If “innovative” means – as it should – creating something that is beneficial, then the increasing popularity of secondary markets for private shares is the first “financial innovation” in a long time that actually deserves the title.

For entrepreneurs who don’t want to go public and don’t want to sell their business to create liquidity, this is a very healthy alternative and a much needed market.

http://www.pehub.com/71570/commoners-keep-overvaluing-facebook-twitter-tesla/

I wrote this comment in response to an excellent post by Fred Wilson “From Hopes and Dreams to the Real Thing” I wrote this comment in the comments to his post but am reposting it here as well.

Some thoughts about the reality of entrepreneurship from my experience of the past 11 years living a mainly entrepreneurial life (and lifestyle):

I’ve lived the ups and downs and downs and ups of entrepreneurship and my experience has been that when you look back on those days when you were in the trenches fighting for survival, you’ll see them, through the lens of nostalgia, as the “good old days”. By contrast, scaling a fast growing startup that has found its market fit is stimulating and exciting but, at least for me, sits nowhere near as prominently in my minds list of proud moments.

My last entrepreneurial run went from 2000 to mid 2006 with a true “go to the light” near death experience throughout most of 2002. The business ultimately found its market fit and had a high growth phase from 2003 to 2005 (from 7 people to more than 200 during Continue reading →

UGC, LBS, media, meta search, NLP, aggregation, commerce, web 2.0… As industry insiders, we’ve all heard these labels ad nauseum. But customers don’t think in categories – they think in problems. Don’t worry about what other industry insiders label you, worry about problems you solve for customers.

The details are details. They make the product. The connections, the connections, the connections. It will in the end be these details that give the product its life.

Charles Eames

Please see the job description at

http://jobs.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?6689

The iPad is NOT for you if:

• You are expecting it to be a smaller/lighter laptop
• You want a replacement for a specialized reading device like the Kindle
• A replacement for a mobile device like iPhone or Blackberry
• You type rapidly on a keyboard and will become very frustrated with being slow on a hard to hold, hard to type on iPad
• You are already very comfortable with a Mac or Windows full operating system; you will be very frustrated with how cumbersome the iPhone OS is relative to a real computer.
• Don’t already have a computer – you can’t startup an iPad without first connecting it to a computer (Windows or Mac). Yes, that’s ridiculous for a device this expensive.

The iPad is not:

• Easy to type on
• Easy to manipulate or engage with content on
• Mobile (at least not by the standards of iPhone or Blackberry)
• Ergonomic – it’s too heavy to hold for long with one hand, incapable of being held with two while you type and basically all around awkward.

At the current price, the iPad IS for: Continue reading →

Oyster is looking for sales and business development people. Please contact me if you are interested elie at oyster dot com and attach a resume and write a short note

Here is some of what we are looking for:

• Charming
• Likable
• Persuasive
• Deeply extroverted
• Articulate
• Loves networking
• Aggressive and ambitious
• Customer focused – the kind of person who answers every email and phone call before going home for the night.
• Customer service oriented
• Concise – no buzzworders please. Nothing is more annoying than someone who speaks – regardless of how eloquently – and delivers many words but no content.
• Presentable – will present well for the Oyster brand, particularly when speaking with advertisers or hoteliers. No one slick please.
• Smart – can understand the needs of the customer and help them become a better marketer as a result.
• Hard working – the sales and marketing team will run on a 9AM to ~8pm schedule 5+ days/week so this is not a job for everyone.
• Number of years of prior work experience – 1 to 6
• Willing to be assessed continuously – Understands that the sales and business development org is a quantitative metric driven  environment with the derivative potential (and likelihood) for high churn among those who don’t meet the highest standards of performance. For the right people, that metric driven assessment is a boon, for others it’s a nonstarter.
• Prior experiences preferred; not required for people who have tremendous aptitude but the ideal candidate has at least a few of these.
  • Has sold online advertising before
  • Has sold to tourism bureaus before
  • Understands the Internet. Can easily name 5 sites that they use frequently and explain what makes that site best in class (Google, amazon and any mail program does not count)
  • Have sold to hotels before – understand how hotels think about marketing and sales
  • Has sold something, anything really, before and liked it
  • Has worked in the hotel industry
  • Was an entrepreneur – even if their business was not successful, I’m still interested (for obvious reasons, it’s hard to hire the entrepreneurs who have been very successful)
  • Passionate about hotels – kind of obvious but worth stating.
• Locations
  • NYC – currently the most desirable
  • LA
  • SF
  • Miami
  • Vegas
  • Orlando

If you’re profitable, you can control your board.. 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 - Mark Pincus CEO of Zynga

For many an entrepreneur, raising venture capital (VC) money is an important – if not critical – milestone in the history of their business. In fact, raising VC money has become such an important part of the entrepreneurial experience, at least  for certain types of enterepreneurship (e.g. consumer Internet) that it’s hard to remember that raising VC is still a relatively new way to finance a new business – the VC industry having only really been established in the 60s with the likes of Arthur Rock (early investor in Apple and Intel) establishing funds that did nothing else. There are so many impressive stories about VC funded businesses (Google, Cisco, Hotmail, AdMob, Zynga, Etsy to name just a few) and so many “celebrity VCs” including Vinod Khosla, Don Valentine, Michael Mortiz, John Doerr and Continue reading →

Clay Shirky has written a truly brilliant essay on the future of newspapers. The short version: newspapers don’t have a future – is, of course, not surprising. Additionally, journalism – not newspapers – are something that we, as a society, very much need. Journalism in and of itself is not a profitable business and has been subsidized for a long time – as Shirky says by WalMart (publishing ads that help the times pay for the Baghdad bureau) and the 14 year old kid who, for a very low wage, delivers the newspaper to your home in the suburbs.

Printing presses, trucks, ink, and union wages simply can’t compete against WordPress, servers, and electrons. And they won’t which is why we should expect that most printed news is going to simply disappear – as anachronistic as a steamship plying the Atlantic ocean or a horse and buggy taking a businessperson home from Wall Street to their suburban home on 70th street and West End Avenue.

The revolution in publishing infrastructure - presses to electrons - means that any Continue reading →

It’s not just a provocative title – it’s true. When building a product – especially a consumer web product – it’s important to remember that your potential customers are busy. Take a look at a weeks worth of posts on TechCrunch or TechMeme – the number of new companies and new products is overwhelming. A byproduct of our creative and entrepreneurial culture is that we are collectively churning out massive numbers of new things for customers to try.

Given the noise of new and existing offerings that you are competing against, here are a few things that I think are critical to remember:

• Intersect customers where they already are – your potential customers are largely not going to come find you – you need to go find them where they already are. You can have the best product in the world but if you don’t have a good way to get that product to customers you are going to have a problem.
• Word of mouth (not viral) has more potential than it ever had: The good news is that – particularly for consumer web products – it’s vastly easier than it ever was for word to spread about great products. Twitter, Facebook, mass adoption of e-mail, digg, a massive number of blogs covering every last little niche and Google – both paid and organic – have created a massive distribution network that speeds word of mouth. The noise is vast but if you excite customers, word spreads far faster than it ever did in the past. That’s certainly a part of why we are now seeing companies capture massive numbers of customers in just a few years (it’s still not a few months) where it used to take a decade or more for most. Think of local reviews as an example. In the past decade CitySearch grew and became massive and within the same decade Yelp Continue reading →