Fred Destin

Seedcamp in Paris

Last Friday the Seedcamp train was making its scheduled stop through Paris. 

Thanks to the good work of folks like Gilles B, Codor, Leafar, Jacques etc there was a good crop of startups that have been covered in detail by Mike B at TC.

SC continues to excel with the quality of its mentors; many startups were amazed to be able to interact with folks like Remy Amouroux.

For my part I had great fun moderating a panel with Dom Vidal (Index, Yahoo, Kelkoo), Gilles Babinet (Musiwave, Eyeka et. al.), Jerome Touze (WAYN), Jean Schmitt (Sofinnova) and Dider Kuhn (Screentonic).  I won't bore you with pearls of semi-wisdom but having folks that have built, financed and exit businesses around the table was great.  As is the style for Seedcamp, we tried to keep the discussion deeply pragmatic and practical.

Photo courtesy of Flickr/Leafar, people as above.

Daniel Kahn (with J Bouteiller) shows French lawyers are Mac-cool

Technorati Tags: seedcamp,paris,startups

FOWA: Google mashup fest and Amazon service platforms

FOWA: in the early afternoon, an inside look at Google API's was provided by a senior product manager who ran through some of the best API usage examples currently out there, including NASA weather mapping, 3D rendering of UK landmark buildings such as the Globe Theater, live fight plan GoogleEarth integration.  At code.google.com all the API's are available for the technically minded amongst you.  I never got Sphere to work but had no trouble creating personalised search for my blog, so they must be doing something right if non tech users manage to use their APIs too.

An iteresting piece of insight was provided by the fact that the guys at housingmaps.com did the first google mashup by hacking maps and pushed Google to release the API's to the community as fast as they possibly could.

He was followed by Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon, to talk about S3 and EC2 and other Amazon services.  Rather than talk tech, Werner focused on competing on ideas.  The concept is of course that Amazon takes the complexity away from you to allow the entrepreneur to focus on their business idea and not the backend.  His posterchild is Doug Kaye of the Gigavox podcast application: just drop in your MP3 and publish the podcast with appropriate encoding and ad insertion. 

The key message is that Gigavox built very little itself but rather use the EC2 computing cloud, the Queue service and S3 storage.  Pay for what you need.  So focus on the business idea, build it cheap, grow easily.

The key argument is around business continuity and focus: how can you, as a startup, scale 100x, provide 4 nines uptime, survive a complete datacenter failure etc.  Hard disks crash by 6-8% every year.  The argument is this is making life too hard for business that need to iterate constantly.  Vendor lock-in however was not addressed in the talk, which I certainly feel is a major issue. 

Examples put forward include:

• Smugmug (125K users, 120M photos).  Saved $470K in first 7 monyhs of operation, expecting to save around $2M this year
• SecondLife, using S3 as a CDN (streaming 70GB a day) to achieve offload
• Enrackados.com (a JS OS operating inside the browser) that uses S3 as the backend and takes an environment snapshot when leaving the session, saved on S3 and restored on the next login

The second service is EC2 i.e. the elastic compute cloud used for load-testing, time of traffic-based scaling, simulation and analysis, rendering, SaaS platform.  People run traditional grid based apps on this (see RenderRocket) or archiving services (Hanzo:web).

Another example was natural-language search company PowerSet (described as the most hyped company on the planet).  Ratrher than build a massive webcrawl engine they use EC2.

The full array of services include queue services, storage (S3), compute cloud (EC2), search (Alexa), commerce and Mechanical Turk (where humans come back into the picture).

The same concept was promoted by the excellent Simon Warldey who is building a similar service inside Canon / Fotango called Zimki.

technorati tags:fowalondon2007, wernervogels, amazon, google, api, s3, ec2, zimki

FOWA: The Index Session

Live at the Future of Web Apps: Ben Holmes stands in for Danny Rimer and starts by telling the audience about how great technical founders is really what the VCs are after.

I am sure the FOWA audience with its techy slant appreciated the the compliment, but I think that ain't strictly speaking true in the European environment.  The best find is the entrepreneur who can take it all the way, and that usually means a strong businessman at the helm who doubles up as a great product guy.  If you look at European startups that made it big, most of them are still run by the original founder (think Business Objects or Skype).  Of course these animals are few and far between, and certainly having true product innovators is a decent proxy.

The beggining of the presentation goes through the basics of how VC work, the fact that we VCs have empathy with the entrepreneur money raising process, as we too have to go out and raise some cash every three years.  Ben then takes the audience through stages of invesment and others 101 aspects.

