Fred Destin

Premature Scaling Kills Startups: the Genome Data

The new Startup Genome project tries to bring structure and data to the following question: why do so many companies die from premature scaling ? I was impressed by the first report the Startup Genome team produced so when Bjoern asked me to comment I was more than happy to comply.

The first Startup Genome Report dealt with understanding causes of failure during the Lean, iterative phase of a startup's lifecycle.  This time, they decided to attack the complex and more nebulous area in a startup's life when a company decides that it's ready to scale and gets it wrong.  All companies get it wrong to a certain degree and as Ben Horowitz rightly pointed out, "product-market fit is not a discrete event".  [Reminder: If you only read one blog, read his].  The interest of the report lies in looking at data and trying to systematically determine when these errors lead to ultimate failure.

In their own words:

Startups are temporary organizations designed to scale into large companies. Early stage startups are designed to search for product/market fit under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Late stage startups are designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model and then scale into large companies designed to execute under conditions of high certainty.

A startup can maximize its speed of progress by keeping the 5 core dimensions of a startup Customer, Product, Team, Business Model and Financials in balance. The art of high growth entrepreneurship is to master the chaos of getting each of these 5 dimensions to move in time and concert with one another.

Most startup failures can be explained by one or more of these dimensions falling out of tune with the others.In our dataset we found that 70% of startups scaled prematurely along some dimension. While this number seemed high, this may go a long way towards explaining the 90% failure rate of startups.

I encourage entrepreneurs to think through the full Lifecycle all the time and I think this is a great initiative.  I jotted down some of the reasons why I see companies scaling before they're ready to throw some quotes at Bjorn:

• Illusions of product market fit or price discovery: The classic mistake is to confuse a few early adopters with a market.  This was perfectly documented by Geoffrey Moore and is still relevant today.  Not being able to replicate early successes also occurs in consumer businesses, usually through the rapid degradation of customer acquisition and conversion economics.  It's one thing to spend $50K a month through online marketing channels with high marketing efficiency, but quite another to spend 5 or 10 times that amount without shooting the economic contribution of each new user or consumer.
• Confusing Founder Heroics with a Repeatable Model: As Peter Lynch famously said, "go for businesses that any idiot could run, because some day one will".  The parallel here is that it is an easy mistake to assume that hired salespeople or marketing people will be able to replicate the same rate of success as an incredibly motivated, tenacious and compelling founding team did in the early days.  Of course that's rarely true.  The commercial proposition needs to be baked enough and repeatable enough that possibly less talented and less determined sales organisations will be able to shift product efficiently enough.
• Unprofitable Scaling / Absence of operating leverage: You may be able to sell more faster, but you might not be ready to scale profitably.  The more customers you get, the more bugs, new requests and support issues start to bog your infrastructure down and ultimately come back to rest on the door of your salesguy.  I have lived through one experience of a company that had not understood that it had a total quality problem on its hands and kept ploughing money into the front of the funnel, to no discernible end.
• The Tail Wagging the Dog (Board Pressure): You've raised a fair bit of money on the back of an ambitious set of projections, anod now you feel compelled to hit these numbers.  Never mind that the market may change or that you may discover these new verticals aren't as easy to crack as you thought, it will be difficult to go back to the board and tell them you won't spend the new cash, or hit the numbers.

The Priebatsch versus Lauzon debate, as old as startups

Scvngr's Chief Ninja, speaking at the recent Nantucket conference, clearly made a few people uncomfortable with his (fun) pronouncements about how every startup should raise as much money as early as possible.  Whilst I enjoyed his wit and style, I was twisting in my seat, though nowhere near as much as the other young founder on the panel, Matt Lauzon.  He seemed a little sick. 

When Matt took him up on it and said he would never advise founders to do this, there was a perfect Green Goblin versus Spiderman moment between Mr Orange who's clearly going for a $1BN or bust, where the management team is made up of a Chief Ninja, a bunch of Rockstars, a Pixel Czar and so on (did I mention the King of Bling) whilst Mr Black patiently incubated at Highland and puts his Customer Support Gals front and center of his website.

