Sunday, October 25, 2009

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Sergey Brin Donates $1 Million To Organization That Helped Him Migrate To The U.S.

Posted: 25 Oct 2009 08:46 AM PDT

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has donated $1 million to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), the organization that played a critical role in helping his family escape anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and migrate to the States thirty years ago.

The New York Times ran an article and interview with Brin about the donation this weekend, revealing that Sergey’s mother, scientist Eugenia Brin, is also a Director of the organization.

In the interview, Sergey Brin notes that he and his wife, Anne Wojcicki, would like to engage “more substantially” in philanthropic endeavors, acknowledging that the $1 million donation is relatively small if you consider that fact that his personal wealth is now an estimated $16 billion according to the Times. So far, the Brin family has donated over $30 million to charity, particularly to organizations who are involved with Parkinson's disease.

Notably, Brin cites Microsoft founder and Chairman Bill Gates as an example:

Mr. Brin noted that Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, was widely criticized for not giving away enough money but is now known as one of the world's leading philanthropists. "While everyone was criticizing him, he was generating a whole lot more money for his foundation, and ultimately, when he got serious about philanthropy, he did it really well," Mr. Brin said. "I'd like to learn from that example."

In case you’re not familiar with the story of Brin growing up in the Soviet Union: Sergey was born in Moscow in 1973 and immigrated to the United States after moving to Paris, France for a couple of months at the age of six, when his parents found that the anti-Jew sentiments in their native country was blocking their professional careers. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society reportedly aided the Brins by helping them navigate the process of immigrating, helped them apply for visas and even supported them financially.

As the saying goes: what goes around, comes around.

HIAS CEO Gideon Aronoff said the gift will be used for increasing the organization's use of technology, supporting advocacy on immigration policy, and more.

(Pic of Sergey Brin when he was only 8 years old courtesy of NY Times – also check out the video of his surprise appearance at the Web 2.0 Summit)

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imo.im Quietly Building One Solid Multi-Network Instant Messaging App

Posted: 25 Oct 2009 07:42 AM PDT

When I first covered imo.im back in February, I wrote it was one of the best Web apps for instant messaging you’d likely never heard of, and chances are you’ve forgotten all about it since then. To be honest, so had I, but the team got in touch last week to let us know it had added some useful new features to the service over the past few months and that we should give it another look. We aim to please, so here goes.

Imo.im is a multi-network IM tool, which means you can use it to log on to multiple messaging services like Windows Live Messenger / MSN, AIM / ICQ, MySpace, Yahoo Messenger, Jabber, Gtalk and even Skype and get a single, complete contact list from inside your browser and chat with people on your list using text, voice or video. It also boasts a basic desktop client, which is unfortunately still Windows-only.

Recently, imo.im added Facebook Chat to its list of supported IM services, which was about the only one it sorely lacked when I first wrote about the app. Now that its supports chat sessions with your Facebook friends as well, it’s more than ever a close competitor to better-known startups who offer web-based IM clients like Meebo and eBuddy Webmessenger. And it supports Skype chat in addition to the classic ones, which – correct me if I’m wrong – I have yet to see integrated in any other web-based application (note that apps for mobile devices like fring and Nimbuzz support Skype chat).

Also new in imo.im is a ‘broadcast’ feature that allows users to send free messages out to other imo.im users (e.g. job openings, chat invitations, etc.) and a complementary photo sharing service that allows people to share images with other users across all networks. Finally, the startup is experimenting with a ‘whiteboard’ feature that enables users to work on diagrams, drawings and more with each other. Next up: perfecting the service’s search and chat history functionality.

Also on the roadmap is an iPhone application, which the startup aims to put up on the App Store in the coming weeks (we’ll be watching).

The company, which was co-founded by Georges Harik – one of the first 10 employees at Google and manager of several of its early products – claims it has so far attracted half a million users to try out its service even though it’s still in alpha mode looking at the logo.

Give it a whirl – no registration or download required – and tell us what you think.

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NSFW: Weezer, plane crashes and everything else that’s worrying about the real-time web

Posted: 24 Oct 2009 09:05 PM PDT

1250698774-weezerA little before 9pm on Wednesday night and I’m standing on the ‘VIP’ balcony of San Francisco’s Regency Ballroom, holding a can of something called ‘MySpace Buzz’ and waiting for Weezer to take to the stage. It’s a weird scene, all told, and not just because I thought Weezer was dead.

The bulk of the weirdness stems from the make-up of the crowd: a dozen feet below me in the main auditorium there are maybe a couple of thousand writhing teenagers – Weezer fans to a (wo)man, cheering and shouting and jumping and sweating and doing all the things I remember doing a little over a decade ago.

These are the invited fans; those lucky enough to have been chosen to attend this ’secret show’, organised by MySpace. You know, for kids. Every so often one of the stage lights picks out a tiny puff of smoke in the crowd. Ah, you crazy kids and your pot: I feel like I’ve been transported back in time.

By contrast, there are no kids up on the VIP balcony. Instead there are the ‘important guests of MySpace’ – or at least those who had enough sway with MySpace PR to get on the invite list. If you’d told me back in 2001 – the last time I last saw Weezer live – that when I next saw them I’d be standing next to noted-non-rock-kids Scoble and Loic LeMeur (”is zis Weezer a famous band?”), I wouldn’t have believed you. I’d also have asked you what ’scobul’ is.

And yet despite the obvious differences between the two groups -the kids down there and the grown ups up here – there is one thing we have in common. Almost everyone – young or old – has a phone in their hand.

As befits their demographic, the kids are using their Nokias as cameras – pointing them at the stage in anticipation of their heroes’ arrival. And as befits our demographic, we grown ups are using our iPhones to tweet that same anticipation, but only – of course – after we’d checked in to the venue on Foursquare. “Wow. The real-time web is awesome”, I remarked, to no one in particular.

And Weezer, to their credit, agreed with my sarcasm. After their first song – Hash Pipe, if you’re interested – Rivers Cuomo came to the front of the stage to talk to the audience. For a man who has been doing this longer than most of the crowd have been alive, he was oddly ill at ease. Still, he had the measure of his fans: “remember,” he said “this is a secret gig, so shhhhhh, no writing about it on Facebook or Twitter.”

