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Feld Thoughts

• Platforms vs. Developers 12 April, 2010, 4:00 am
  In the last few days there have been a large number of posts about two platform companies – Apple and Twitter.  These posts covered a wide range of perspectives (a few of the better ones are linked to below) but fundamentally came down to the tension between a platform (e.g. the iPhone OS or Twitter) vs. third party developers that build applications on top of the platforms. Several of the Twitter related posts include The Twitter Platform’s Inflection Point, Twitter and third-party Twitter developers, and Developers In Denial: The Seesmic Case Study. Several of the Apple related posts ones include  and Adobe Vs. Apple War Generates Rage, Facebook Group, Why Apple Changed Section 3.3.1, Steve Jobs response on section 3.3.1.  If you missed the leads to the story, Apple made a major change in their TOS and Twitter launched an official Blackberry client and acquired the Tweetie iPhone client, rattling their developer community.  And Twitter Officially Responds To Developers and Tries To Calm Fears. While there has been an amazing outburst of reaction – including much surprise and criticism – to both of these situations, they should come as no surprise to anyone that has been in the computer business for a long time.  What we are experiencing is the natural evolutionary struggle that exists between a platform and its developers.  In the past few years, both Twitter and Apple have created amazing platforms and build incredible network effects on top of their platforms.  One way they have done this is to embrace developers, who have flocked to these platforms in droves, building a huge variety of awesome, great, good, mediocre, and crummy products on top of the platforms. Some of these products have created meaningful revenue for the developers, others have generated fame, and many have generated a giant time sink of work that hasn’t resulted in much.  This is the nature of being a developer on top of a platform. True platforms are special things that are rare.  Fortunately, developers have a lot of choices and that is a powerful dynamic that keeps both the platforms and developers evolving.  I think the next few months are going to be pretty exciting ones as the current phase we are in sorts itself out.
• Email Is Still The Best Login 30 March, 2010, 2:53 pm
  After downloading Skype 4.2, I realized that I could now invite all of my Facebook friends who had Skype accounts to my Skype contact list.  So I did.  Unfortunately the Skype UI for this sucks so I had to go through about 1,000 entries a screen of five at a time unchecking the Facebook friends I didn’t want on Skype.  I ended up inviting about 280 – fortunately I was on a conference call for the thirty minutes it took me to grind through this. The data field used for the match was email address.  Shocking, I know.  It’s the same data field used to log in to Facebook and Twitter.  Google sort of uses email (at least the gmail) account for their authentication, although now that I have both my gmail account (brad.feld@gmail.com) and my email account (brad@feld.com) in Google’s system, I am constantly having to fight with the “reauthorize me to access that thing via brad.feld@gmail.com) game” since Google hasn’t solved for multiple email addresses yet. More and more sites are integrating Facebook Connect, Twitter “Connect”, or both.  Yahoo has such a golden opportunity to do this and own it but they blew it.  Google seems to have also missed this and ceded it to Facebook and Twitter for some reason.  Microsoft has been trying for a decade first with Passport and now Live ID. And then there is Skype with their 20m simultaneous users.  Or Amazon with their gazillion users authenticating via email.  And then there’s Barnes & Noble – if I want to create an account I get to use my email address.  And the list goes on and on. Facebook and Twitter are in a perfect position to own single sign on.  I just don’t understand why Yahoo and Google blew this although I don’t really care.  What I do care about is that there seems to be a natural convergence on email as the user id and authentication via widely pervasive services like Facebook and Twitter rather than entertainingly complex approaches like Oath.  I predict email is going to become even more important in the next few years.  There’s no reason for me to have a phone number any more – you should just be able to contact me via brad@feld.com.  And that should authenticate me anywhere.  And – as a messaging protocol – I should be able to use my “inbox” (wherever or whatever it is) as my central notification point. It’s remarkable that 15 years after commercial Internet email started to proliferate, it is still at the root of all the commercial Internet activity.  Very very cool.
