Notes from joe krause preso:
Joe Kraus
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1) Test your business plan early
2) Like olympic trials. Every success leads to a tougher round. Keep enjoying success. Stakes raised every victory.
But important to celebrate and keep motivating
3) Differences between 1996 and 2006
- Easier to start a company, but same difficulty to start a business
- Funding is more available than ever
- more succesful exits than before
- Difference between need/take
- example of funding of 250,000 at 500K premoney
- 3.75M exit = 5x return for the investors
- example of funding at 5M at 10M premoney
- 5x return means a sale price = 75M
- Persist
- Hire people with talent.
Today is startupschool! When i applied to startup school initially, i wasn’t really sure if i’d have my ideas developed this far along by end of april. But, i am in the thick of developing the ideas into a company and i got accepted to startupschool. In fact, i totally forgot about startup school and made other personal travel plans. I came back from it last night and here i am getting out to stanford.
Joe Kraus was the first, I was few mins late and missed a good bit of his talk. The place is packed and it’s got great energy. There is no wi-fi though. Kinda sucks. I am posting this in lunch break from my home.
Notes follow in the next posts. Note: they are very raw
Dave Shen (dshen) is blogging. Dave was the first designer at yahoo! creating the original yahoo! logos, look and feel, the jumping y! guy. He was *the* leader for UED for a long time before moving on couple of years back. Not that he needs my endorsement, but he is an extremely innovative, forward thinking, product/idea guy. Go read his blog.
As I mentioned in the post here, i wanted to think through about some guiding principles for the ideas i am planning to work on. It’s not that i don’t have any ideas that are worth working on, or i have some writers block. I do think that i have some very interesting and compelling product ideas. I am very excited by the possibilities and how these products can improve people’s daily lives. Add to that, there’s real, meaningful (100M+) revenue opportunity and while these products may or may not make that much money, big market sizes attract investment.
On my last day at yahoo!, I got the opportunity to spend a bit of time with James Slavet. James is a VP at yahoo! and a rising star. While the title of VP is obviously official, the rising star tag is my own. I had the good fortune to work closely with him and learnt a lot from him in a short duration. Coming back to my last day, the first thing he asked me in our short meeting that day was my definition of success. I stuttered for a response and he went to tell me how he was asked by someone he respects (Let’s call him James++) that same question. Upon an unsatisfactory answer from James, James++ proceeded to say that he was succesful in life. James++ was successful because he has a happy family, great grand children and they all have really good relationships amongst them. The point was to look at success as something beyond prosperity. Just as paul graham pointed out that money is not wealth, prosperity is not success. This was a great insight, simple but something that we don’t pay attention to in the daily rat race.
I was thinking more and more about what would be success for aXooba (pronounced uh-zooba). Building a product, building a product that’s useful, raising money, making revenues, being profitable, selling the company for a good profit for all involved, and a list of other simiar things, don’t quite seem to hit the mark. I suppose ultimately, everyone and every company should determine the definitions of their own success. Since, aXooba is me at this point, I’ll use my definitions of success. I also know for sure, success is not a milestone, it’s a process, a path. It’s not a stage that a company reaches, but a path.
Once i started looking at various companies’ mission statements, i quickly realized that quite a few of these profit making machines are sensitive. All the companies listed there have some sort of vision, mission, that reflect their definition of success and give insight into their values. Of course, some of them (like kellog) just have a set of values posted. Google, of course, did not even get into the semantics of vision/value/principle, but just posted ten things. Google’s mission statement, is quite a lot more succint. Yahoo’s mission statement , also lists out core values. Reading all those, really no company ever comes out and says that their primary and most important goal is to make ton of money. I guess no surprises there. I think the question to think about is, to what extent that company and it’s employees continue to understand and reflect the values.
The important thing is though, is to clearly state those principles and philosophies what ever they might be, early on in the company’s lifecycle. This does not mean that they are not adaptable. It just means that stating the values upfront means you have better chance of attracting people who agree with that philosophy and overall a better chance of sticking to the values.
For aXooba, I don’t know if I have 10 things or 6 core values. I know for sure that not only do i have to set principles, they have to be tied into clear actionable policies/programs/activities company undertakes.
The first one is about customers. The 2nd about giving back.
Our company’s lawfirm - WSGR - organized a “coaching” session with sequoia for some of the entrepreneurs they represent. My coach happened to be mike moritz - who’s prior successes include google & yahoo. He’s also recognized as #1 midas by forbes.
The format required that i make a short presentation covering the basics of the idea. I had to be in the wsgr offices by 8:20 am and that mean i had about 36 hours. I panicked a little bit, but rushed to create a preso that would work for this meeting.
This morning, i met mike finally. The meeting went off very smoothly. Mike seemed like a very nice, smart guy. It was very helpful and encouraging to listen to discuss the idea. Net/net i walked away with a very positive feeling about the idea, and charged up to execute.