Somewhere across the room, a MySpace PR groaned, and threw herself off the VIP balcony.

Cuomo was joking of course – a ham-fisted attempt at a target reference – but there was a strange and tragic truth in his plea. I mean, what were we all doing? Filming and tweeting and checking in rather than just putting our phones away and enjoying the gig. Why does the world need two thousand photos of the same band on the same stage, all taken from a slightly different angle. That kind of 360 degree imagery might have been useful on the day Kennedy was shot – not least because it would have kept Oliver Stone quiet – but for a Weezer gig? And what’s the point of checking in on Foursquare at a ticketed event that no one else can get into. You might as well tweet “I’m a dick” and be done with it.

And yet this real-time mentality – pictures/tweets or it didn’t happen – continues to seep into every aspect of our lives, both personally and professionally. Whereas once we might attend a conference to watch the speakers and perhaps learn something, today our priority is to live blog it – to ensure our followers know we’re on the inside; first with whatever news might be broken. And it’s not just journalists doing the live-blogging, but anyone with a laptop and a wifi connection.

Hell, we can’t even have lunch or drinks with a friend without tweeting, Foursquaring and probably photographing the occasion. No matter how unimportant the event, the actual experience of something has become secondary to our capturing of it and telling our followers. (Even celebrities aren’t immune – to the point where studios like Disney have started to include non-Tweet clauses into contracts to stop their stars real-time broadcasting spoilers and gossip from on-set.)

Worse still, we’re told that this is the future. The real-time web – a web where every single thought that enters our head, or image that passes our eyes, can be instantly captured, shared and archived for the approbation of our friends and followers. At O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Summit both Google and Microsoft announced deals with Twitter to integrate tweets with search results. Marissa Mayer proudly boasted that this would allow Google users to find information so fresh that there hadn’t even been time for anyone to write a proper indexable blog post about it. No more of that irritating forethought or composition.

The week before O’Reilly’s event, ReadWriteWeb hosted a ‘Real Time Web Summit‘ to talk about all things instant. Last year’s LeWeb in Paris had the somewhat nebulous theme of ‘Love’; this year the theme is – yep – the real-time web. Hell, even TechCrunch is in on the game with its ‘Real-Time Crunch-Up’s. And of course every ten minutes somewhere in the world, Jeff Pulver is hosting another of his 140 Characters conferences. I hear the one in Antarctica is a sell-out.

The assumption at all of these events is the same: real-time is where we’re heading; real time is good. Newspapers were good, cable news was great, blogs were better, instant attention bursts are best.

Hmmmm.

This week, the Christian Science Monitor reported that American judges are having to remind jurors that they’re not allowed to tweet from the jury room. I shit you not. In February, a juror in the trial of an Arkansas lumber supplier tweeted – during deliberations – his opinion that the defendant’s company will “probably cease to exist, now that their wallet is 12m lighter.” Meanwhile in Philadelphia, a juror posted daily updates from the courtroom including – and this is awesome – on the eve of their verdict: “stay in touch for a big announcement on Monday everyone.”

Don’t touch that dial, folks, we’ll be in jaw-dropping contempt of court right after these messages.

Less illegal, but just as worrying, is how the real-time generation reacts whenever disaster strikes. I first noticed the trend back in 2005 when London’s transport network was bombed by mentally defective al-Quaeda fan-boys. The first footage to emerge from the attacks was not from the BBC or CNN but camera phone imagery taken by survivors as they walked through the Underground tunnels to safety. The pictures caused all manner of hand-wringing at the time: is that what has become of London’s famous Blitz spirit, pundits asked, documenting our fellow man’s suffering as if it were some macabre reality show that we might want to re-watch time and again with our friends? Just four years later – after the Hudson crash and a hundred other real-time news events – we wouldn’t bat an eyelid.

Advocates of the real-time web argue that this is simply a branch of citizen journalism – a desire by those holding the cameras and laptops to ensure that the world knows that something dramatic is happening. In truth the desire is far more cynical: to ensure that the world knows that we were there when something dramatic happened. I was on the scene, I was somewhere you weren’t – and I have the photos and tweets and videos to prove it. Check out my YouTube account; follow me on Twitter. LOOK AT ME, LOOKING AT THIS.

And it’s not just a question of micro-ego: when a juror is tweeting teasers from the jury room, part of them must know that a guilty verdict is much more exciting to their audience than one of innocence. How can that not subconsciously influence them? Likewise when we – the real-time generation – watch someone being attacked in the street or a plane crashing into our building and instinctively reach for our phones, can we be sure that our first impulse will be to dial 911, rather than firing up Tweetdeck or clicking the camera icon to ensure we get props for being there? I mean, really sure? In a perverse twist on the uncertainty principle, knowing that our behavior is being observed inevitably changes it for the more dramatic. Just look at reality TV.

And that’s when the real-time web – for all the attention it’s getting right now – starts to look less like a brave new world, and more like the path to a hideous dystopia. A world where our reaction to any event, no matter how serious, is influenced, not by what’s right, but by how it will play with our micro-audience. An audience that, thanks to Google and Microsoft’s wholehearted support of the real-time web, is about to get even bigger and more tempting.

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Sergey Brin’s Surprise Web 2.0 Visit: The Video

Posted: 24 Oct 2009 07:51 PM PDT

On Thursday, Google co-founder Sergey Brin made a surprise visit to the Web 2.0 Summit and was interviewed on-stage by John Battelle for about 18 minutes. Our full notes from that day are here, but the video above gives a good sense of where Brin’s head is at right now. Also check out his what he’s wearing on his feet at the beginning. I’m not sure if those are shoes or rubber socks.

Brin touches on Twitter, Bing, Android, the growing network of Google alums heading up other companies, the book settlement, his surprising lack of baseball knowledge, and Chrome for Mac, among other subjects.

He points out that search ads were at the bottom of the barrel when Google started. They were considered the equivalent of remnant ads, but that Google’s success is due to seeing value where nobody else was looking. In the same way, he says, it is impossible to predict where the most value will be created on the Web in the future.