The point on these two is that you have, on the one hand, a momentum player who wants to own the market yesterday and will throw everything he's got at it, and another who's on a consistent and possibly more mundane path of building team, culture, repeatability (and talks a lot less about it).

Style aside (I do like a bit of camp in my startups), I know where I'd put my money and I'd certainly never advise young founders to raise as much as they can as early as they can, but let's just look at what the data says.

Report Conclusions

You should really get the report, but let's just say that it reads as a homily to

(a) being highly consistent, measured and systematic in progress along all the core axes of execution (customer, product, team, finance, mode)

(b) constraining yourself until you're really hurting for resources, including people and capital

Borrowing from The Master (in Germany: Das Guru) on the excellent RWW: 

• The team size of startups that scale prematurely is 3 times bigger than the consistent startups at the same stage
• 74% of high growth Internet startups fail due to premature scaling
• Startups that scale properly grow about 20 times faster than startups that scale prematurely
• 93% of startups that scale prematurely never break the $100k revenue per month threshold

Before the Lean Startup was codified so beautifully (the elegance of the theoretical model has to make you smile, does it not ?), we at Atlas used to call this Prove / Build / Scale.  It was not a perfect framework, and initiatives like this are key to bringing a rigorous and systematic approach to company building, so it can be taught as a form of management science.

Me ?  I will read, learn, and do as usual: forget all the lessons in the world and go with "data-augmented instinct" in my decision making.

Go crush it.  Let's make these stats better.

Startup Lifecycle - Lean to Fat, Launch to Scale - Video

The video and accompanying presentation gather much of the current thinking around building startups from scratch to scale.

This was my annual contribution to Seedcamp, in the form of a new Prezi and accompanying commentary on Startup Lifecycle, which I presented at Seedcamp Ljubljana.

An awesome editing job was done by Lecture Hub using flowplayer and you can now enjoy the synchronized presentation and slides on their site.

A lot of credit to God (SG Blank), Jesus (Eric Ries) and Mary (Alex Osterwalder, sorry Alex) as well as Tom Eisenmann for references and structure, David Skok for his awesome visuals and sense of economy and DaveMcClure for the Startup Metrics FTW.    We're also trying to get beyond just Lean you can also dig into Scaling (e.g. see my answer on Quora).

And since I'm still having a bit of trouble typing, I borrowed the blog post of a super Seedcamp startup (that I voted for hard but you cannot win them all) called Blossom.io to give you a sense of what's covered.  I trust Thomas won't send me a cease and desist.  If you are looking for Lean Project Management, check them out.

I look forward to any comments -- ping me over mail, this blog will migrate soon and not sure I can (be bothered to) migrate the comments over with me.

Start

• Pick the right co-founder
• Do reverse vesting — It’s founder friendly
• Borrow & steal — minimize cost, more time for product/market fit

Launch

• Be Lean — The Lean Startup, Running Lean, Business Model Canvas
• Focus on providing value to your customer
• Use validated learning, pivots & iterations to achieve product/market-fit ASAP

Build

• You can’t manage what you can’t measure
• Initially focus on activation and retention (funnels, KISSmetrics, …)
• Be data informed, not data driven. Brush up on your statistics skills
• Use your intuition for important decisions (see the big picture), use analytics to optimize

Chasm

• Aggressive investment before product/market-fit can be dangerous
• To grow you need to cross the chasm from early adopters to the early majority
• Read Crossing the Chasm and/or Inside the Tornado by Geoffrey A. Moore

Scale

• Build a repeatable customer process
• Build a solid infrastructure for billing & deployments
• Fight organizational creep and automate stuff
• Grow the team and company culture

Startup Mixology / Techcocktail in Chicago–Insights from Travis Kalanick

Finally made it to #Techcocktail / Startup Mixology conference in Chicago

First guy I see is Travis Kalanick (@KonaTBone), a co-founder of Scour and later RedSwoosh (acquired by Akamai).  He’s full of fun factoid (such as influencing Parker in “getting” Zuck and fb, says he’s been replaced by an Asian woman in the movie, or getting sued for $250bn).  He’s a mix of arrogant and brilliant, pitches himself as a “startup curator”.  JamPad is his gig, “startup jamming” is the high concept.  He can be “The Wolf in Pulp Fiction, your Funding Shepherd, Your Interim CXO, and Curator of Entrepreneurs, your Eminence Grise”.  Ultimately though the guy has got plenty of substance once he gets going; I would want him on my side if I was a founder.