VC Value add is presented as follows:

• Advice and strategy
• Hiring
• partnerships
• Profile and PR
• Internationalisation
• Trsuted service provider relationships (hiring, PR)
  
• Exit optimisation
  

Ben repeats the mantra that Index looks for really great product developers and does not want to get in the way in terms of strategy, pointing out that many Entrepreneur-VC relationships get disruptive when VC's get too prescriptive on strategy.  I subscribe to that.

As a case study Ben runs through the Stardoll story, where Index acted as interim management, hired the CEO (Mattias Mikschke), relocated to Stockholm, hired Fred Davis to the Board (a celebrity lawyer), added Sequoia as new VC ("at a good valuation") and so on.  Apparently snatched the deal away from Viacom who was looking at buying the business for a couple of million.  Stardoll is now in the Alexa 500.

His second case study runs through Skype (who ?), talking about the hiring of Saul Klein, of Mike Volpi as Chairman and about Index's role in navigating the exit strategy.

After this good pitch, Ben moves on to talk about the "founder shock" of receiving a venture capital term-sheet.  Here are the highlights of provisions he runs through:

• Target 20-35% ownership
• Board representation
• Liquidation Preferences, Participation Rights, Reverse Vesting, Control and Veto Rights, Option Pool, Exclusivity Period

I liked the way he addressed the hard terms head on and with honesty, in particular the issues of liquidation preference and reverse vesting. 

Usefully Ben runs thorugh reasons NOT to raise VC money:

• Application is a feature and not a product (MyBLogLog)
• Market size is too small
• Motivation is not financial

Theere a clearly real dangers in raising VC money.  We will push to industrialise and grow what could have been a fantastic medium exit or lifestyle business.  It's not for everyone.

Top tips:

• Have a great product
• Focus predominantly on the business and not the fundraising
• Evidence of execution ability is more exciting than a long business plan

A slight twist on his comments would be that early evidence of customer take-up matters probably more than a great product.  There is no time that is too early to start testing a concept and a product with customers, you should really do it from conception stage.

Ben moves on to the difficult question of how to choose a VC.  I really feel for entrepreneurs given how little visibility there is in the market and the fact that all VCs essentially tell the same story.  Having actual funds to invest, quality of relationship, relevance of portfolio are key choice drivers.  He urges founders to take references and make sure they like the community they are getting into.

 

technorati tags:fowalondon2007, fowa, indexventures, benholmes, carlsonsummit

Arrington's keynote at FOWA

The future Of Web Apps started with a session from TechCrunch's Mike Arrington.  I have heard him speak before and he moderated a panel I was on.  I am glad to say he kept his content pretty fresh and interesting.

Mike (RSS feed up to 260,000 now :-)) starts with apologising to the crowd for closing TechCrunchUK and not covering the market properly.  Remember the vaudeville ?

His talk is entitled "The Magic Formula" i.e. what's the right formula for creating a great startup ... noting immediately and rightly that most great entrepreneurs ignore these rules, alluding to Kevin Rose who seems to be sleeping late.  This feeds nicely into the recent post by Saul Klein, his "statement of intent" as it were upon joining Index (more on this later).

Mike starts with a discussion of the Bubble2.0 ($600M invested by VC in Web2) but immediately counteracting with the $1.65bn paid for YouTube (3x the overall money) and the $1bn+ reported bid on Facebook.  Bradley Horowitz, who is in the room, "can neither confirm nor deny".  I think comparing numbers is missing the point: there aren't enough exits.

He moves on to make the point I most agree with: the endgame is really not del.icio.us or flickr, the best is yet to come and is starting to emerge.

For entrepreneurs, the focus for him should be on:

1. invent a market / destroy a market / remove friction
2. have a business plan (he put that in to place Carson but thinks ... really not)
3. have a revenue model
4. build it cheap, test the waters (it's really ok if it does not scale in the early days)
5. avoid a high burn rate (stay hungry, pretend you don't have any money)
   

However... YouTube

1. threw away their original business plan
2. lost a founder
3. flounted copyright law
4. had no obvious revenue model

It worked because (a) the removed friction by providing a much needed service - IPTV (and not user generated videos) (b) first to market (c) so much growth that everything esle became irrelevant and money poured in to cover the burn rate.

