August 18, 2008 by Nathan Kaiser
So, the latest news is that Randora may have to shut down because it can not afford the royalties it has to pay to labels and artists. It would be interesting to see how much of those gov’t sanctioned royalties actually make it to the artists, but that is a topic for somebody else.
Wired has a good roundup today where they speak with Tim Westergren, who we spoke with a while ago and featured in an interview. It comes as no surprise that Pondora can’t survive with the higher rates, which is obviously a concern for anyone who likes Internet music.
The key issue though is that the market simply changes too fast for the government regulators to keep up. How can they, when we barely can? The same issue applies online privacy. We featured Auren Hoffman in an interview as well and he spoke at length about how quickly the industry is changing, the number of players, and how data is growing exponentially.
I don’t propose to have the answers, but I think the music industry will have to work with the service providers (Pandora) and others directly. Either they do or all players fail outright and the important players (consumers) are very unhappy. As they will be if Pandora goes under.
The RIAA is invested in keeping the labels key players and with the government stepping in they are simply prolonging this status quo. However, does anyone really think that the labels are necessary for distribution?
So please, regulators keep out of it and let the market decide. It won’t be easy, and most likely won’t be pretty, but the job will get done!
Posted in Entrepreneurship | 1 Comment »
August 13, 2008 by Nathan Kaiser
Posted in Entrepreneurship | Leave a Comment »
August 12, 2008 by Nathan Kaiser
Not a good week for WordPress or Gmail and it is only Tuesday! What is a start up to do that doesn’t want to spend any money and wants all the services that FREE services provide? Nothing I guess.
The question is, should we expect a 99.99% reliability of free services? If not, what should we expect? Do we have any options if they are down (really, since we aren’t paying)?
Whatever the answer, it isn’t any fun!
Update (08/13/08) – The day after I posted this, someone from Customer support at WordPress posted an explanation about what happened. I am very impressed by this type of response and think more companies should be out engaging in this way. Way to go WordPress!
Posted in Entrepreneurship | 1 Comment »
August 12, 2008 by Nathan Kaiser
Posted in Entrepreneurship | Leave a Comment »
August 11, 2008 by Nathan Kaiser
As it comes as no surprise Gmail down this afternoon and I was unable to access my email for at least two hours. Obviously, the world didn’t end as some assumed it would, but it was certainly a major inconvenience. This raises a broader issue in regards to communications. If Gmail (or any other provider) were to go down for a sustained period, what would be the options for communicating with others?
Is there a substitute that would be able to take up the slack however imperfect?
- SMS: Perfect for immediate communications that are limited to one or at most two points. Mostly limited to one-to-one communications.
- Twitter: Great for general communications, essentially what I call virtual water cooler discussions. Able to have a one-to-many communication as well as private discussions one-on-one. Limited to 140 characters, which limits the amount of content and media shared.
- IM: Excellent for one-to-one communications, but the immediacy that is implied can impead discussion and discourse as well as complexity associated with email communications.
Seems like we are going to be using email for awhile yet. Interestingly, all new forms of communications tend to add to the options available and don’t replace preceeding forms. So, no replacement for email and when it is down I think we will have to simply deal…
Posted in Entrepreneurship | 3 Comments »
August 5, 2008 by Nathan Kaiser
Thanks to everyone who has submitted their valuation data. We currently have 15 examples for valuations within the Seattle area. I am trying to get additional data from outside the Seattle area, and will see what I can do…
So far, I think there are some interesting take aways:
- Average equity stake for investors is targeted at around 24%
- Average Pre-Money Valuation: $4.7M
- Consumer Internet: $5.5M
- Enterprise / ASP: $2.3M
- Other: $3.4M
- Average Post-Money Valuation: $4.9M
- All companies have 10 employees or less
- Stage of company: (companies, valuation, raised/raising)
- Concept: 1, $7M, ??
- In Development: 1, $2.5M, ??
- Beta: 7, $4.9M, 2 raised / 1 raising / 4??
- Launched / Live: 6, $4.5M, 2 raised / 2 raising / 2??
Here are the links:
Submit a Company Valuation >>
See the data >>
Obviously, this is not a scientific survey, but I do think the data is quite interesting. This data does not capture any personal identifiable information is open to everyone to review.
Feel free to share the above links, as the more data we capture, the more usefull it all becomes!
Posted in Entrepreneurship | 1 Comment »
July 25, 2008 by Nathan Kaiser
We will be bar hopping in Ballard on Tuesday, July 29th. The event starts at 6pm at Connor Byrne (map). Being a pub crawl, we plan on hitting a number of different bars. If you want to join us at any time during the night, you can follow our location by regularly checking http://twitter.com/nPost for updates.