A few points from him I wanted to share:

• Preemption is bad; don’t trust VC’s who pitch pre-emptive deals, you usually get a raw deal.  I am sure there are a ton of counter examples, but he’s basically saying “don’t fall for VC marketing, raise money on your own terms”.  Can’t disagree, will still try to pre-empt… Would you not think less of me if I didn’t ?
• VCs want to kill founders, even those who perform well.  I have a lot of sympathy with this point.  I have seen this tendency at work of replacing founders, which usually means losing part of the soul of the company.  Pattern recognition iswhat drives this, in the sense that many companies fail because founders don’t "scale" (fact).  But it’s become a disease in the industry to seek “professional CEOs'” too early or when it's not warranted.  Often the supposedly rational choice is not the RIGHT choice.  In a way this is where art and intuition trump method and experience, the ability to recognize when to take a real risk on an unproven but talented entrepreneur so as not to kill the spirit of the business.  Hired guns don't do miracles, but founders often do.
• “Fear is the disease; hustle is the antidote”
• “Fake it till you make it” is bullshit; don’t live a lie, this is not a sustainable but an insecure strategy driven by fear.  His message: don’t fake it, you won't make it.  
• Funding does not solve all problems.  Absolutely.  Funding does not solve product/market fit and can make the pressure worse.  Sales and hustle solves problems.  No point raising too much too fast when you won’t use that money because you haven’t figured out p/m fit yet.
• CEOs that survive are CEOs.  If you are not tough enough to survive the pressures, you won’t make it.  Magic is not enough to take you through, you need the grit and toughness to make it through, and you need to be self-aware enough to recognise when you don’t have the toughness in you.
• Many, many entrepreneurs have had bad / disappointing advisor relationships.  Part of the problem is that entrepreneurs try to squeeze too much out of advisors.  Think about full time value (cash and equity) if they come on board, and pro-rate to how much you would give them for the time they actually commit.  It’s probably going to be more than you would normally give them, but now expectations are set and you are likely to get real value.  I agree wholeheartedly, there is an art to being a good mentor and advisor that few people master, and there is an art and a method to getting real value out of advisors, that few founders master.  Much work to do here and a necessity to reference and create feedback loops.
• A finally let me reference a good post he wrote on angel fundraising skillzzz.

Onward.

In praise of the (self-aware) Maverick

On a flight from Geneva to London, I find myself reflecting on the type of founder profile that I like to work with.  They tend not to conform to any classic profile.

In venture land, probably over 50% of investors have an MBA of some description.  They tend to be Stanford, MIT or Centrale whizzes with a Harvard or Insead MBA.  They were usually president of the Private Equity club, or similar.  They were born to greatness :-)

Many of us shy away from such profiles in the entrepreneurs that we back, and I certainly do.  We like guys who do not fit the mould, who do not know what they don't know.  After all, the bizarre notion that a company of ten people can take on Apple or Google is based on "suspension of disbelief".  It takes a special kind of person to spread that special kind of blind faith to those around them.

Real Mavericks

If I look back at people that impressed me over the last few years (focusing on entrepreneurs I did not back), they would include

• Kristian Segestrale, who tells you with a straight face he's going to be bigger than EA and some come across as credible
• Martin Lorenzon and Daniel Ek, with Daniel underselling with absolute grace and Martin telling me with absolute confidence that the pre-money on his Series A "will be north of €40M"
• Peter Ohnemus, a formidable sales guy with no off switch who has an uncanny ability to make you want to work with him
• Alexander Straub, who has never failed to send me a follow-up mail to convince me to give Truphone a try, every single time we speak
• and of course, Niklas Zennstrom

These guys don't play buy your rules, they can be both likeable and arrogant, both deeply knowledgeable and highly ignorant, brilliant and unnerving.  But they definitely share a common trait of maverickness.  In VC speak, they are likely to be "hard to manage", "abrasive", "difficult to align".  In other words, they are going to be hard work.  But they also have that unique spirit that sets them completely apart, entering new markets that they sometimes know almost nothing about with the absolute certainty that they can revolutionize it.