Some great case studies:

• MyBlogLog: launched October 06, acquired Jan 07, never raised a venture round, grew purely virally
• AmieStreet: could this be the Digg of Music ?  Launched mid 2006.  Artists upload, users download, creating demand.  The price per download increase based on how many times they get downloaded, up to $0.99.  Here is a free market based pricing system for new music.  Fantastic.
• 1800-Free-411: Free business information, place an ad before you get the phone number (highly relevant of course).  Has taken over 3% of the US market. 

Moves on to shared attributes of winners.  I'll pass on these.  But shared attributes of losers:

• poor founder / team choices (the early C player)
• lifestyle / ego entrepreneurs
• raising or spending too much money
• over-business-plannning
• forgot to scale (don't be a friendster)

Opportunities identified by Mike:

1. Online / Offline
• Adobe Appollo (run apps offline and online seamlessly) opens so many opportunities ... incredibly easy to develop (you can now do Flickr and Picasa with the same app)
• Firefox 3.0 is working on this
• File system + html / flash / ajax
2. DRM and Music/Movies/TV
3. Data and service portability (teqlo, nings, pipes) ... very important for freeing user's data, even tough no one has found a way to make money off this yet
4. Mobile (yawn) preferably#@ going around the carriers
   

Some new ideas for me, some oversimplifications (raising too much money is a primary reason why people fail -- I will argue that one in a separate post), overall a great session.  The guy  deserves everything  that is happening to him.

technorati tags:fowalondon2007, michaelarrington, arrington, techcrunch, carlson, conference

LIFT07: minimally invasive education

I was a LIFT these past few days even though a bad flu meant a lot of time in my hotel room (thankfully a nice room at Les Armures).  For great coverage check out Bruno Giussani.  Of what I did see, I was fascinated by the extraordinary educational experiments of Prof. Sugata Mitra of HIWEL.

Dr. Sugata Mitra, Chief Scientist at NIIT, is credited with the discovery of Hole-in-the-Wall. As early as 1982, he had been toying with the idea of unsupervised learning and computers. Finally, in 1999, he decided to test his ideas in the field. On 26th January, Dr. Mitra's team carved a "hole in the wall" that separated the NIIT premises from the adjoining slum in Kalkaji, New Delhi. Through this hole, a freely accessible computer was put up for use. This computer proved to be an instant hit among the slum dwellers, especially the children. With no prior experience, the children learnt to use the computer on their own.

The original "hole in the wall" being installed

In a nutshell, this is what happens:

• a hole in the walll computer is installed in a village or slum
  
• within 10 minutes, some entrepreprising child has taught himself to surf
• within hours, a collaborative surfing experience is under way
• in months, children teach themselves IM, email, gaming, online music and video, general surfing, English
• like any good grassroots network, this is one is self-organisational and so efficient because it does not impose a way of functioning on its members
  

Children teach themselves collaboratively with minimum outside intervention, hence the term minimally invasive education.  Skills picked up include problem solving, collaboration, sharing.  In remote areas where no English was spoken, children would teach themselves basic English (badly pronounced but correctly conceptualised) from using the computer.

It also seems that as a complement to traditional educaction, the programme has a real impact on a child's academic results, as you can see in detail here.

It's really fascinating stuff.  The interaction between the children is best appreciated by watching the HIWEL videos, but unfortunately I could not locate any on the web.  Some of the great moments include the boy who learns to surf in a few minutes, the little girl who teaches the older boy (she has knowledge that he cannot "take" from her, so collaboration is the only way for him to progress) and the formation of "circles of knowledge" (3 kids operating the PC, another circle of 8 kids providing expert comments, another circle 16 kids providing completely useless comments, all learning from each other).

Chanchal (Girl, 12): "I love solving Maths problems. I find that very interesting. I have learnt it from my sister Raj. I have taught my friend Shilpa."

technorati tags:lift07, liftconference, hiwel, holeinthewall, sugatamitra

Mastering the Mashup : our panel at AlwaysOn

This week at Tony Perkin's AlwaysOn Media conference (which Atlas Venture was sponsoring)

it was my pleasure to moderate an entertaining panel on Mashups.

We started out by defining mashups for the audience, linking both content mashups (chicagocrime.org being the example I used, mixing maps and crime stats) and application mashups (the creation of composite applications through the use of web services). For info on mashups best to look at ProgrammableWeb.

After a presentation of the participants we ran through a good number of questions from the audience.