• TechStars Data from 2007 to 2009 15 March, 2010, 5:29 am
  One of our internal mantras at TechStars is to “publish your data.”  We encourage every team to do this starting very early in their life.  To this day, I still get daily performance reports (I refer to them as TPS reports) from many of the companies that have gone through the program. Last week, David Cohen published all of the historical TechStars data.  39 companies have gone through the program to date (30 through Boulder and 9 through Boston).  The data that David published covers a lot of ground, including status by individual company.  Some of the pertinent summary data follows: In three years, about $16.5 million in seed-stage funding has been raised. 27 of 39 (~70%) TechStars companies have either raised outside funding after the program or bootstrapped to profitability. TechStars companies currently employ 156 people. Four of the first ten companies from the inaugural 2007 class have already achieved positive exits. The most recent group of companies resulted in seven VC-led follow-on funding rounds and three additional angel-led rounds. At the same time, Shawn Broderick, who runs the TechStars Boston program, just published the age demographics for the newest class of 10 companies that started the program at the beginning of March.  The numbers may surprise you as being higher than you might expect: Youngest: 21 Oldest: 51 Average: 28.3 Median: 27 Our plan is to continue to update this data on a regular basis as we think it helps people better understand the TechStars program.  If there is additional data that you’d like to see, please feel free to suggest it. Applications for the TechStars Boulder 2010 program are still open until March 22, 2010 at 11:59:59 PM Mountain Time.  If you haven’t applied but are thinking about it, apply now (it’ll only take a few minutes.) Related posts:TechStars 2009 Demo Day in Mountain View – 9/30/09 Why to Apply for TechStars Boston 2010 Today TechStars Applications Are Now Open
• Blur is Coming 20 March, 2010, 10:08 am
  I’ve been hinting about a new conference that we’ve been working on with Eric Norlin that complements Defrag and Glue.  Eric is about to launch it and the splash page for the Blur Conference is up.  If you are familiar with Defrag and Glue, you know they are built around two of Foundry Group’s themes (Protocol and Glue respectively).  Blur is being built around our Human Computer Interaction theme, but with a twist.  Instead of simply being able to “see cool stuff up close”, our goal with Blur will be to create an environment where you can actually use and work with this stuff.  We’ll have user-oriented demos, hackathons, and tons of crazy shit no one has ever seen before.  Plus, we’ll give away a lot of cool toys, have a ton of smart people who are working on the next generation of HCI in one place, and have some fun surprises.  And we are doing it in an environment that is especially tuned for a conference like Blur. I’m incredibly excited about what Eric has put together for this year’s Glue Conference (as I wrote about the other day).  He’s setting a high bar for Blur, where the goal will now be to have a few brains explode!  Get ready – it’s never dull around here. Related posts:Pitch Me At The Glue Conference The Glue That Binds Things The Glue Agenda Is Getting Awesome
• Update From ADPrentice 22 April, 2010, 11:00 am
  In 2005, I wrote a post titled ADPrentice that talked about a weekend event I did with a number of the undergraduates in my MIT fraternity (ADP).  In the post I described the entrepreneurship education event I helped put on with Sameer Gandhi (Accel Partners – then at Sequoia Capital) and Mark Siegel (Menlo Ventures).  It was an awesome weekend – we held an event modeled after the Apprentice TV show (without the bad hair) that had three challenges: (1) Marketing, (2) Hiring / Interview, and (3) 5-Year Plan & Budget.  In between events, Mark gave a talk titled “How Does Venture Capital Work”, Sameer gave a talk titled “Business Plan 101”, and I gave a talk titled “Do You Have The Balls To Start A Company?”  A few months ago I wrote a post titled Startups at 351 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, MA detailing the rich history of startups from ADP that happened around the time I was living there.  After some back and forth, a handful of folks decided to mobilize another ADPrentice event for the undergraduates living in the house.  Mark, Sameer, and I have committed to participate again and we’ are trying to rope in a few of the other successful MIT ADP entrepreneurs from over the years. In the mean time Alex Moore, the founder of Baydin (TechStars Boston 2009) who also lived at ADP (although much more recently) sent me a list of the various companies that have come out of folks that were at the ADPrentice event.  Not surprisingly, it blew my mind! Josh Runge ‘07 and Zach Clifford ‘08 are working furiously on a task management/task optimization startup called Lazymeter. Ruben Rodrigues ‘04 and Josh Ouellette ‘04 are starting Loci Technologies, a voter targeting system that incorporates real-time, location-aware feedback into campaign calls. Patrick Hereford ‘05 and Adan Gutierrez ‘04 are starting Huddlehub, a fantasy sports aggregator and recommendation site that launched at SXSW and was mentioned on Jimmy Fallon’s late night show. Steve Chait ‘08 is working on interactive flashcards and learning-based games. Xavi Ramirez ‘07 and a coworker are starting a company part time and are still defining their first product. Alex Moore is am working on Baydin with a partner from Dartmouth, making email clients smarter and more useful. These are the active companies.  Two others were started that didn’t succeed, but that’s part of the entrepreneurial cycle!  It’s just awesome to see the outcome of something like this – it reminds me how powerful spending time with college kids is.  They are clearly the future – and we want more of them to be entrepreneurs.  Congrats to all of you – you make me proud to know you.