So being a maverick is a virtue I respond to at a very emotional, animal level, and that I appreciate in company founders.

The need for emotional intelligence

As a founder, what you do with your "maverickness" of course, will probably play a bit part in determine how successful you become.  If you are unique, driven, somehow exceptional at harnessing a vision, there are also probably of areas when you are going to be terrible or at the very least can be handled much better by others.  The trouble is that you may have a tendency to run your company like a benevolent dictatorship and are such a good communicator that not many people can stand in your way.  If you are assertive, driven, action-oriented with a dislike for routine, you're not likely to be the good administrator that your company will at some point require.

Which is why we need our mavericks to have a high degree of self awareness and emotional intelligence.  Those that can leverage their maverickness into building fantastic organisations and recognise their limits are the ones who can really scale all the way.

Some further thoughts on this:

• Anticipate your fall. "Founder transition" is avoidable if you anticipate it.  In most cases, you are unlikely to be the right CEO long-term for the company because the skillset is , but you can be.  Take the example of Chris Ahlberg, founder of Spotfire, who created a strong partnership with an experienced exec called Rock Gnatovich on the way to making Spotfire a success.  Identify early where you're bad, be ruthless in your self-assessment, and complement yourself early on.  If you are fantastic at product vision, setting direction, motivating the team, closing sales and evangelising the product, great.  If you're really not into negotiating salary increases, designing long-running workflows or even managing the board don't.  Get outstanding, senior help - competency matters too.
• Fill the gaps.  Like most brilliant personalities, you're likely to be excellent at some things and absolutely terrible at others.  You have to embrace yourself, recognise your weaknesses, even communicate around them.   One of the easiest ways to avoid information asymmetry about your own failings is to publicise them.  You also have to learn to harness your weaknesses.  To paraphrase Aristotle, "being angry is easy, but being angry at the right person, at the right time and with the right intensity is very hard".
• Invite contradiction.  This for me is very important, including from a board perspective.  Whilst as the maverick leader you are likely to be right about many things and feel that you play the major role in determining the outcome of your company, you are often likely to have a chip on your shoulder that is part of your motivation and may blind you to dissonant advice.  Again, if you are that good, you should contradict your natural instinct and ask instead  "how will we fail", "where is the chink in our armour" or simply "what can we do better" ?
• Build diversity around you.  It's impossible not to be impressed by the plethora of companies started by PayPal alumni (Tesla, YouTube, LinkedIn etc).  It's often be said to me that the root of success there was a deliberate and systematic policy of attracting highly varied talent to the company.  Maverickness by itself does not a company build.  The less obvious qualities of consistency, repeatability and incredible professionalism in a company's operations usually need to be brought in, with the art being to protect the unique alchemy that allows a company to be disruptive, its "disruption ethos" if you like.  Many venture disasters stem from "vc running a company into the ground" (founder version) by bringing on expensive corporate types who stifle the company's ability to innovate and execute.  More on this in a later post.
• Don't be a hero.  I have witnessed that one of the hardest things to do for brilliant founders is to accept failure.  Yet in the life of a startup, there are ALWAYS times when your company teeters on the edge, and it is in these defining moments when great companies are made.  As Marten Mickos once told me on receiving the Next Gem award, "a diamond is made of carbon, compressed really, really hard".  The thing about failure though is that it's not absolute, it builds up over time.  If you are trying to take on too much in the face of mounting adversity, are not able to share your concerns and your minor failures, are not able to recognise that building a company is never a solo effort, you might be setting yourself up for a burnout, a major bust-up with your team or your investors, and a terminal failure of your business.