Dorrian (mozes founder) told me in our first meeting that while doing a startup somedays are great and somedays just aweful. This definitely is a great start for the day
Google finance launched last night. I was expecting them to launch google finance for a while, so i wasn’t totally surprised when katie stanton - google finance product manager - pinged me after the launch on messenger.
The front page looks like a simplified version of yahoo! finance. There are no currency links, mortgage rates, links to deeper parts of site (actives, indices, bonds, etfs, options etc). So the home page emphasizes huge search box, top indices summary, Major market news, Most recently looked up stocks and related news. There’s tons of other “crud” on yahoo! finance page, most notably ads (big expand on mouseover ads) and ads pretending as content (For example banking center, credit card center etc) that google did away with that’s very good.
The quotes page itself, again has no ads, has quite a bit of content presented very well. Despite having a lot of content, the page looks organized and here are some early thoughts
Overall a great quotes page. But the best thing about their site is not this page. The feature i love best about google finance is search. You can type in company name, sector, ticker symbol, still get great results. Y! finance ticker symbol look up is pretty bad and they have just chosen not to solve that problem. (Note: I was part of the team that implemented this solution on y! finance - more on that at the end of this post). You can type in random strings and still get decent strings. I tried, “games”, “bonds”, “actives”, “movies”, “wireless”, “wireless chips”, “studios”. Most results are satisfactory. Strange things to note - i got a quote RDY when i asked for actives & I got SIFY in the results back when i typed “movies”. Overall pretty good.
There are quite a few nit picks, including no RSS feeds for news, limited portfolios etc, but overall it’s a really good first effort from Google.
Now for some background. I was part of the Y! Finance engineering team from late 1996 through 2000. I was/am very proud of the product we built there. We built the best finance site on the web. A lot of content that was inaccessible and/or expensive before y! finance was free to use and easy to understand because of our product. Even now, overall Y! finance is a very good site.
However, for a while now, i felt that y! finance stopped innovating, they stopped trying to solve hard problems. Message boards/groups was an acknowledged problem, there’s quite a few other discussions that happen in the finance team. I hope the good folks in finance who want to build better and more innovative products gain strength from the launch of Google Finance. I really hope that there will be renewed focus from yahoo on finance properties. I wish all the Y! Finance folks the very best in beating google, because google finance is indeed a really good product and worthy competitor.
http://www.craigslist.org/pen/eng/142558340.html
if you are the one, write back at ravi at dronamraju dot com
I discovered naval’s blog and also about Vast couple of days back. Today i come across paul kedrosky’s review about Vast.com and it’s strategy.
Vast.com is a vertical search engine for classifieds. I can think of few yahoo!s that will go - “I tried really hard to convince the powers @yahoo! that we should build this 2 years back!, but we did not invest in this area”. Vast claims to have a lot of listings (4m+ cars, 6m+ jobs etc) and the number of listings is very important in the classifieds market. Vast.com as a site looks pretty good, but i’d have to play with a bit more to see what they do well.
Paul noted that they make all of the listings available via 3rd party apis for free, even for commercial use. He seemed quite surprised by it. My take is, that it’ simple. In the classifieds business, listings are content, and listings are ads. Ads and content are the same thing! So by allowing people to syndicate listings, vast is simply expanding their distribution. If you are familiar with classifieds business, it’s obvious why you do it. Classifieds Ads (listings) are worth based on distribution. You’d be willing to pay 40$/listing in ebay, where a lot of people would see your ad, but probably not be willing to pay 10$/listing on my blog. The more your distribution, the higher the listing fees you can charge. Also, ebay/autotrader illustrate that the site with most listings(most ads, most content) draws disproportionately higher traffic.
So, this seemingly philanthropic move is quite simply, the most sensible business move.
Good luck Vast.com!
I have been thinking for while about building some of my ideas. The cool thing is the freedom to experiment, follow one’s beliefs and the hope to make a vision into a real product. I guess quite a lot has been said in the blogosphere recently about risk/reward of a startup. There is a lot to glean from the words of paul graham whether it’s about wealth/value, funding, startup.
I am trying to internalise a lot of what i read. Every blog article seems to start out about simplifying things and saying a lot of complex words. What ever work i embark on, i do want to set up rules or guiding principles before i start.
In this morning’s post about a newly minted startup -minti, michael arrington says
This is another “walled-garden” solution - meaning the founders did all of the easy web 2.0 stuff - ajax, tagging, comments, etc. - but couldn’t make the hard choices when it came to site architecture and fell back on old web 2.0 ways of doing things.
I hope he meant old web 1.0 ways. Either that, or we are on web3.0 and i don’t know it yet. The main point of his review though, is about websites that do visually cool stuff, yet don’t really “get it” - minti being one of the site that don’t get it.
This brings up an interesting question. What is the minimal set of criteria a company/product must meet to be web 2.0? I guess there is a concrete set in people’s mind , but are there principles that can be articulated? I know a checklist is definitely not web 2.0, how about a manifesto - ala agile manifesto?