blog almost 2 years ago, i'll summarize again why Resumes are for Shit, and why all you need are 4 basic things to get a kick-ass job (or whatever u want really -- still have to write that post later on why money-sex-power-drugs-guns are pretty much commutable):
a simple LinkedIn profile is nice, but it's not what i'm talking about. you better work, sister(sashay, chante!) -- get your connections into LinkedIn, fill out a work history with different positions you've held & expertise gained, get recommendations from people & partners who you worked with (not just your boss), answer questions on topics that matter in your line of work, etc. most importantly, reference companies, products, skills, and other keywords that are important to you & others (see below).
note that other social networking profiles don't substitute for LinkedIn. there was a time when i thought Facebook might eventually subsume LinkedIn, but i was clearly wr... wr... WRONG (ok there, i said it). both LinkedIn & Facebook -- and for that matter, MySpace as well -- have broadly established & well-entrenched userbase that likely prefer one of those 3 primary SNS platforms. but still most people who call themselves "professionals" should maintain a LinkedIn profile, even if it's not their primary hangout. LinkedIn is *THE* place that most recruiting (or any) professionals use for people search, and LinkedIn search results generally rank at the top for many Google name searches. note: if you have a common name like John Smith, even more reason to create popular content attached to your name to distinguish you from other John Smith's who rank for basketball, accounting, or other types of specialized content.
fyi, Guy was initially a bit of a Luddite re: my suggestion to use LinkedIn + Blog as alternatives to a traditional resume, however he came around later and penned one of the single most useful posts about LinkedIn i've ever read (tip: an old friend may have helped change his mind on that one). if you haven't checked it out, i strongly encourage you to do so. Guy doesn't really need LinkedIn, but his suggestions are top notch.
2) write a regular blog, and 3) ABSOLUTELY DOMINATE selected keywords (the ones that matter to you or others).
surprisingly, this doesn't take as much work as you'd think.
if you write regularly, passionately, & intelligently about topics people care about (ie: search for), use appropriate keywords in headlines & titles, you'll start to rank for that content rather quickly. in fact, i've accidentally blogged about topics / keywords i don't really care about, but ended up ranking for anyway.
let me explain.
NEWSFLASH: there are a lot of people out there who blog. a few of these crazy people blog regularly. a few of those few know how to use keywords in headlines, and how link text & basic SEO fundamentals work. a very small further few write well and are fun & interesting to read. however, there are very very VERY few people who blog regularly, interestingly, & specifically with respect to the keywords they care about. if you are one of these people, you can rather easily become king of your (perhaps small but focused) hill, by using regular & interesting blog posts that score well and rank for search keywords of note. it also helps if you include or embed photos or other media (see #4).
you can of course use other search-friendly sites & services as
distribution for your content & keywords, but blogs (& blog
headlines) are pretty well optimized for search so it's probably the
easiest place to start... tho twitter & friendfeed & a few other notable services work well to amplify & distribute original signal from your blog or other social platforms. i'll describe some of these below.
4) create notable online social media (video, pictures, presentations, etc) relevant to your line of work and link [to] them / embed them on your blog, your LinkedIn profile, and other online sites.
this one is actually overlooked by a number of very thoughtful (but not very colorful) bloggers. i once wrote a post about Facebook licensing their platform to Bebo in response to Google launching OpenSocial. the copy was pretty much empty blather except for the somewhat insane graphic at right that i created using powerpoint, and then uploaded to Flickr (and also to SlideShare), then embedded in the post. i probably spent about 5 minutes writing the post, but i killed most of an afternoon (3-4 hours) putting together one silly image to satisfy my own freakish psychotic social network addiction. the photo later got picked up by several other bloggers, and when i checked just now the Flickr photo had over 6000 views. the SlideShare presentation (just one slide) has about 5600 views. and the photo comes up on the first page of google image search results for the term "social graph". whaddya know: my crazy-ass graphic is DOMINATING the social graph term! and i bet my post gets more awareness than any ten other high-and-mighty bloggers who wrote some in-depth intellectual analysis (yeah i know i do that shit too).
people love images, and they watch a lot more TV than they read. you've heard "a picture says a thousand words"? well as far as blogs are concerned, it's damn well true. i'd even go so far as to say there is such a thing as keyword visual arbitrage -- essentially, that there are high-volume search terms with low-volume associated images or video, that you can draft off and use to discover & attract new audience. this may seem like link-baiting, but actually it's just satisfying market demand for visual imagery around key terms that people have expressed an interest in.
in fact, i'm often criticized by several folks who say that my trademark "ransom notekidnapper" font style choices -- bold, underlined, enlarged, or many-colored fonts -- clearly let people know i am both childish and insane. and some folks may be right that it is incredibly annoying and odd, but it is a visual brand choice i've made (whether consciously or not ;) whatever your perspective, i've developed my own special (olympics?) audience. the choice of using "AARRR!" as an acronym for my "Startup Metrics for Pirates" is pretty much the auditory complement to the visual point above.
if you don't care to be quite as lunatic as i, you can simply use embed code and links to bring your popular social media from other sites & services into your blog or social profiles. i'm particularly fond of Flickr (graphics), YouTube (video), and SlideShare (powerpoint), as these services are also destination sites in themselves, and drive their own unique traffic to content you distribute on those sites. many people who do embed rich content also overlook this fact -- that the same content redistributed on multiple platforms can draw incremental users & attention, and that some of these platforms may be better at driving relevant traffic than your own blog or text-based sites/services.
in short, the rich media you associate with your blog and certain keywords also DEFINE WHO YOU ARE and WHAT YOU MAKE / USE / ENJOY. if you can cleverly associate social media -- literally, media to share with other people -- with your persona, and with specific tags & keywords, then you can merge these things into one.
in summary: you become a notable social object by associating rich media & keyword text with the person you are on blogs and social network profiles.
in closing, i include below examples of the graphic, video, and powerpoint content associated with "Startup Metrics" that i typically embed on my blog & social profiles:
This is an initial brainstorm presentation i put together on Facebook fundamentals (social network, social platform, FB Connect, FB Payments), for a discussion with some folks in entertainment media about social networks & platforms. Much of it is high-level & speculative, however it might be useful for other folks to think about.