In praise of the Maverick

From an investor standpoint, I will choose the maverick founder over the more sedate kind any time.  The primal urge to build something of note, the passion to succeed in the face of adversity are fundamental to me.  I know the overhead and tension of dealing with the relationship will be higher; but I consider it's my job to foster an environment of mutual respect and trust where maverickness is allowed to flourish, whilst at the same time the sound foundation for building and scaling a sustainable business is being laid. 

In fact, to my mind managing that tension is at the heart of what makes venture capital challenging, interesting and ultimately successful.

Related Reading

A brilliant entry from Ben Horowitz on the preference for founder CEO's : http://bhorowitz.com/2010/04/28/why-we-prefer-founding-ceos/

Fred Wilson on "stepping up" from CEO to Chairman: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2007/02/when_the_founde.html

Seedcamp 2008: entrepreneurs, sharpen your pencils

Seedcamp, for those who do not know it, is the marquee event for seed startups.   If you have a killer product prototype but no money yet, this is the place for you.

The online application process will open in late June (stay tuned).  In the meantime the Seedcamp team has published the application guidelines, which you will find here.

Key dates for Seedcamp week are:

• August-10 -- Online applications close
• September 15-19: SeedCamp Week

Some of the great mentors you will meet at Seedcamp 2008 include Robin Klein and Michael Smith

OpenCoffee club in London

Hail Hail!  Saul Klein has immediately started bringing further openness to VC.  You can check out where to meet on his blog for the OpenCoffee club.

There is a real challenge for any of us to cut time out of a week where travel, board meetings and entrepreneur meetings tend to leave little time for family or even checking email (my inbox currently numbers 1,480).  Nevertheless if we make a real effort to be there and keep the level of conversation challenging and engaged, this should be "accidental time" well spent.

It all goes back to providing more transparency to a market where entrepreneurs don't really know who does what and have real trouble cutting through completely undifferentiated marketing messages coming from the VC's. 

Call it Open Source Venture Capital. It's a theme I love and that we tried to promote through events like the Elevator Pitch in the Elevator at the Next Web conference.

technorati tags:opencoffee, london, saulklein

Guy K and the mirage of free marketing

So I had decided to stop reading Guy Kawasaki because he was writing too many top ten lists and would do anything to build audience.  But I have to give it to the guy (who once famously turned down the CEO role at Y!), he does write some excellent posts too.
Here are two recent ones:

• Basic but good, 11 rules for building a company sustainably
  
• A book review of the "No Asshole Rule" by Robert Sutton (I fail rule 9 ;-))
  

Of the 11 rules, one rang particularly true:

Plan for marketing costs. Don’t depend on wishful-thinking marketing based on virality, buzz, TechCrunch, and a demo at Demo. It’s true that some companies do achieve success this way, but we’ve heard of them because they are few and far between. To use a sports analogy, we all know who Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretsky are because they are rare examples, not because their story is common.  You need to explain your demand-creation process in a mechanical, not magical, way: ad rates, click through rates, unique visitors per month, conversion rates, revenue per customer, etc. Ultimately, the underlying assumptions in your marketing model is the key to the fundability and viability of your startup. “We’ll get it on TechCrunch and then viral marketing will be easy because we have such a compelling product” doesn’t cut it.

Virality has become a vastly overused concept (no, an invite a friend function does not constitute viral marketing), and so has grassroots marketing.  As Seth Godin once said, what happens to most marketing is ... nothing.  In the brave new world of Web2.0 I find that too many people assume that free marketing is a given or that some ill defined proprtion of the world will care about their product.  There is no cheap substitute for good media planning !

technorati tags:sethgodin, guykawasaki

Well done MindCandy and eBuddy

First of all, my favourite: Michael Smith gets Accelised (by Bruce Golden I think) after having been Indexed (and Robined, I guess ?).