• Give Your VCs Assignments 5 May, 2010, 4:00 am
  Over the weekend, Mark Suster wrote a great post titled How To Communicate with your Investors between Board Meetings.  Mark continues to just tear it up with great advice for entrepreneurs.  However, he left out one thing from the post – which is one of my favorite pieces of advice for entrepreneurs. Give your venture capitalists (and board members) assignments Mark alludes to this in many of his suggestions but he never comes out and says it.  And, amazingly to me, many entrepreneurs either don’t ever think of this or don’t feel comfortable doing it.  They should. Most VCs will quickly say that they want to help the companies they invest in to success.  Some will go further and say things like “I’ll do anything I can to help my companies.”  Rarely have I heard a VC say something like “My plan is to just hang around, go to board meetings, ask a few nonsensical, low insight, rhetorical questions, eat the crummy food, and then disappear until the next board meeting.”  However, as any entrepreneur who has ever worked with multiple VCs knows, the statements a VC makes (or doesn’t make) doesn’t necessarily correspond to his behavior. I think you can break this cycle early in the life of your relationship with your VCs by giving them assignments.  At the end of the first board meeting, spend some time talking about your expectations for your board members (including your VCs), ask if they are reasonable, and then go around the table and ask each board member what they’d like to specifically help with between now and the next board meeting.  Explain that you want to develop a cycle of accountability for each board member to the company and use this to (a) develop deep engagement from each board member between meetings, (b) benefit from the experience and wisdom of each board member on a continual basis, and (c) set a strong tone for the leadership team (and the company) that everyone has functional responsibilities that they are held accountable to.  Acknowledge that it will take a few board meetings to get into a good rhythm with this, but be clear that you’ll spend a little time at the next board meeting going through individual assignments, what was done, and what the new assignments are until the next board meeting. The assignments should be specific – if they are general (such as “help with strategy” or “help with the financing”) they will be useless.  Make sure the assignments play to the individual board members strengths and interests.  They should provide leverage for the leadership team; not create make work.  They should be impactful, but not mission critical. In companies where the CEO hands out regular assignments, I’ve experienced an awesome tempo after about six months.  The board members begin holding themselves accountable and the management team is much more comfortable working directly with the individual board members.  Over time assignments become less “stiff” and the regimen of passing them out and reviewing them at the board meeting will fade away over time as everyone gets used to being held responsible for what they sign up for.
• Don’t Be A Twammer 9 April, 2010, 6:53 am
  I hate spam.  Over the years I’ve been an investor in a number of companies that address the spam problem, including Postini and Return Path.  I’ve also been involved in lots of other companies in the email ecosystem and spam has always been something I’ve paid close attention to. I’ve thought hard about Blam (Blog Spam), Spim (IM Spam), Skam (Skype Spam), and SMam (SMS Spam).  A few times in the past I’ve thought about Twam (Twitter Spam) but Twitter has done a good job so far of dealing with most of the nasty stuff, the most visible being the porn-follower twam that they somehow managed to beat back (or that I’ve successful ignored). Today, I got caught in a twam trap.  I got a note from someone to try out a service.  It’s someone I’d heard from before so I went to the new site and played around with it.  I wasn’t terribly impressed and didn’t really get it.  A few minutes later I got a DM from a friend that said “@bfeld none of the links on that page are active, fyi. tried Chromium + Safari” I didn’t know why my friend was tweeting me that, but then it occurred to me that playing around with the software must have sent out a tweet.  I took a look and lo and behold it did.  I didn’t want that, nor did I set it up.  But it did.  Yuck. Automatic tweeting from within applications is becoming commonplace.  This is good in many cases, but unless the sender authorizes the actual tweet, it’s twam.  There’s no opt-in dynamic around twam, so before a service sends out a tweet for the first time, it seems like good form is to make sure the user wants to tweet.  Most, but not all, do. When you develop a twitter integration, think this through.  Don’t be a twammer.