Don’t worry, getting to Ballard is quick and easy… Head North from downtown on Elliott Avenue, which becomes 15th Ave NW or take 45th East from I5. No passport required!
Posted in Entrepreneurship | Leave a Comment »
July 24, 2008 by Nathan Kaiser
Had an interesting conversation with an entrepreneur this morning about pre-money valuations. What he consider the company worth differed significantly from what I suggested. For the record, I was approaching this conversation to solely provide feedback about the overall idea.
Obviously, we were approaching the valuation from different perspectives and with different goals. That said, I would be interested in seeing a larger data set of startup valuations. I have set up a poll that will collect segmentation, size, company stage, pre-money and post-money valuations and expected raise amounts. We are not capturing who submitted or what company the info is for. All the information submitted will be available to everyone online.
This is a first attempt at gaining a clearer picture of different valuations. Any additional feedback about how to optimize the poll, please contact me directly. Feel free to submit or not, it is completely up to you.
Here are the links:
Submit a Company Valuation >>
See the data >>
Posted in Entrepreneurship | 3 Comments »
July 23, 2008 by Nathan Kaiser
What if Google decided all of a sudden changed from “don’t be evil” to “who cares?” Lets say they do… I decided to compile a list of all the Google services that I use daily to see where I would be affected:
I use the above services more than any other site, service or application. I am almost fully online now and am completely at Google’s mercy. For a quick summary, Google knows who I communicate it, what I am interested in, what I read, what I don’t read, my daily schedule, the traffic that my sites receive, what I am writing about, has detailed understanding of the data that I share with others in the form of Google Docs, and untold data based upon their acquisition of DoubleClick (where I go online, what I see and do, my browsing habits, etc).
The question I ask myself, is what are the risks associated with having all my data controlled by one company? If they did decide to change how they operate, how much risk would be in? What if even one employee were to pull data illegally? Could they access my bank accounts by determining my banks and financial institutions and hacking my passwords (they will have the ability to determine my passwords via email, and my history).
If I do decide that the risk is too high, what are the switching costs? Who else provides the scalability for all the services mentioned above and how much would I be willing to pay? I would need to determine how much the assessed risk “cost me.” When all is said, free is powerful.
I will continue to use these Google services and probably more and more as time goes on and will hope and pray that my fears do not come to pass.
As it stands now, I can fully adopt Google as my alter ego. After all, they do know me better than I know myself.
Posted in Entrepreneurship | Leave a Comment »
July 22, 2008 by Nathan Kaiser
Posted in Entrepreneurship | Leave a Comment »
July 22, 2008 by Nathan Kaiser
I’m here today with Dean Robinson, the creator of Hahlo. Dean, would you mind giving us an introduction to Hahlo?
Hahlo is designed to allow Twitter users to access and send messages via the iPhone. It uses the Twitter and Summize.com (recently purchased by Twitter) APIs. The main goal of Hahlo is to provide the most feature-rich Twitter client for the iPhone. Essentially that was the goal from the beginning… to try to provide as much of the functionality of the full web site but for the mobile environment.
Were you a heavy Twitter user when you created Hahlo?
I wouldn’t say I was a heavy user. I’ve probably become a heavier user since. I’d been using Twitter for about six months prior to it. I built the original prototype the night after last year’s keynote, when Steve Jobs announced that you could make web apps for the iPhone and my first thought was, “Oh, what can I make?” I thought Twitter was perfectly suited for use on the iPhone so, I started playing around and Hahlo was the result.
Posted in Entrepreneurship | Leave a Comment »
July 17, 2008 by Nathan Kaiser
Every startup has to keep their costs down. The question is how do they do that? Many meetings happen in coffee shops, where a typical coffee costs $4. Times that by 2-3 meetings per day, 5 days a week, 4 weeks a month, you get the idea.
Then you get into hosting, phone, office, and all the other bills. How do you keep your costs down? This is especially true with companies that bootstrap, where everything is out of your own pocket.
Here are a few things that I do:
- Drink water. Don’t get a cup of coffee. If you must, get a drip coffee or even a hot or iced tea. Save 100% to 50% off the cost of a latte
- Keep your hosting costs down. No need to pay for a gazillion users unless you have them
- Call your phone companies and get group discount/rate for having your entire team on the same plan
- Use as many free services as possible; Gmail, Google Analytics, WordPress, etc.
- If you have to drive, try to coordinate all of your meetings in one location. No need to waste gas at >$4 / gallon.
- Negotiate with your insurance company, see if you can get a discount by threatening to switch providers, works for phone carriers, credit cards, etc.