Not only is it a  great ARG (and being a fan of Lost,  of course I like it), but they do such interesting things as asking the community to design videos that represent the spirit of the game ... such as this one:

And then on to eBuddy.  Onno and the guys are a really nice team and they have achieved some very impressive traction.  We are grateful to Josh who introduced this very interesting project to us and really wish them all the best in their IM quests.  EBuddy is all about less hype, more traction (apart from that RH cover of course).  I mean, just look at that logo :-)

technorati tags:mindcandydesign, perplexcity, ebuddy, michaelsmith, onnobakker

Killing the Golden Goose ?

This week I am travelling across the US and Canada seeing old friends.  We started the trip on the West Coast in Redwood City visting my wife's brother, Mathieu Foquet, who is a senior scientist and one of the inventors behind Kleiner-backed Pacific Biosciences.

Mathieu's story has been punctuated over the last few years by particularly painful immigration procedures, most of which are the result of the tightening of rules since 9/11.

He studied physics at Cornell under Prof Craighead and co-authored noted articles and patent filings in the field of nano biotechnology, for applications and instrumentation that enable high-speed gene sequencing.  The ultimate promise would be for DNA reading to be used at the diagnostics stage, which explains why the company, formerly known as Nanofluidics, got funded by Mohr Davidow, Alloy and Kleiner Perkins.  At least I think that's what they do, the exact description being "observations of DNA polymerase activity as an example of the effectiveness of zero-mode waveguides for performing single-molecule experiments at high concentrations" according to this Science paper.

You would think the US Government would welcome someone like Mathieu with open arms.  His skills are not replicable and he has been contributing valuable patent work to a US company.  Instead he has been trying to cope with a cumbersome set of rules that forces him to spend time outside the US regularly in order to renew his working permit and go through long sessions at the consulate.

From my trip to Bombay a couple of months ago I understand that a number of excellent Indian engineers are also choosing to stay at home or return to their homeland rather than face an alienating immigration process.  I cannot imagine what life is like if your are an Iranian or Pakistani scientist.

This is anecdotal evidence for a broader trend that worries member of the startup community in the US.  Many of the great technology successes were built by Indian, Chinese or, say, Turkish engineers who were attracted by the unique environment that allowed innovation to blossom.  Besides losing its apsirational status as the undisputed champion of freedom thanks to its subtle foreign policy, the US is also at risk of forcing talent to look elsewhere, including at home, to fulfil their dreams.

Couple that with the increased difficulty in luring engineering talent away from GYM and you can see why a number of entrepreneurs that I have come across are starting to think hard about alternative locations to grow their business.  The US should watch out as it may be starting to hurt the delicate machinery that made it so succesful.

This week's depressing conversation with a European entrepreneur

I have been working since 93, in VC since 99 (yes, the bubble), and I have been directly involved as an investor with about 20 companies so far.  I have probably heard well in excess of 1,000 pitches.  And there is one answer which never fails to get me either depressed or combative, depending on how many lattes in the day I have had. 

The question is: "what's your international development strategy".  The answer is not the US or Asia, it usually goes: "we were thinking about ... the Benelux".  Sometimes I drop the latte; other times I decide to become a tour guide of Brussels or Antwerp.

The most recent example relates to entrepreneur X (as in X-Factor), who I met this week.  He runs startup #1,413.  He has a great, highly differentiated product, whose sheer excellence seems sufficient to defeat the highly visible and competent US and Israeli competitors that he is facing.  His go-to-market relates on well-oiled and highly efficient channels.  He has 7-8 very obvious acquirers (all in the US) and could exit on tech prowess only or decide to execute further and go for the big winner.  In either scenario he is looking at a chunky exit.  I am all excited.

And then the dreaded answer comes: "we are going to expand into EuroCountry A than EuroCountry B, are looking to exit within 18 months for about $30-50m, providing everyone with a decent return in the process.  We don't want to go to the US because it is costly and most people fail to make it.  Our investors advised us to raise less money and take this safer route".

I am not going to pretend that it's easy to make 10x+ returns in the European market, or that breaking the US is easy, or that increasing your capital intensity is the answer.  However I will say that such a company has a duty to itself to dare to go for more than being the #1 in Spain and Holland.