Itzik Cohen of ClipSync talked through the unique value presented by his technology innovation, turning the web into a real "venue" where an audience could interact in real time around content. The guy used to play for Maccabi Tel Aviv; I am not worthy. Clipsync: "Watch it together" -- Imagine watching Borat with your friends and not alone with your PC. Danny Kolke from Etelos presented his evolutive vision from the programmable web, but the old days of exposing legacy apps as webservices to today's broadening API platforms and a world where, effectively, "everything is content" (from his blog). "Uninsurable" Seth Sternberg from Meebo said he did not know he was a mashup at all when he started the company. I joked that with 1.6M logins a day (if I remember correctly) the absence of buzzwords should not be a problem for the company. And Rex Wong of Dave Networks talked us through his use of mashup concepts to create the media enabler of the future.

Some of the thoughts that came out of the panel:

• Innovation still required: Most content mashups are little more than fun apps put together by coders after hours. Take ononemap for an elegant example. But those that can add real value and stand on their own two feet as technology innovations can hope to accrete sustainable value.
  
• Mashup = reuse = efficiency: Mashups provide the ultimate time-to-market and capital efficiency tool. Why reinvent the wheel when you can piggyback the expertise of other programmers and product designers and assemble a best of breed application ?
  
• Confusion of roles: In the Open API word who knows whether you are an enabler, a destination site, a content ingestion site etc? You can be all of the above. Meebo is a multi IM tool but can also be found in the gadgets on Live.com. DailyMotion is a video hub and who knows whether it's a destination site, an enabler for private channels, a hoster for blogs.
  
• On-the-fly intermediation: The internet has seen wave after wave of intermediation. Meta-intermediaries are easiliy enabled by mashups. The ability to provide unique value but leverage the data and communities built by others give mashups unique leverage.
• Mashups as disruptors: consider this: if you can leverage thousands of programmers, audited open platforms, millions of content providers, mashups could be much more than "features as companies" or distant derivatives that deliver no value. They could well prove to be a disruptive force in the software industry.

I am happy to report that at least one person liked the session :-) Allen Stern also posted a fairly detailed review of the session on his blog.

Rex / Seth / Danny / Itzik and me (c) A. Stern

technorati tags:alwayson, mashup, panel, clipsync, meebo, etelos, dave.tv, allenstern

Venture capital hangs itself with overhang

You have heard this story a 1,000 times, but going to basics on headline numbers is always sobering (courtesy of Mr Deninger, Jefferies).  Facts, not opininons (i hope I got his numbers right).

• 1996: $4bn deployed, 110-ish "quality exits" (meaning 100+ in value)
• 2006: $11bn deployed, 67 quality exits
  

In digital media alone: $6bn put to work and over 1,000 companies funded (according to Kara Nortman, a VP M&A with IAC).

That's insane.  We will probably not get a market correction that is anywhere close to the last one, but the venture industry is undoubtedly recreating problems for itself here.

But not us.  We are not lemmings.  Proof: my partner Ahmet Ozalp, when asked where he plans to invest our money, points out that telecom infastructure (amongst other themes he mentions) is due a comeback.  Mark Stevens (a partner from Fenwick & West) almost falls off his chair and says "You heard it here first, folks, telco is back !".

Another issue raised by Bruce:

The problem is compounded by 6 years of decline in the number of quoted companies.  This means fewer buyers, a depleted acquiror pool and increased negotiation leverage for the buyers.

Bruce's advice: bring more of your companies public... We'll work on that !

technorati tags:alwayson, newyork, deninger, ahmetozalp, karanorman

Final thoughts on the TechCrunchUK debacle

There is a nice podcast from Sam where he talks through the incident, through GizBUZZ.  It was a good occasion to line up some final thoughts about this story and draw some conclusions:

• Real time is fine, but when (driven by exhaustion) France's number one blogger insults you openly on your site, it may be time to call a time out and engage in dialog.  Blogs are supposed to be about conversations, this time it was more about asynchronous slander.  My judgement is that Sam should have taken a breather and talked this one over with both Mike and Loic.  Offline is sometimes better.
• Having said that, I would side with Sam were I forced to take sides.  Here is a guy who reacted in the way a real time blogger who is a full partner of TCUK would be expected to. 
• On reflection, the defense of Mike (they were not a sponsor because no money changed hands) is slightly Clintonesque: factually true but not right either.  To blog prosecutor: "I did engage in barter advertising but did not actually cash out".  I still respect Mike's decision as the senior partner in TCUK.
• Finally, I don't see how TCUK recovers from this.  Who will step in the shoes of the murdered man ?  They should just close it down for 6 months.

Also some final words on lewebtrois by a much better blogger than I.

Technorati Tags: leweb3, loiclemeur, samsethi, michaelarrington, techcrunchuk