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For Jon Fawcett, Kickstarter success came with an unusual soundtrack: an air horn. The din started on May 7, 2012, the day Fawcett and his colleagues at Fuse Chicken, a four-person design outfit in Akron, Ohio, launched their first Kickstarter campaign. They were trying to raise funding for Une Bobine, a product of Fawcett’s design that stuffed an iPhone charging cable inside a metal gooseneck, allowing it to double as a flexible docking station and makeshift tripod. It was a simple, clever idea, and the team set out with the modest goal of raising $9,800 to put it into production. In anticipation of their micro-windfall, the Fuse Chicken office prepared a ceremony of sorts. In the days leading up to the campaign, team members downloaded a slew of sound effects to their computers, with the idea that they’d play them in celebration whenever they received a new pledge. Fawcett’s sound effect was an air horn. Starting that Monday morning when the project launched, every time he’d get an email notification that a pledge was made, Fawcett would let the horn blast forth from his speakers. Then his co-founders would join in the fanfare with sounds of their own--a cacophonous, call-and-response ode to their crowdfunded success. "That lasted for about two days," Fawcett says.
Digital advertising was a $36.6 billion business last year, and it is driven largely by advertisers’ ability to pinpoint who is most likely to respond to their ads. How do they do that? By keeping tabs on consumers’ behavior. According to an informal survey by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, even back in 2009 80% of online advertising used some form of cookies or online tracking. Meanwhile, data brokers profit by selling information about consumers gathered by stores, the government, and via other publicly available sources. In his graduate thesis project, New York University student Federico Zannier wondered why the advertising industry makes billions of dollars using his and other people’s data, while he makes nothing. To bring attention to the issue, he stalked himself online--screenshotting every website, recording every mouse movement, and noting every location. Then Zannier sold his private data for $2 a day on Kickstarter.
Every morning and every evening the fleet glides through the city, hundreds of white buses with tinted windows navigating San Francisco's rush hour. From the pavement you can see your reflection in the windows, but you can't see in. The buses have no markings or logos, no advertised destinations or stops. It doesn't matter. Everyone knows what they are. "Transport for a breed apart. For a community that is separate but not equal," said Diamond Dave Whitaker, a self-professed beat poet and rabble-rouser.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-bus-is-a-sign-of-silicon-valleys-excesses-2013-5#ixzz2UQY2LOSE
There seems to be a new breed of entrepreneurs whose greatest skill is playing a political game similar to the corporate stooge.
You may not be frequently giving out an embarrassingly gushing smile and you might not write little love notes during your lunch break. But, there are ways to tell if you love your job. Of course, no job is perfect -- even the best of relationships have their down days. We all have to do things we don’t like. I love working at HubSpot, it's the best job I've ever had (but, that's by design). But, even I have “off” days where I'm not spending all my time doing things I absolutely love. So all of the following may not be the case all of the time. But when you love your job, many of the following should be the case much of the time:
Ambitious is one word that comes to mind when describing Brienne Ghafourifar, who succeeded in raising $1 million for her startup Entefy. This makes her the youngest college graduate to raise $1 million in funding. Brienne, who graduated from Santa Clara University with a degree in economics last June, co-founded the company with her brother Alston, 20. Brienne just turned 18 on April 29. Aside from having to give up chocolate because she’s allergic, the biggest challenge she’s taken on was staying focused on finishing college while simultaneously dealing with all the excitement and energy needed when starting a company from scratch. Entefy, a Palo Alto based company, integrates communications, search, and cloud storage. She said their app would be similar to Google in that it promotes centralization, but that the problem she sees with Google is that nothing integrates or works together. “Our product is a star,” she said. “It’s extremely beneficial just with the level of convenience, efficiency and centralization.” Though in stealth mode right now, Entefy aims to be a single application that goes across multiple media platforms, such as e-mail, text, voice, video, social, search and storage into one entity. Brienne said her company will also make privacy a priority--Entefy users' information will not be shared with outside parties. So has her youth made it difficult for her to fundraise?
The fast-growing data visualization software company puts Seattle back on the IPO map.
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In chatting with a friend this weekend I realized how significant the fear of asking for money is for some people. Personally, I used to do door-to-door sales, so I built a tolerance for rejection. However it turns out that without practicing asking for something (literally anything), your fear of doing so will increase over time (I know it has for me). The ultimate test for any entrepreneur is this: will someone give you money for what you’re offering? Even if you want to give away your product for free, try to go out and convince at least one person to pay you for what you are offering. If they give you money, you know you are providing value.