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Startup School: Mark Pincus Talks About Becoming A Great CEO, With Tony Robbins’ Help

Posted: 24 Oct 2009 05:23 PM PDT

Zynga founder Mark Pincus is the final speaker at Y Combinator Startup School 2009. My notes on his talk are below.

Pincus kicked off his talk by asking the audience how many wanted to become great entrepreneurs (much of the room raised their hand). But fewer raised their hand about becoming a world class CEO, which is something Pincus says they need to address.

Out of college, Pincus says he went into banking and then business school, after which he worked in major corporations. He says that sometimes entrepreneurs are born after finding that nothing lese works for them, explaining “I got kicked out of some of the best companies in America”.

Pincus’s first lesson: You should set a goal for what you want to accomplish. Pincus says he was Fred Wilson’s first consumer deal (”he loaned me $250k and gave me four months to do something”). He started FreeLoader. The company was acquired, but the CEO of the company that bought it “had a nervous breakdown”. At this point Pincus says he had his ‘greencard’ to be an entrepreneur.

Pincus said that after selling FreeLoader, he had some downtime — ”And then you get a new group of friends… A ghetto version of the show Entourage” — friends go out on Monday night at 1:30. But that gets old after a couple months.”

Pincus then started another company, called Support.com. “We created this service that nobody wanted, figured out quickly that nobody wanted it.” Pincus says that when you have a friend who has a ‘hairbrained’ idea that they think nobody understands yet — you may want to have an intervention. If you have an idea that can’t get funding, it may be a good idea, but it may be a bad idea. “What I would do is find five friends, give them your pitch, write a powerpoint as if you had $30 million in funding, and come back and tell me here’s what my service will be when this is spent.”

Support.com had core technology that let you clone old PC into new PC called MoveIt. Interviewed people on the street, and they wanted a way to move kids’ games to their new computer. So they actually had something people wanted, even if it wasn’t the core focus of the company.

Pincus says the second lesson he’s learned: not having a clear goal when you set out leads to death by a thousand compromises.

Death by a thousand compromises
Pincus says there’s no such thing as an independly controled company. Your VCs get some board seats, they say let’s both select an independent guy. You find out at the first board meeting the independent guy looks to the investors and says “it’s their money”. Someone else is running your company, and because he’s backing you and he’s a first time netrepreneur, you’re not getting the head of the firm. First day as the VC, and they’re proving themselves on you. And junior VCs are junior for a reason. If you have a conversation with John Doerr, he’ll say yeah, let’s do that. Junior guy is more nervous about the downside. So when you’re successful, they say this company is so valuable, you’ve never run a big company any more, so they talk about hiring a COO. Then you find out there is no world class COO who would work for a 20-something year old (except for Mark Zuckerberg). So then you have to make them CEO. Death by a thousand compromises. Pincus says after an ordeal like this, he was left with a public company that was profitable but he wasn’t fulfilled.

Pincus says he then went to Tony Robins (seriously). Attendees at the conference consisted of 4000 out-of-work realtors. But it works. Robbins says to set very high goals but take any path to get there.

With Zynga, Pincus says he wanted to make a company that put out a consumer service that would be around and would matter for a long time. As Tony Robins says, “Control Your Destiny”. In 2007, he says you don’t have the luxury of just building a feature, you have to build the whole thing.

Referring back to his issues with the board, If you’re profitable, you can control your board. He says we negotiate for the wrong thing because we don’t know what our goals are. “Who gives a shit what your valuation is? At the end of the day your valuation will be more impacted by a board made up by a bunch of old white men who show up once a month for half a day. It’s a lot easier if you just tell them what you’re going to do”.

Second Thing.
“You ought to all aspire to be a great CEO”. When you have a big company, you need to either find someone else to be the CEO, or you’re the CEO. He says the odds are more in your favor if you go to a company where you go to a company like Facebook, Zappos, or Zynga, where we help create CEOs.

On Fake CEOs:
Pincus says a fake CEO is someone who goes out, does talks and photoshoots, while something at the company is “on fire”. Says that he was supposed to be doing a talk at Harvard Business School, but canceled because he had to be there for the launch of Facebook’s changing News Feed.

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Startup School: Tony Hsieh On Delivering Happiness

Posted: 24 Oct 2009 04:25 PM PDT

IMG_5137

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh has taken the stage at Startup School this afternoon to talk about company culture and delivering happiness. Hsieh started out by talking about his beginnings at LinkExchange, a company he sold to Microsoft in 1998. The reason LinkExhange sold to Microsoft was because of the company culture, according to Hsieh. After LinkExhange, Hsieh was an investor in Zappos, and two months after the founding of Zappos, Hsieh came in as the CEO. Zappos started in 1999 with no sales, and last year in 2008, had over $1 billion in gross sales. Hsieh mentioned that the biggest source of revenue for Zappos is word of mouth, as well as repeat sales.

Zappos is best known for their customer service. When Zappos started out, there was no company culture. In 2003, Zappos decided that they needed to differentiate themselves from all the other companies, and chose customer service. Zappos now follows the 3 C’s; Clothing, Customer Server and Culture.

Now, in 2009, Zappos is all about delivering happiness, both for employees and customers. What makes Zappos so great, among other things, is their policy on returns. If something doesn’t fit, or you want it returned, Zappos gives the customer 365 days to return the item. Decisions like these have powered Zappos to the top in company culture.

Hsieh talked about the Zappos hiring process — each time Zappos interviews a candidate, Zappos sends a shuttle to the airport to pick up the interviewee. The shuttle driver then will tell the recruiting team what happened in the shuttle so that Zappos can get a better understanding of the interviewee.

Zappos has 10 core vallues that each employee must meet in order to work at Zappos. All 10 of these core values are talked about during the interview process as well. Hsieh mentioned that if employees don’t have the right company culture, they won’t be welcomed in the Zappos culture, so they make sure they hire employees with the right company culture.

In July 2009, Amazon announced their intention to acquired Zappos, which is still waiting for government approval.

Photo by Adam Jackson

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Startup School: An Interview With Mark Zuckerberg

Posted: 24 Oct 2009 02:37 PM PDT


Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken the stage at Startup School, where Y Combinator’s Jessica Livingston is interviewing him. I’m liveblogging the interview below.

