Shonzilla, a pattern-seeking animal

Forgetting the old dog tricks

• Serial entrepreneurs try to prove that their first success wasn’t a fluke. Rather than starting from the basis of technology (“isn’t this cool?”) or customers (“there must be a better way”), the reason for existence is “I’m going to prove that I’m talented.” This is a bull shiitake reason for starting company compared to solving people’s problems or changing the world.

• Serial entrepreneurs cannot distinguish between causation and correlation. The root cause of earlier success may have simply been blind, dumb luck, but few people realize this and even fewer will admit. Thus, they have the hollow arrogance of people who just got lucky instead of people who have been truly tested, and arrogance is a bad thing in entrepreneurs.

• Serial entrepreneurs are likely to use the same methods again. How can you fault them for using the same methods that made the successful the first time? For example, if they built a high-end computer the first time, they build a high-end computer the NeXt time. If they used dealers the first time, they use dealers the second time. If they gave everything away to get eyeballs and sold the company to a bigger, dumber, richer company, they try try that “business model again.”

• Serial entrepreneurs don’t (or can’t) work as hard. When you have a 5,000 square foot house, a second house in Montana, a car made by a company whose name ends in “i,” a spouse, and kids, attitudes change. Indeed, attitudes should change or people never grow up. However, it’s one thing to work to survive and another to work for fulfillment. They can say they’re just as hungry this time, but the point is that no one had to ask if they were hungry the first time.

• Serial entrepreneurs don’t get smacked around enough. Life is good as a serial entrepreneur: they walk in, tell people that their last company was sold for a bazillion dollars, and now they’re starting another one, and it’s a privilege and honor to invest. Who’s going to poke holes in their strategy when Sequioia, Kleiner Perkins Tom-Perkins-Adventure-Capitalist Dec-07 , et al are issuing term sheets and ever lesser venture capitalist is sucking up? No one. And that’s too bad because they won’t get anyone checking their sanity.

• Serial entrepreneurs fill new, unfamiliar roles in their next companies. For example, in the first company the person was an engineer who became the vice-president of engineering who became the CTO. Just because you were good at writing designing chips doesn’t mean you’re CEO material in your next fabulous fabless chip company. As Glenn says in his post, “This means that what I used to be really good at — designing software — I don’t do as much of anymore, and what I never had to learn how to do — manage people – I now do all the time.”

• Serial entrepreneurs hire their buddies who were with them the first time. Thus, the entire founding team suffers from all the problems listed above. People who don’t know what they don’t know are few and far between, but a startup needs this kind of people to push the boundaries of what’s possible in what ways. Ignorance is not only bliss; it’s also empowering.

This thread started with a post on TechChrunch by Glenn Kelman (of Redfin fame) who duly noted that the greatest IT successes (Amazon, Apple, Dell, Ebay, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Yahoo!) came from hungry, inexperienced under-30 technology geeks with an itch to scratch.

The history shows that, once you succeed, it becomes very, very hard to forget what it took to succeed and to repeat that success.

Serial Entrepreneur Behavioral Pattern

It appears that the most successful entrepeneurs follow the same path, where they:

1. create a startup that scratches your own each (or when you “eat your own dog food” if you’re a software developer writing software for other developers)
2. continue to be pationate about it
3. scale it
4. sell it (or merge it)
5. create a new startup in a higher role (tackle higher-level challenges while managing and mentoring youngsters doing the real job)
6. try to figure it all out
7. (reach this point if they succeed in 6)

It rarely happens that someone is both gifted to learn new tricks in a different role and daring enough to follow one’s intuition and passion to repeat the previous success.

Sign of the space-time

(I am updating this entry with a map and open invitation) 

Guys over at Dopplr have published on their blog a map showing where their members (I might call Web2.0 early adopters) have travelled in 2007.

In the spirit of time (Zeitgeist in German they call this Raumzeitgeist, the spirit of the space-time and results can be seen here:

Hopefully everyone out there will have at least one dot away from home this year.

Dopplr requires registration, but it’s invite-only. If you need one, let me know.

[via Dopplr Blog] 

MySpace about to get serious about OpenSocial

MySpace Developer Program 

A couple of days ago MySpace announced receiving pre-registration to their MySpace Developer Program a.k.a. MySpace OpenSocial beta. This is the greatest news coming out of OpenSocial community since it has been made public in November 1, 2007.

For those geeky enough to have heard of OpenSocial - it is an open standard that will enable web-based applications akin to Facebook application to show on any social networking web site (or any web site for that matter) data that are related to you and you choose to display. By data I mean anything, your photos, your favourite movies, your night life recommendations,

You-know-who competition 

This move by MySpace (i.e. News Corp) comes as especially improtant as Facebook is planning to increase their stronghold on the market by syndicating Facebook apps (i.e. allowing Facebook apps and your data shown in them to appear on your personal website).