“Forget everything you learned,” they told me on the first day of law school. Three years and $150,000 later they erased from my mind all the half-truths I learned from school and my family. They were not teaching law, they acknowledged, they were teaching thinking. As an entrepreneur, you, too, have to relearn everything from scratch. By yourself.
Every so often this blog post makes the rounds on hacker news. I was lucky enough to have been there at the time. I made a different decision back then, and I figured that it would be illuminating to compare my perspective to Tom’s and give some more details about what it was like. Powerset was always very high profile in the tech press. Accordingly, news of the acquisition broke inTechCrunch before most of the company knew. The article came with a number attached so we could work out a rough idea of what our stock would be worth. The Powerset stock was basically new car money for the rank and file. Rumors were flying around that there would be a bonus of some sort, but we did not really know what it would be until MS made the actual offers. On bonus day they called us each into a conference room 1 by 1. When I went in it my manager was there along with a Microsoft HR representative. I was given an employment agreement that laid out all the particulars: salary, retention bonus and the payout breakdown, benefits, and new stock grants. I was informed that the package take it or leave it; they were not going to negotiate with us individually.
Lyft, a San Francisco-based car-sharing service, turns one this month. To celebrate, the company snatched some new investors, netting $60 million, giving the young service resources to fight the legal and political challenges that lie ahead.
Mobile apps are a dime a dozen — the Apple App Store just hit the 50-billion download milestone — but not many are the brainchild of a second grader. That didn’t stop 8-year-old Nicolas Come from pitching his idea for a nutrition-focused mobile app to potential backers and now the result, Nicolas’ Garden, is launching for iPhone and Android smartphones. Armed with a hand-drawn wireframe of his concept for a social platform and mobile apps that promote healthy eating and cooking for children, Nicolas pitched his startup idea to nearly 100 technical experts last November at an Intel-sponsored hackathon at Hacker Lab near downtown Sacramento. “It was at Cereal Hack II and I got up on a chair to present my idea,” said Nicolas. “My dad had told me that if I pitched my idea there he would help me, so I did it. It was exciting and cool.”
.@Jason's take on the Yahoo Tumblr deal
Yahoo is going to buy Tumblr for $1B on Monday according to reports. In this email I will explain to you why the media is freaking out, why big companies need to make more bets like this, why Yahoo is the perfect home and why Zuckerberg should offer $2B. Media... Freak Out! -------------------------- Over 20 years in the industry I’ve learned that when something gets bought for $1B or more, people tend to freak out. People can comprehend millions of dollars, because we all know folks who have a million or more dollars (or homes worth that). When you start talking about 100s or 1,000s of millions, people get emotional and some start lashing out. Journalists are one of the first groups to lash out. Why? Because they have no chance of making big money in their jobs, and they have to fight for $5k raises while their pensions are replaced with 401ks. Also, they tend to have covered startups like Tumblr from year one and they can’t reconcile how something that didn’t exists five years ago is now worth $1B -- and that they don’t have to balls to create something. F@#4k It, Yahoo Should Buy 10 Tumblrs -------------------------- Here’s the truth: a billion dollars is nothing to a company like Yahoo or Google or Facebook or Apple or Microsoft. If there were 10 startups like Tumblr, with 100M+ users and $50M-$100M in revenue potential a year, it would actually make sense for Google, Yahoo or Facebook to buy all 10. At once. Roll the dice. Why? Because those companies have tens to hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap and cash, and if one in 10 of those startups turn into YouTube, it’s worth it. For background, Google bought YouTube for $1.6B5 in October 2006, after 20 months in business. It now has 1B monthly users in year eight. If YouTube were a stand-alone business that IPO'd it would now be worth AT LEAST $50B, but I would say north of $100B based on potential. A hookup with Yahoo makes complete sense because Yahoo has massive scale in advertising and with users. Yahoo could easily grow Tumblr’s user base by 3x and revenue by 10x in two years. That means Yahoo’s footprint makes Tumblr 4x bigger in a year. Just like Google made YouTube 50x more valuable in the six-and-a-half years since buying it. Or Google bought Android for an estimated $50M back in 2005. Android just announced it has 900M devices activated -- compared to Apple’s iOS device count of ~560M (as of Q2 '13). Oh yeah, Yahoo almost bought Facebook for $900M back in 2006. If it had, Yahoo would now be Google. And Google almost bought Yelp for $550M in 2009. Yelp is now worth ~$2B. You need to risk a Geocities or Bebo to get a YouTube, and if you get a YouTube you win. Zuck Needs to Step It up ----------------------- If I’m Zuckerberg I’m waiting in a Sprinter outside of Tumblr’s office with three things: 1. a term sheet for $2.2B: $1.1B in cash to match Yahoo’s offer and $1.1B in Facebook stock as the gravy. 