Mark Zuckerberg: “I love being here. These are like, my people.”

Q: I want to go way back, before Facebook. What did you learn from those experiences?
A: I mostly built stuff that I liked. When I got to college I started messing around with other programs. There’s this story —  I was making Facebook the week before finals, and there was a class where you had to learn all these pieces of arts. I was supposed to be studying, but instead I was learning Facebook. A few days before the exam I was screwed. I took all the images, make a website, where you could add notes to each image, and it was a ’study tool’ where everyone else filled in all the notes that I needed to pass the class. After that the professor said it had the best grades of any final he’d ever given. This was my first social hack. With Facebook, I wanted to make something that would make Harvard (and more open that) more open.

Q: How were the first users using Facebook?
A: Looking people up, but it was so simple. There were no messages. You could look at profiles, poke people. Everything else built over time. People say launch early and iterate, Facebook is clearly a good example of that. YC has a shirt that says “do something people want” and I think that’s a great way of looking at it.

Q: Tell us all the dumb things you did.
A: Where do you want to start? *pause* What kind of stuff do you want to start with?
We weren’t even set up as a company at first. I started it with different friends at Harvard who were really smart, and they didn’t have the same levels of commitment. I moved to Silicon Valley, lots of folks didn’t want to move out. A lot of the early founder group was fractured. I didn’t want to be involved with setting up the business at all. We had this guy Eduardo . Instead of setting up standard company, we set up as Florida LLC. I don’t know all the things wrong with that, but lawyers out here said that was number one to unwind. In the beginning we weren’t trying to make it as big as possible. We wanted to provide value. Instead of launching schools that would be most receptive, we did least receptive. We launched at Stanford, Columbia, Yale where each of them had their own community already. When we launched Facebook at those schools and it took off, we realized it could be worth putting our time into it. My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There’s a lot of that in Silicon Valley. We wanted this to be valuable.

Q: But that’s a problem for startups — it’s not valuable til people start using it (chicken/egg problem).
A: Facebook is inherently viral. There are lots of sites that include a contact importer, and for lots of them it doesn’t really make sense. For Facebook it fits so well. It wasn’t until a few years in that we started building some tools that made it easier to import friends to the site. That was a huge thing that spiked growth. Before that organic spreading on campuses. One amazing thing, we launched at schools with most people asking for it. We didn’t have enough money for all the schools, we had servers for $85 a month, kept getting more as we needed them. At Dartmouth, half the student population signed up in one night.

Q: Who were your first investors. How did you pitch them?
A: I’m not good at pitching anything. I never eally pitched. There’s Eduardo who did some. Moved out here Peter Thiel was our first investor. Sean Parker helped set us up with first outsourced accounting firm, introduced us to Peter. There were already hundreds of thousands of users. It was clear that if we executed we would continue to do well. I was 19, I doubt I was at all impressive. For the first two years the only advice he would give me was “don’t mess it up”. Gets back to the “build something people want” motto. Early on we were clueless, all of us came from having users and growing at a sustainable rate. When we were first meeting with Peter, we didn’t have Facebook.com. We were TheFacebook. That’s a winner.

Q: What would you do now different?
A: I’d get the right domain name. The moral is that we could get the domain. We ended up “tens of thousands” for the domain. I think we used Register.com which was also a mistake. The core people at the company a lot is still in tact. Management team has improved over time. Was hard to get people good at managing businesses early on. Now we have Cheryl, but early on there’s no way we could have gotten her. There’s nothing wrong with making these mistakes and not getting it right at each step along the way.

Q: What did you do differently at Facebook?
A: We didn’t realize what we did differently because we didn’t have context. I look at some companies that call themselves technology companies, and there are lots of managers who aren’t technical. So we were always committed to maintaining technical people in the company. One of our major marketing roles is an engineer. That kind of tech culture is important to have in the DNA of the company. Google is a tech company that I really admire. And as we’ve grown it’s clear how we’re different. I look at Google and think they have a strong academic culture. Elegant solutions to complex problems. We pride ourselves on strong hacker culture, building things quickly for lots of people. We have small team — ratio of engineers to users is by far more than any other company (1 mil+ per engineer).

Q: How do you keep this environment?
A: We do try to attract people, but our goal isn’t necessarily to keep people forever. Some companies are really good at training people. A lot of people for a long time went to IBM because it was great to learn sales. We want Facebook to be one of the best places people can go to learn how to build stuff. If you want to build a company, nothing better than jumping in and trying to build one. But Facebook is also great for entrepreneurs/hackers. If people want to come for a few years and move on and build something great, that’s something we’re proud of. Steve Chen when he started working on YouTube was working on Facebook. They left, did something cool. I’m not encouraging people working at Facebook to leave. We’re not pretending that we’re building a company that hackers would want to stay at forever.

Q: I ask lots of successful founders did you know it would be as big as it is? Tell me a couple moments when you went, woah, this could be huge.
A: I guess it just kept on growing, so our expectations did too. The interesting thing about the Facebook story. A lot of founders say they have some huge vision. A lot of people I hung out with at Harvard was this trend for more and more information becoming available, this was leading to increasing openness. Didn’t think we’d have a chance to influence it. So I did this little project, which over time grew. A few years in, we were sitting around and said this maybe could impact this. So I think probably around the time people kept using Facebook after they graduated from college. We started to realize it was something that was pretty universal.

Q: Did you ever have a scaling issue?
A: Yeah. We limited growth in the beginning because we didn’t have money. As we got more money we’d rent more servers for $85 a month. When we first took money we decided the biggest thing we could do was accelerating user growth. When economy when south we decided to get cash-flow positive. We got around lots of problems early on but limited growth on purpose. Some of the stuff like photos was pretty crazy. With photos there was a 2 month period where people weren’t sleeping much in the company. That was kind of crazy.

Q: What have you learned about running a big company?
A: Not clear that I’ve learned much (joking). Tech companies when they’re small can move so much faster. It’s been reinforced for us how much we need to keep moving really fast even as we get big. Otherwise inertia slows thing down. Last time at Startup School. People tell you “you can’t do this, there’s all this stuff you have to know”. My message last time was that no, don’t let those people tell you that. I think it was taken out of context that I don’t value experience at all. I think a lot of you are here because you want to take your shot at something and build something.