When you have world class technology and a good team:

• Educate yourself about the type of investors you can get.  Even Sequoia did a bunch of deals in Europe last year, and there is no reason why they would not invest in you...
• Make a point of going to your largest market first and go measure up against the best competition in your segment, and play to win.   The European market is a field of dead bodies when it comes to once promising local plays who got crowded out when the big US players entered the fray.
  
• Do not let your investors dictate what you should do.  Investing is a partnership, and a company is nothing without a management team.  Defend a true vision.
  
• Raise your game.  Get a great board member, court a great manager, pitch a great VC.  [Yes, we are open for business 24/7 ;-)]

It's a cliche, in fact this post is full of cliches.  But you really need to plan back from your endgoal and ask the question: what will it take to become a real leader in my industry ?

More TechCrunch, with a British twist

Mike Arrington's crunching reach expanded yesterday at he teamed up with "Entrepologist" Sam Sethi.  We look forward to reading you.  Someone has obviously been whispering "Piczo" in their ear.  Our colleagues have been positioning themselves quickly ;-)

PS: TCUK has got 1600 subs in a day, about 10X me after 3 weeks :-(  Talk about brand appeal.  Of course some way to go to catch up with Ouriel (4,486) and the main man (98,168).  Maybe this is a first step to finding the UK's missing bloggers.

Tracing UGC Video's Ancestry to its real beginnings

TechDirt comments on a Slate article that traces YouTube's ancestry back to America's Funniest Home Videos.  This provides me with a unique opportunity to be European culture snob that is just too good to pass up.

The point is well made that TV has only itself to blame for getting its public used to on the one hand user content like A'sFHM (1990) and on the other under-produced reality shows courtesy of the deal-making maestros at Endemol (Big Brother in 1997) or MTV's The Real World back in 1992.  From a great way to improve margins ("hey, this stuff costs nothing to produce and gets great ratings") to destroying your business, the TV industry took a giant step forward towards Andy Warhol's "fifteen minutes of fame" vision and created a monster (or a set of 180 monsters) that could have been called FameTV but was called YouTube and co.  (Or was it that everyone would be famous in 15 minutes ? I forget).

Anyway I would argue that UGC video harks back not only to Andy but also to the great tradition of film-making and the seminal widescreen experience of the Freres Lumiere.

"L'arrive du Train en gare de la Ciotat" was supposedly so impressive to onlookers that they would jump over the seats towards the exit to avoid the train's impact

Indeed, take a look at the set of short-films that constituted the public release programme of the Lumiere Brothers (from Wikipedia):

   
1. La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon (literally, "the exit from the Lumière factories in Lyon", or, under its more common English title, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory), 46 seconds
   
2. La Voltige ("horse trick riders"), 46 seconds
   
3. La Pêche aux poissons rouges ("fishing for goldfish"), 42 seconds
   
4. Le Débarquement du Congrès de Photographie à Lyon ("the disembarkment of the Congress of Photographers in Lyon"), 48 seconds
   
5. Les Forgerons ("blacksmiths"), 49 seconds
   
6. Le Jardinier (l'Arroseur arrosé) ("the gardener, [the sprinkler sprinkled]"), 49 seconds
   
7. Le Repas (de bébé) ("baby's meal"), 41 seconds
   
8. Le Saut à la couverture ("jumping onto the blanket"), 41 seconds
   
9. La Place des Cordeliers à Lyon ("Cordeliers Square in Lyon"--a street scene), 44 seconds
   
10. La Mer (Baignade en mer) ("the sea [bathing in the sea]"), 38 seconds

If that isn't UGC... So there you have it, we are back to the future: YouTube, DailyMotion, vpod are all the great descendants of the illustrious Lumiere Brothers, and the next step in the great tradition of filmed entertainment.  On that note, let me get back to watching King Kong on my HD plasma.  [And thanks to pco for triggering this particular lightbulb in my head] 

Tags: UGV, video, youtube, dailymotion, vpod.tv, lumierebrothers, slate, techdirt