I have been doing the above, and have saved ~$1,000 / month. That isn’t pocket change!
Remember, every dollar counts! How do you save $$$$?
Posted in Entrepreneurship | 10 Comments »
July 15, 2008 by Nathan Kaiser
Posted in Entrepreneurship | Leave a Comment »
July 14, 2008 by Nathan Kaiser
Posted in Entrepreneurship | Leave a Comment »
July 10, 2008 by Nathan Kaiser
Tags: startup tech jobs
Posted in Entrepreneurship | Leave a Comment »
July 8, 2008 by Nathan Kaiser
Whatever you do, don’t use the Yaari social networking site. They will SPAM your contacts and you will very much regret it. It is common for social networks to allow you the option of checking your contacts to determine if any of them are using the service. However, Yaari took the step to actually send an unsolicited email to my contacts. In no way did I instruct the service to send emails to my contacts.
Not only is this practice wrong, it is reprehensible. If you received an email from me regarding the Yaari site I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. Do not sign up for Yaari!
Posted in Entrepreneurship | 1 Comment »
July 2, 2008 by Nathan Kaiser
Posted in Entrepreneurship | Leave a Comment »
June 23, 2008 by Nathan Kaiser
I have heard lots of talk recently about the rise of this or that platform, mostly Facebook and Twitter. Are these truly platforms? To answer that, we need to come to a conclusion about what a platform is. In the simplest sense, it is a means by which services are delivered and facilitated.
Microsoft Windows is definitely a platform and the Internet is certainly a platform. Is Facebook a platform? They have >80 million active users, and are one of the fastest growing social networks. However, MySpace still has over 20 million more users and is continuing to grow. At the core, though, is Facebook at platform? Are services delivered and facilitated by its technology?
Yes and no. A lot was made out of Facebook widgets, but are they providing full communication, lifestyle, business, or other services to Facebook users? The current answer is no. it does have one thing going for it and that is its user base. To become a full fledged platform they need to do the following:
- Completely open up its data to outside providers
- Allow developers to create full fledged applications to run internally
- Become more than a site and expand into a full operating system – via a browswer
- Expand to more of a mainstream audience – Until my mother uses it, it won’t be a platform (I am calling this the “Mother Test” and it applies to most technology)
- Needs to integrate with external IM and email. This having to go to the Facebook site to correspond with people is lame and annoying and a long term hinderance to adoption
I am certainly not an expert on platforms, but I do know it when I see it… If you disagree, I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
I want to also take a look at Twitter. The problems it faces in becoming a platform are relatively simple:
- Reliability – A platform can’t go down and be unavailable at even a fraction as much as Twitter is down
- User base – There are simply not enough users on the site to provide the critical mass necessary for a platform
- Technology – Is Twitter a broad enough service to provide the scope necessary for unknown applications? Will it be anything more a simple communication system that compliments phone calls, email, IM, SMS, etc?
I know what I think… Do you agree or not?
Posted in Entrepreneurship | 2 Comments »
June 17, 2008 by Nathan Kaiser
Posted in Entrepreneurship | Leave a Comment »
June 10, 2008 by Nathan Kaiser
Posted in Entrepreneurship | Leave a Comment »
June 3, 2008 by Nathan Kaiser
Posted in Entrepreneurship | Leave a Comment »
May 20, 2008 by Nathan Kaiser
I had a great conversation yesterday with Alie Degon of Metajiva about the future of recruiting and how it has dramatically changed and how it will continue to do so.
Historically, recruiting has been all about the rolodex. Who do you know and how well did they fit the need for a given position at a specific company. They were similar to the match makers of old, who would connect two people from different families.
Recruiters served a similar purpose, and the two are very different as people often spend about the same if not more time at work with their co-workers than they do with their spouse or significant other. In that sense, it was important to match up people and companies based on a good understanding of different values, cultures, expectations and of course skill sets.
Now though, with the explosion of online job boards and with much more savvy applicants and companies recruiters are seeing their roles change. They are no longer about spinning the rolodex and are more about using data to filter out candidates.
With many of the job boards driving tens to even hundreds of applicants for every job, the recruiter is responsible for filtering down to the top few candidates to bring in to interview.
What should every recruiter be doing:
- Monitoring which job boards send the best candidates for specific types of jobs
- Compare these job boards against long term performance and retention of placed candidates
- Try different messaging for getting the attention of candidates
- Develop key metrics for each employer around culture, performance, technical requirements, location, etc.
- Develop a vetting process for weeding through candidates
- Leverage the niche job boards as well as the social networks
Posted in Entrepreneurship | Leave a Comment »