—
open to questions
—

Q: We know so much about people’s history because of Facebook. I want to know how you’ll make this available to people 2000 years from now. It’s just bits. How will anyone know what we were up to when it’s all digital.
A: I like to pride myself on thinking pretty long term, but not that long term. So you win. Marc Andreessen told me a long time ago when he was Netscape Microsoft had longer time horizon which helped them win. Back to your question. We feel we’re part of this movement to become more open. I think a lot of companies have this sense of purpose, but that might not be forever. Microsoft just released Windows 7. How much innovation is happening with operating systems? There was a huge period of time where the OS innovation was most important. Now I think pushing more opening is going to be most important. I think the answer to your question, if tech stays strong people will be building comapnies to take this into a long time in the future.

Q: One of the stories I heard about you was when you made changes. You were reported as saying “the most disruptive companies do what they need to do. What was behind that rationale”
A: One saying we say a lot is the biggest risk you can take is to take no risk. In evolving world if you don’t change you will lose. Change is really disruptive for people especially when it’s a web service, people aren’t opting in to the change. On a website you don’t want to keep forking your code. You want to push people to use one version. When I was talking before about making the company move quickly. I’ve heard values are worthless unless they’re controversial. We’re willing to give up a lot to make sure we can move quickly. We want to have one code base (we did Facebook Lite, which was a bunch of Y Combinator folks who did that).

Q: Can you talk what it’s like in order to speak publicly so people don’t pounce on you? Seems like you’ve changed since 2006.
A: Have I not said enough offense stuff? Is this less interesting?
Q: Yeah… probably less interesting (oooooh from the crowd)
A: Maybe we need more controversial questions.

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Sequoia Capital Invests In Bump Technologies, The iPhone-Tapping Data Swap App

Posted: 24 Oct 2009 01:12 PM PDT

Bump Technologies, the startup behind the very popular iPhone application Bump, has closed a funding round led by Sequoia Capital. We had heard whispers of the news weeks ago, but the company declined to comment on it. Today though, during Sequoia Capital Partner Greg McAdoo’s presentation at Y Combinator Startup School, we got all the confirmation we need: Bump was listed on one of his Powerpoint slides as a company Sequoia has funded this year.

Bump once again declined to comment on the funding and the amount, but the cat is out of the bag. We’ve heard the amount raised was over $1 million, and are looking into getting more details.

For those who haven’t used it, Bump offers mobile apps that let you transfer information (like contacts and even multimedia) simply by tapping two phones together.

The company is also Y Combinator-funded, and has been featured in Apple’s TV ads.



Bump Technologies

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Startup School: Paul Buchheit Wings It, Tells Us What He’s Learned

Posted: 24 Oct 2009 01:03 PM PDT

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FriendFeed Co-Founder, Paul Buchheit has taken the stage at Startup School at UC Berkeley. Buchheit is talking about what he’s learned so far as an entrepreneur, from creating Gmail to founding FriendFeed. Buchheit made some interesting points from his career at Intel, Google, FriendFeed and now Facebook. He’s also winging his presentation to see how it goes (and he’s doing a good job at it).

Buchheit talked about his past at Google, where he is of course known as being the creator of Gmail, as well as Intel. At Intel, Buchheit learned that he didn’t enjoy working at large companies. People often ask what’s the formula to startup success. Buchheit answered with that Google had a formula for making successful products that everyone had to follow.

Buchheit also mentioned that he left Google because “it seemed like a good idea.” He said the same thing for why FriendFeed sold to Facebook. Buchheit’s biggest learning experience from Facebook so far is that Facebook ins’t like Google.

Buchheit talked about college, and whether or not to go. He said that you have to pay for college, while if you have a startup, you get paid. Also, the formula of success — there is none. You have to figure it out yourself.


Paul Buchheit – Been at your job too long? QUIT! – Startup School 2009 from Alexa Lee on Vimeo.


Video by Alexa Lee

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Startup School: Ev Williams And Biz Stone Admit Even Twitter Thought Twitter Was Stupid At First

Posted: 24 Oct 2009 12:30 PM PDT




Ev Williams and Biz Stone have just taken the stage at Startup School, where they’ll be taking many questions form the audience. You can submit questions by tweeting a question like this “@poll _________” (where the blank is your question). I’ll be liveblogging the session.

Q: What was the original motivation behind Twitter?
Biz: We should start with Odeo. We were working at Odeo, we weren’t as passionate about the podcasting service as we should have been. We weren’t using it, and that was a problem. Twitter got started because Ev gave us some freedom to think along different lines.

Biz: We (Jack Dorsey and Stone) did a thing where we had two weeks to build something and demo. Build it, try it out over the weekend. If it sticks we may keep working on it. I was ripping out carpeting during a heat wave and then my phone vibrated in my pocket, and it was Ev. And it said he was sipping pinot noir. I realized I was totally engaged in this product. So we decided we should keep working on it. At the beginning it was “okay this seems compelling”. Early on someone said “twitter is fun but it isn’t useful”. Ev said “Neither is ice cream”. So what if it’s just fun? SXSW 2007 was a huge watershed moment for us, first time we saw real potential in the tool. Saw people tweeting about a good session to go to.

Q: How long did the first version take to build?
Biz: It looked a lot like a simple sketch Jack had done. A box for updating, there wasn’t even a question at the time.
Ev: I think it said “what’s your status.” It was very focused on SMS as well. The whole idea was about SMS, that’s why it was 140 characters. But there was one concept that was completely different — because it was status, it didn’t repeat them based on time, it showed them like a buddy list. The first version had the ugliest logo of all time.
Biz: First version was kind of janky but cute, but then we got clever. We learned, “Don’t get clever”. Unless it’s T-shirts, then it’s ok.
Q: When you first launched this, did you realize how big it would be?
Biz: Yeah, we knew Barack Obama was going to use it.
Ev: I knew I was going to be on Oprah in two years.