• Kasa – The Best Sushi in Boulder 10 April, 2010, 9:54 pm
  Amy and I love sushi.  While my sushi dining experiences have been limited to the US and Europe, I’ve had a number of amazing sushi dinners, including Masa in New York.  Boulder has a bizarrely large number of sushi restaurants and over the years we’ve frequented them all numerous times. A year or so ago a new one – Kasa Japanese Grill and Bar – opened up on the corner of Pearl and 15th.  It’s around the corner from our condo in Boulder so we stopped in a few times.  The first time went there it was empty, but the owner and manager Mimi was delightful and upbeat, shining her happiness on us.  As we kept going back, the number of people in the restaurant at any given time increased, but Mimi always welcomed us as if she was welcoming us into her home, doted over us, and made sure we had an amazing time. Last week Kasa finally got a review that it had long deserved when the Boulder Camera wrote Kasa Japanese Grill review: Delicious excess has its place.  Amy and I had dinner at Kasa tonight with our friends Tim Enwall and Hillary Hall and the place was packed.  It was fun to watch Mimi run from table to table, making sure everyone was having a great time as her staff did the same. I’m a Kasa regular and hope to be for a long time.  I’m psyched they are getting the recognition they’ve been working hard for.  The next time you think of sushi in Boulder, give them a try.
• Conference: Startup Lessons Learned 11 April, 2010, 12:00 pm
  Sometimes I feel like a conference promoter.  It’s worth noting that while I put plenty of events up on this blog, I only post the ones that I’d consider going to.  Specifically, I probably get 10 requests to post something for everyone one I do. Over the past year, I’ve gotten to know Eric Ries through the work we’ve done together on the Startup Visa initiative.  If you don’t know of Eric, he’s a software entrepreneur who over the past few years has been developing and evangelizing the idea of the Lean Startup.  He’s an extraordinary writer – I gobble up every word that he writes on his blog Lessons Learned. Eric wrote me the other day about a new conference he’s doing called Startup Lessons Learned in San Francisco on 4/23/10.  The overview of the event follows: Startup Lessons Learned is the first event designed to unite those interested in what it takes to succeed in building a lean startup. The goal for this event is to give practitioners and students of the lean startup methodology the opportunity to hear insights from leaders in embracing and deploying the core principles of the lean startup methodology. The day-long event will feature a mix of panels and talks focused on the key challenges and issues that technical and market-facing people at startups need to understand in order to succeed in building successful lean startups. We have a great lineup of speakers, including Kent Beck, Steve Blank, Sean Ellis, Andrew Chen, Randy Komisar, Hiten Shah, and many others.  While I can’t be there I highly recommend anything that Eric is involved in.  He’s given me a discount code of ERIES25 which is good for 25% any ticket if you register for the event.  If you are in the bay area on 4/23/10 I encourage you to check it out.
• New Blog Design 16 March, 2010, 11:40 am
  As you may have noticed, I’ve got a new blog design, as do my partners Jason Mendelson, Ryan McIntyre, and Seth Levine.  Every year or so I get bored of my blog design and we go through a nice little upgrade.  Our good friends at Slice of Lime do all the design work and Ross (our IT guy) wrangles everything.  We’re still changing some stuff, but if you have any suggestions or notice any bugs, please leave comments so I can tune things up. Related posts:Nike Blogger Shoe Design Contest Web Design Mistakes Corporate Web Site As A Blog