(Note: any guesstimates i make about Facebook Connect and/or Facebook Payments are highly subjective, and likely to be very, very wrong... so please don't assume i know what the hell i'm talking about here. Caveat Emptor.)
ok, so even after alltheseannouncements about data portability, no one seems to understand what the hell i keep talking about re: using email & IM messaging data stores to improve targeting & make friend lists work better. i admit it's a bit inside-baseball, but it's actually pretty simple.
the thing is, i actually DO believe we're on the verge of something game-changing here. i DO believe that the social gestures & interactions pioneered on Live Journal & then Facebook & now Google & MySpace are slowly going to migrate over to the rest of the web, and energize all of our normally boring websites with social cues & viral behaviors.
HOWEVER: i'm really friggin' tired of a popup with 50 of my 1000 friends (whose names all seem to begin with 'A') or being asked to upload my address book (over 2000 contacts, many of whom are email lists or people i don't know) to use as a viral distribution method.
in fact, i don't trust ANY of you -- friends or websites or apps -- any further than i can throw [a sheep at] you.
just cause i've accepted an invite to be your friend, or happened to find you on a website, or in a forum or group i've passed by in the online version of a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am-for-the-one-night-stand, DOES NOT MEAN i want to know what you had for dinner last night, who you knocked boots with lately, or if your new social networking startup for Retired Dread Pirate Roberts or website for exterminatingRodents Of Unusual Size is worth bazillions.
on the other hand, there probably IS a small subset of crazy peeps who i DO want to share your shit with, but it's probably only ~10 people in my potential network of 1000. and i want to figure out how to choose 10 targeted people quickly & easily out of my random network of 1000. (and probably only 1-3 of those folks will really take a look, but those are the ones you want).
so let me state that more clearly.
PROBLEM: when i'm on a website or social network or social app, it wants me to help refer other people / help with some lame-o viral marketing scheme. however, i'm only gonna do that for a select few who really share my context / insanity, not everyone in my network (unless my name is Robert Scoble).
what I DO NOT WANT:
select from a god-awful list of 100 faces in your pop-up face listbox
upload my entire address book of 2000+ contacts for you to spam the world
wait for your data-loading / selection function to crash horribly, after taking forever to load
what I DO WANT:
popup the MOST RELEVANT 5-10 peeps who meet certain key criteria
use an intelligent combination of shared interests & messaging frequency to figure out who these "TOP" friends are (for the given context)
let me select 1-3 of them to invite & checkout an awesome [video game | baby stroller | new book | really good pr0n] i just found
SOLUTION: let's see now. WHERE? can i find an easily accessible data store with info on how frequently i contact other people, already-indexed relevant keywords for conversations i've had with those folks, and provides a built-in distribution method for sharing further information & content?
ANSWER: why, it's EMAIL! you stupid mofo. and also your IM client, and your SMS history on your cellphone, and nowadays your photostream & Facebook wall & tweetstream & everything else related to the Centralized ME.
Now, WHO has the largest collection of email / IM data on the web? Well i'm guessing the order looks something like this:
Yahoo (~400-500M email users, ~10 years of data)
Microsoft (~300-400M email users, ~10 years of data)
AOL (~100-150M email users, ~15 years of data)
Google (~100-150M email users, ~5 years of data)
note for the record, MySpace & Facebook also have a shitload of this data, as do other social networks, altho like Google they're a bit newer to the game than Yahoo, Microsoft, & AOL who've been collecting all that data for over a decade.
ditto for cellphone carriers, especially in geographies where text messaging is more prevalent (= non-US, altho we're finally catching up). except you don't really have to worry about these guys, since they're even more clueless than the big web platform dinosaurs.
But now that everyone has FINALLY woken up, the next step is to put all this shit together & make it useful for everyone else OUTSIDE the walled garden. In short, that means:
Use 3rd-party acct infrastructure to provide "no login rqd" single sign-on
Use profile data for landing page customization & campaign targeting
Use email data for friend lists, filtered by msg frequency & keywords
Use all of the above to enable viral distribution on the non-social web
Use payment info (after MSFT/GOOG buy AMZN/EBAY) to buy stuff
Platform vendors -- at the very least Google & Microsoft, hopefully Yahoo & AOL too -- should be offering these enhanced services for any 3rd-party sites that utilize the above infrastructure. Perhaps it will take further consolidation to make this happen. My guess is one camp eventually is Microsoft + Yahoo + Facebook + Amazon, and another is Google + AOL + MySpace + eBay, but those parts could fit together slightly differently. Regardless, once you combine portals + search + social networks + messaging + commerce, you get a very very interesting & quite lucrative combination of assets.
Those assets SHOULD be utilized to create a Web Operating System which in turn drives the implicit web that accelerates user acquisition, improves activation & retention, energizes referral, and eventually drives substantial increases in revenuefor a whole new wave of web 3.0 startups.
follow me on Twitter
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=6b77befc-50d2-4081-ae65-9b3c3dca5d5f)
2) write a regular 
the simple thing is -- 
Recent Comments