Q: What about scaling, was that a problem? We tell startups if you have that problem you’re lucky…
Ev: It was a serious problem, but I wouldn’t change that advice. Our problem wasn’t that it blew up and was impossible to scale, but there were some bad choices made. One of our biggest lessons time after time was to focus. Do fewer things. We were doing all kinds of things (Twitter via IM, AIM) when the core thing didn’t work. Got to the point where we started pulling stuff in, which is more painful, because there’s a segment of users that really likes it. We weren’t very organized internally with our engineers. Lots of smart guys pulling off amazing feats, but they were small team and making it up as we went.
Biz: Even with ten people we made an assumption that we all knew what everyone was working on, but that was a wrong move. You still need to make an effort to communicate.

Q: How did you estimate the size of the market?
Ev: We didn’t. There are different ways to approach startups. One thing I admired about Google is we said “this thing is huge, and we’re going to kick ass at it”. It’s the CS approach to business. The other approach is “this might be a thing if we pull this off”. I ran into this when we were at Google with Blogger. People asked how big is the market for blogging? I said “I don’t know”, but if we make it awesome lots of people would do it. With Twitter there is no market, other than we knew it was cool.
Biz: If anything we sort of thought it a waste of time, some of our engineers thought it was a waste of time, “If you add video to it maybe I’d work on it”.

Q: Any advice you got early on that you didn’t take that you wish you had?
*silence*.
Biz: I remember Ev going home one weekend and coming back with this genius plan for Odeo,, asked me to read it. It was this whole plan for how we could make it a successful business. I thought wow this is genius, but then again so is podcasting. Then slept on it. Do we want to be kings of podcasting? We were constantly gut checking.

Q: What advice to you have for anyone developing projects on Twitter?
Biz: Keeping going let us know when you need help
Ev: We want to keep expanding the platform, helping the ecosystem. A lot of the value for twitter comes from third party devs. We’re bolstering our platform team (both engineering and dev support side).

Q: I know when you got started people questioned what you were doing. What did people misunderstand?
Biz: Fun, trivial, someone called it the ‘Seinfeld’ of the internet.
Ev: Both of us went through a similar experience with blogging. There’s a similar pattern with what happened with blogging. Blogging was more a movement than one company. I went for years defending blogging. People were asking why are you filling the web with all of this crap?

: Do you see yourselves going public?
Ev: It’s a possibility. Our goal is to change the world, and we’re going to build the best company we can to realize that goal, reach Twitter’s potential. At some point going public may make the most sense. We’re nowhere near thinking of that. At one time I might have said “that’s ridiculous”, but I don’t say that any more. We can be more creative than IPO or being acquired.

Q: How important was API to your success?
Biz: Huge. Really early on this contractor was working from Germany, didn’t want to pay SMS from Germany. Said I want to write something that lets me do it from IM. So we were like, why not make an API (in Rails is one line of code). Some stuff happened. Twitterific guys made cool Mac app. Desktop app for Twitter was cool. Previously if you posted from web it said “via” web or “via sms”. We did “posted via twitterific”. That was the beginning. Now tens of thousands of different apps.

Q: Geolocation.
Ev: We are building geolocation into Twitter. We’ve had fledgling support on profile. And you can search by location we determine in fuzzy way. Location is huge. Reason we’re excited about geolocation, we don’t know how it will change our business. We’re releasing location in the API, eventually in our interface.

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Twitter Finally Removing Deleted Tweets From Search Results

Posted: 24 Oct 2009 12:16 PM PDT

banaWhile most users may have not realized it, Twitter has had a rather annoying problem for some time now: If you deleted a tweet, it would still reside in Twitter Search’s index. This meant that if you said something you didn’t mean to, or made a mistake that you hoped to correct by deleting the tweet, it was still easily accessible by anyone who simply typed your username into Twitter search. Finally, that’s no longer the case.

Now, when you delete a tweet, it will instantaneously be removed from Twitter’s search index as well. We’ve tested it out this morning, and it is in fact the case. Even better, those tweets are also removed from the search API. We’ve tested several third party apps, and none contain the tweets that I deleted.

This is good news for users from a privacy perspective, as deleted tweets showing up in searches have been troublesome in the past. In one extreme example, a series of tweets that were sent the night two people died in a sweat lodge, but then were deleted, resurfaced on Twitter search.

Of course, with retweets and various services indexing and pulling tweets now, there’s still a very high likelihood that anything you tweet, will still exist somewhere on the web even if you delete it.

Speaking of indexing tweets, the reason Twitter finally got this done may have had something to do with its new search deals with Microsoft and Google. It’s one thing for deleted tweets to show up in Twitter Search, but imagine if a tweet you really didn’t want to send was sitting at the top of a Google search result page. Awkward.

It’s also worth noting that a few services which specialized in finding deleted tweets, like Tweleted, are likely dead in the water now. I tried to use it this morning to find my removed tweets, and it returned no results.

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Why The Little Guy Can’t Get A Break In Consumer Electronics And 5 Ways To Find A Leg Up

Posted: 24 Oct 2009 12:00 PM PDT

Every few months we get a press release about some great device from a no-name manufacturer who promises to change the world. One example was the TXTR reader from Germany last January. Another is zzzPhone, a company selling dual-SIM Android powered smartphones from China. Neither company produced much of anything. Era of the Silicon Valley success story - two guys making something cool in a garage and selling it - is over, at least in hardware. The costs of making consumer electronics, including cellphones and computers, on a small scale have risen so much as to be prohibitive and then the marketing costs of that same hardware is even more prohibitive. Whereas, once, two nerds in a basement could build a computer company I worry that it takes more resources than any one man or woman can muster these days to even approach something like success.

Startup School: Wired Editor Chris Anderson On Freemium Business Models

Posted: 24 Oct 2009 11:55 AM PDT

Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson is now speaking at Y Combinator’s Startup School about Freemium Business Models. Anderson likened freemium to handing out muffins on the street to entice people to start eating your muffins. But with muffins there’s a significant cost to giving away each muffin. With digital goods, you can give away 90% of your product for free, without any cost for those goods.

He says ‘free users’ aren’t free loaders, and that it’s okay to let the minority (paid users) subsidize the majority. Because the free users will recommend to friends, it’s a great form of marketing. And for those paid users, many of them are very strong customers — they may be price insensitive, with very little churn.