2. Kevin Systrom from instagram. 3. Sean Parker and Chamath Palihapitiya. 4. Joshua Schachter and Caterina Fake. Why? a) Paying 2% of Facebook’s net worth for a product that teenagers love, when teenagers are starting to hate Facebook, is an awesome hedge. If it turns out that social networks are generational, it’s a super slick move to own a portfolio of social networks that share common infrastructure like advertising, hosting and user data. b) Kevin Systrom got 2x Twitter’s offer for Instagram last year, and Zuck has left Kevin alone. He’s the perfect person to pitch for Zuck. c) Sean Parker set up Zuck as the invincible “God King” of Facebook. Zuck controls everything because Parker showed him how. Chamath showed Zuck how to focus and scale. These two are now doing huge things in the world and can show the Tumblr founder what life is like 'after Zuck.' Which is to say, awesome. d) Zuck should invest in Joshua and Caterina’s startups with a blank check, make them Facebook advisors for $100k each a year and then have them in the Sprinter. Have them tell David Karp exactly what it was like inside of Yahoo and how they feel about their babies being abused post-sale. How heart-breaking it was. This is totally dirty and unfair to Marissa, but it is COMPLETELY fair to Yahoo -- which has a horrible track record with founders. If Zuckerberg pulls this off, he is hands down the greatest M&A executive on the planet: bold, cunning and founder-focused. Zuck has nothing to lose. If Tumblr is a complete ‘Bebo’ (aka what we call a failure in the business), it has zero impact on him. Marissa? Not so much. Everyone will second-guess her and base her term as Yahoo CEO on this acquisition. That means she is going to be all up in David Karp’s business -- she can’t afford not to be. Q: Why Didn’t Anyone Complain about Yammer @ $1B? --------------------------- Yammer was a SaaS enterprise service with subscription revenue. Subscription revenue from enterprises takes decades to lose typically. Advertising revenue in a social network? That tends to vaporize overnight. Tumblr, or any ad-driven business, carries 10x the rate of something a big company pays for on a yearly basis. Q: Shouldn’t Karp Pull a Houston? --------------------------- Drew Houston and Dropbox famously turned down $1B (or more) from Steve Jobs. It was valued at $4B when it raised $250M in 2011. Should Karp do the same? I don’t think so. Blogging platforms and social networks are risky businesses. Sure, WordPress.com has chugged along building more and more value, but MoveableType, Pownce, Friendster and countless others became roadkill. $1.1B is a massive return and while there might be more upside, I don’t see it making up for the massive risk. Sell now. Conclusion: 80% Yahoo gets the deal done, but don’t count out Zuck. Well done Karp and investors. [ Quick plug: next month I’m hosting the second annual LAUNCH Education & Kids at Microsoft. 300 teachers, educators, pundits, investors and founders will meet to discuss the latest technology in the space. We’ll have dinners, drinks and a fun time, too! We’re going to sell out this week (there are 20 slots left). Some updates: Legendary entrepreneur and investor Mitch Kapor will sit down for a fireside chat on June 26, and Daphne Koller, Coursera co-founder and Stanford professor, on June 27. Kapor Capital's education investments include Alltuition (now Brilliant - match & science challenges for world's brightest kids), MindSnacks (mobile games for learning) and Motion Math (math games for mobile). Coursera, which aims to make the best education accessible online to everyone for free, has more than 3.5M students, 370 courses and 69 institutional partners. Daphne pioneered many ideas that underlie the Coursera user experience. We are in the process of choosing 20 companies to launch new products/launch on stage. It's not too late to apply if you have something new or want to launch your edtech startup on our stage: https://app.wizehive.com/appform/login/edu ] all the best, @jason ( yeah, I got the twitter handle @jason ) [ signup for jason’s email at http://jasonnation.com/ ]
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