Friend, pokes, funwalls - OK, now show me the money

All the Generation Next’s favourite online games like broadcasting funny videos, tagging friend’s photos, instant messaging for everyone to see, exchanging pokes and what not - they’re all fun for users of social networking sites and social utilities. The question is why and how can these be profitable to these “social containers” and social application developers, or in other words: where’s the money? Especially interesting is how MySpace’s foray into OpenSocial will earn money for those creating OpenSocial apps and therefore MySpace itself.

It’s hard to tell anything specific. I do not know much and I bet MySpace doesn’t either. ;-)

What is apparent, some players from the Facebook ecosystem (Max Levchin’s Slide) are getting heavily valuated, so there’s fire behind the smoke curtain.

Not much choice

I guess it will necessarily be an ad-based revenue model. It is all about getting more eyeballs, more time spent on the site and ad rolls trying to attract customers while trying to be more relevant and trying to increase conversion. OpenSocial support is supposed to lower the barrier of entry for a tidal wave of applications that will make you spend more time on MySpace.

In my view, Facebook currently has by far a more consistent user experience and application ease-of-use which translates into Facebook’s immense valuation in the market of social networks/utilities. That is Facebook main value proposition to everyone - user, developers and future investors.

OpenSocial needs to iron out many technical hurdles in order to make it easy for significant number of developers to jump ships. In the case of MySpace, it will need to work actively with developers taking part in the MySpace Developer Program while ironing out their revenue model. Being a big company, MySpace (i.e. News Corp.) will almost certainly do both things at the same time, which always proves to be tricky as in such cases target (market and revenue model) is moving even more quickly.

Future, if any and the best way to predict it…

At the end of the value chain are the big name contracts (i.e. the true OpenSocial customers) which will come if OpenSocial makes it easy to develop and safe to use OpenSocial applications.

Also to have in mind is Google Social Graph API, that could be a part of the future online social networking puzzle.

Cards, some of them, are on the table and more chips needs to fly in for the greater developer community to jump the OpenSocial ship.Currently, OpenSocial is something to play with and MySpace Developer Program I expect to be a much better far-less-buggy environment then Orkut Sandbox.

SEO vs. Flipping the Funnel

Doing initial research of SEO techniques this weekend and ended up with a lot of open questions and TODOs, of course. This article is sort of an internal report (albeit public) and reminder (reminding me not to leave an article).

During this research, I’ve stumbled upon a number of tips, topics, and tools/services.

SEO: tips, topics, and tools/services

Tips are numerous to mention. The obvious one is finding a niche, which I should do for this tumbleblog if I wish to make my writing effective and more meaningful. Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense for me to write for just a small bunch of ocassional visitors and/or friends. Talking to myself I do with myself only. ;-) The second obvious one would be build a relevant community. The third one would be follow your (professional) interests rather than … whatever else (e.g. visitor count per se). OK, I might be making these up - well, these tips just seem right to me. I’ll be revising this list and expanding on it as I follow my topics of interest and make some success in the process. Defining success and measuring it are also important topics I’ll be dealing with.

Anyway, here’s a quick list of some tools/services I’ve found:

• Entrecard - Business Card for the Web 2.0 world - exchange information about your website/blog easily and earn credit (not money) to advertise on other people’s webistes.
• SEO for Firefox - SEO information overlayed in Google and Yahoo search results to learn more about what they know about websites when you’re actually searching for them
• SearchStatus - various statistic coming from search engines
• Rubicon project - optimize usage of 300+ ad networks by integrating all the number crunching and statistics in one place
• MeeTimer - measures time spent on websites ;-) (when I realized how I’ve spend half of my weekend)
• StumbleUpon - note to self: create a StumbleUpon account. More on that soon.

Reverse Funnel System

One of the topics that caught my eye is this thing called Reverse Funnel System.

It caught my eye because of Seth Godin’s presentation at Google where doesn’t he talked about marketing strategies for Web2.0 and using “Flipping the Funnel” meme. Now I’ve noticed the e-book, which I might skim through.

Some initial research debunked my initial gut feeling that it might be a scam. Why? It failed the litmus test by eusing varying font sizes, colors and overly enthusiastic claims as any online MLM needs to do, and my gut-powered test because I saw too much emotional buildup that HYIP (i.e. get-rich fast) schemes are famous for. Research to be continued by reading more down-to-earth and balanced reviews.

What’s sure, the sooner you enter the pyramid, the closer you’re to the Pharaoh. ;-)

Follow-up

I will post my insights which will surely be informative… and try to be more terse than I was with my The Email Nirvana posts (part one and two). ;-)

I expect this article to evolve organically during this week so you might want to return and reload.