Anderson says that for Wired, the magazine is sold in various forms (news stand, subscriber, digital form online). And there’s price segmentation on this — lots of distribution given away for free, the bits are free. The ‘atoms’ (physical good) are the premium. 90,000 customers for newstand edition, 800,000 at $1/month subscription.

Anderson than started talking about the very popular game Club Pengiun, which is free to play. Parents are used saying no to credit card purchases for stuff on TV. But if they’re on Club Penguin, they see the child has built an igloo, and has their friends, etc. But if you pay, you can get into the cool igloo, etc. It’s easier to hand over the credit card that way, because it’s clear that the child isn’t just reacting to what they saw in an ad.

What will people pay for? They will pay to save time. Younger people have more time than money. Older people have more money than time.

Anderson then outlined some of the models he’s seen for Freemium models.

Feature limited
Gives users real utility initially, then they convert if they want it even better. But this also means that you have to build more features (things people would want to pay for). And you have to maintain multiple products.

Time Limited
Easy to do. But there’s less commitment and engagement.

Capacity limited
Easy to do (e.g. limit the number of megabytes in a Email box), but it doesn’t always work for a product.

Seat limited
Easy to do. But it doesn’t work for every product, and people can ‘cheat’ by only purchasing a few seats, or segmenting company into lots of 5 person teams so they’re free.

Customer Class Limited
Bizspark is free to businesses if you’re under 3 years old, less than a million in revenue. Once you graduate you pay. This is easy to implement, but harder to enforce. Anderson says that Chinese Pirates had a similar model with Microsoft — Bill Gates said that China was developing, if they were going to steal software, they’d rather they steal Microsoft’s software, so they develop for Microsoft.

As one last example, Anderson spoke about Open Source Hardware, brought up his company 3D Robotics, which makes DIY Drones. Open-source unmanned vehicles. They give the ‘bits’ away (the software) and plans so you can build your own. This helps build a community. And then it sells finished goods on the store. Charges 2.6x what it costs. Need two 40% margin — one for you, one for retailers, who you want to have sell your stuff.

Q: Free was available on the iPhone, I got it for free. And they took it back and I had to pay $10.
A: I didn’t know about that. That sucks. I have no idea how that happened. Free for four weeks on Scribd, free on Google Books, free forever audio form, free in other places as well.

Q: One risk with freemium that I’ve experienced as consumer is feeling that free version is crippled. Yahoo Mail, they can get away with it because people keep sending to your old address. Unless you have that kind of lockin. How would you do that?
A: I recommend not having crappy products, even free ones. If your free version is crippled, it won’t work as advertised, won’t work as a form of marketing.

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Startup School: Jason Fried of 37Signals On Startups, Crack Cocaine, And More

Posted: 24 Oct 2009 11:09 AM PDT

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Jason Fried of 37Signals has taken the stage at Y-Combinator’s Startup School this morning at UC Berkeley. I’m taking my notes below on his talk.

Fried has started off by talking about bootstrapping startups. Startups that bootstrap are more “money hungry” then companies that are funded. If you are a funded company, you generally have money to spend that investors encourage you to spend as well. If you’re a bootstrapped company, you’re hungry to make money.

Fried also talked about the art of making money. He mentioned that making money is like playing the piano. If you started playing piano at 5, you have a lot of time to practice playing piano to get better. If you want to be a good piano player, you start young, and you practice. Same goes with making money. It’s a skill and a talent. The more practice you have making money, the more successful you’ll be.

Fried also used an interested analogy to crack cocaine, comparing crack to funding. Crack is like funding, because it’s addictive. Investors want you to come back for money — they want you to be addicted to the money.

One of the major points Fried mentioned is picking the right price. You have to find the right price to sell your products to consumers. Customers will pay if it’s worth it. Don’t make products that aren’t useful for others — you have to have people using your product, and if they use it, charge for it.

Thing will go wrong as well. Be real and honest about your mistakes. Also, you don’t have to be in Silicon Valley to be successful. Fried mentioned that 37Signals is based in Chicago, but they have employees all over the world. Location doesn’t matter to build great products. You’ll know if you have a great product if people use it.

Q: How do you know if your product is useful for a lot of people?
A:Build something you would use yourself. When you put stuff out for free everyone goes “ah, that’s cool.” Put a price on it, then you figure out if it’s really useful.

Q: Regarding virtual offices.
A: Need to find a good team. People who can work from their home a lot. We’re in touch all day using our tools, but you can put that away if you need to. You can’t put a ‘real’ office away like that. But some face time is essential sometimes. Should be the exception not the rule.

Q: Pricing?
A: First question is ‘would I pay for it?’ It’s a science. You have to worry about margins. Walmart doesn’t use 9s for their prices. They do 8. But for me, is it worth paying for. We have multiple tiers. Every price point is double, but you get more than twice as much in each tier.

Q: I’m a scientist, skeptical about luck.
A: I think luck plays a part somewhere. BUt I think for the most part make your own success. You can’t wait for something lucky to happen. Maybe timing/meeting right person is luck. I think it’s the kind thing to say, PC to say. But I think if you ask people honestly they won’t say that.

Q: How long did it take you from having idea to launching paid project?
A: We launched basecamp as a side project. We were a web design company at the time. We made it in a few months, then we put a price on it. Built it for ourselves, we needed it for ourselves. Hit $5k a month in about six weeks, has since increased. We don’t share exact rev numbers. Job wars made 1.5 mi. book material about a million. Advance from new book is handsome. We make millions in rev and profits. We did take one investment in 2006. We bootstrapped. We didn’t need the money (from Jeff Bezos). We did it for liquidity and someone like Jeff available, he’s built a business from scratch.

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Startup School: Sequoia’s Greg McAdoo On The Opportunities Of A Recession

Posted: 24 Oct 2009 10:31 AM PDT

I’m here at UC Berkeley for Y Combinator’s Startup School 2009, where the startup incubator has invited hundreds of entrepreneurs from around the country to listen to some of Silicon Valley’s most accomplished founders and investors share their advice on building a new company. Sequoia Capital Partner Greg McAdoo just took the stage to talk about the current economic conditions, and how startups can actually thrive during them. Below are my paraphrased notes on what he said. You can also watch the live stream here, or using the embed at this bottom of this post.

During the last 12 months since the fall of Lehman, we have been more busy making investments. Made ~20 investments (Series A/Seed) in the last twelve months. Don’t let the negative headlines get to you. If you look back at the headlines of the 70’s (1975-78), there’s quite a bit of bad news, but some of the biggest names (Apple, Atari) were founded then. Likewise, the early 80s had awful headlines, but very strong companies like EA, Oracle, Symantec. Again in the 90’s, and again in this decade (2001-2004). What we’ve learned: there’s a correlation between tough economic times, and the conditions needed to make a great company.

When it’s about saving money, people are willing to get creative (both consumers and enterprise). When it comes to competition, you can a lot of irrational spending during good times, with excessive hires — those go away during down times. Things are much more easily available (office space). Recessions tend to reward companies that are disciplined. You’re also much more inclined to pay attention to those (potentially) few customers you come across. Recessions also reward stealth.

Recession era startups buy the cash register early: figure out early on how to develop a business model, get cash out of customers. Everyone who founds a company in the middle of a recession is generally more committed.

Q: Last summer you were saying RIP good times. Wouldn’t this presentation today have been more helpful last year than this year?
A: I have to tell you, that RIP Good times presentation was very misinterpreted. The point was to say you need run business cognizant of times we’re in. The trick last year, we had lots of startups that started in ‘good times’, and fell into bad habits. Habits that would have killed you now. The message wasn’t fold up your tents. It was reevaluate/reengineer to run like some of these companies. Buying the cash register early, start making money, etc..

Q: You mentioned that enterprises might be more willing in recession to check out a small startup product.
A: You need to have a hard dollar ROI, that is so clear that the person at the enterprise is scared to not listen. Message to send: If you passed up change to save a huge chunk of operating cost, and didn’t do it, you’re going to be in trouble (don’t actually say this, but send that message).

Q: Talk about perception that investors are clueless. Is it hard to find VCs that have tech knowhow to judge startups?
A: I’ve never believed there was a VC community. I spent 13-14 years with startup companies before Sequoia. Every VC firm was different, even within firms. There are people in the community who are, frankly, clueless. You have to do your research on who you raise money from.

A: One thing we commonly see is startup with fabulous technology, but inability to clearly describe, “who cares?”. Need to show there is market, people who will spend money on this product. Describe in business terms why people care.

Q: How does valuation compare to a few years ago?
A: Hasn’t changed much. There’s a business model the founders/ourselves pursue. Valuation doesn’t play much role in that.

Photo by Alexa Leeh


Watch live video from Startup School on Justin.tv

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Tim Armstrong’s Secret Project Is To Turn AOL Into A Low-Cost Content Machine

Posted: 24 Oct 2009 10:30 AM PDT

A couple days ago at the Web 2.0 Summit, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong caused a little bit of a stir when he hinted that AOL is working on a “secret” technology project. When pressed for details on what exactly it is, he was vague. But after fishing around with our sources, we have a pretty good idea.

The secret project is a new content-management system (CMS) which will make it easier to produce and publish Web content across AOL’s sites and perhaps beyond. It will also help AOL scale up the number of contributors who write articles and produce videos for its numerous media sites well beyond the thousands who are working for it today.

During the on-stage interview at Web 2.0, this is what Armstrong said:

TA: We have some secret sauce that I can't announce. But we've been working on something for 3 months that's a big tech shift. I can talk about it later.

JB: Wait, tell me more. What tech?

TA: It's a broader platform with more information about content, and around content. I can't give you a better answer. We've gone from 500 journalists to over 3,000. We're going to keep growing. Our content is 80% our own, we're going to keep going. It's all about taking content management serious. There's an opportunity there.

Armstrong’s maniacal focus right now is on increasing the amount of content AOL spews out. In addition to its main Website, AOL operates more than 75 independent topic-specific sites and blogs in its MediaGlow business run by Bill Wilson. All told, AOL already employs a growing staff of journalists (3,000 to date).

The new CMS system will allow AOL to accelerate along that path, and bring in even more writers from the outside. Built into the system is a way to include content from freelance writers and pay them based on the views and ads shown on the pages they write. It’s like a fancy blogging platform with all sorts of tracking and ad-monetization built in.

Demand Media has something like this called Demand Studios which is paying out $17 million a year to writers, editors, and video producers. In addition to furnishing Demand Media’s sites with content, Demand Studios also farms out articles and videos to other sites. AOL could do the same thing and provide the ads as well.

In addition to the content coming in from thousands, or even tens of thousands, of lowly-paid contributors, the CMS system might also be able to automatically generate related content on the fly. AOL is already experimenting with lightly-curated, automated topic pages on Love.com, which uses technology from its Relegence acquisition.

What isn’t clear is whether AOL is building an entirely new CMS system from scratch, or integrating technologies from past acquisitions. All of AOL’s blogs (Engadget, TMZ, Autoblog) already run on the Blogsmith CMS that came with its Weblogs, Inc acquisition. The new CMS might very well be based on Blogsmith or at least be built by the same engineers. AOL’s non-blog sites run on a relatively new CMS called Dynapub. It would make sense to have one CMS for everything. Then there’s the contextual feeds from Relegence. And blog-link generator Sphere, now known as Surphace, may also play a role. Put them all together, and you’ve got cheap content galore.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/05/lazy-publishers-rejoice-get-your-content-from-pluck-on-demand/

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First Annual CrunchGear Halloween Costume Contest! Win an XBox!

Posted: 24 Oct 2009 10:25 AM PDT

Halloween is coming up and if there's one thing I know it's that geeks love Halloween. The opportunity to hide behind a mask, to subvert the status quo, and to dress up like sexy nurse/sexy witch/sexy balloon boy is a cause for celebration. That said, we're offering one Xbox 360 Modern Warfare 2 Limited Edition Console to the winner of our First Annual CrunchGear Halloween Costume Contest. Here's how to enter. UPDATE - Link fixed.

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