Entries Tagged 'angel' ↓

Kai Roer wrote a great blog entry about a 14 year old girl, a web cam, the consequences like having to move out of town once the video hit the Internet, then went back and did some analysis of his blog traffic to find out that the entry he wrote was his most popular page.

His conclusion:

There are a ton of perverts out there
There are a lot of teens out there in a similar circumstance

Either way it does not bode well if those are the only two options, or a combination thereof.

But - giving it a little more thought, perhaps not all the hits are from wankers - but from young, frustrated guys looking for same-age girls? If there are predators only, I’d love to do something with it. You know, some ball-crushing or similar exercise. Source: Roer.com

With facebook, myspace, and other sites firmly in the mainstream, as well as just about the hundreds of ways to do communication that parents will not figure out, it might be a good thing to read Kai’s blog on this one. This is about everyone in the family, not just the kids, but the parents as well.

Keywords: facebook, myspace, Internet, surfers, weird, bizarre, kids

We have been waiting for this one to happen, and it comes as absolutely no surprise, but John Cook, the venerable technology reporter for the Seattle PI is saying that there is a slow down in Venture Capital money flowing into Seattle. This is no surprise, people have been talking about it for months now, but it is also good to see major reporting from the Seattle PI to go along with it.

We have been thinking about the same issue at techwag, because it is important to the thriving startup community here in Seattle. Slowdown in Silicon Valley this can happen in Seattle too and Will the recession hit Seattle Startups are just couple of articles on the idea that what shows up in Silicon Valley first, will also show up in Seattle. Odds are highly likely that the same slowdowns will also hit in Texas, Boston, and other hot beds around the country.

In Washington, the two reports show radically different numbers, but the general trend in both indicates that startup investing has cooled. According to Venture Source, 23 Washington companies raised $248.9 million during the first quarter. That’s down 37 percent from the same period last year and off 43 percent when compared to the fourth quarter. Venture Blog

In all this makes for some interesting news, and something that all startups regardless of area should be paying attention to when they go out to do their pitches. Money may be tight, so funding people will be looking for the next Google, not the next Facebook application.

Keywords: slowdown, recession, seattle, google, facebook, funding, silicon valley

A Venture Capital joke went awry yesterday when the UnFunded a joke site about the relationships between VC’s and the people they give money to sorta backfired when too many people took it for a legitimate group to expose the weirdness that are people looking for money from VC’s.

The domain for the Unfunded will only be a round for a couple of days, so the screen cap above catches what the site looked like for the April fools prank. The scary part is that on the Redeye VC that sponsored the joke on their blog noted that 30 people signed up for the site not realizing that it was a prank.

Even the Seattle tech startups list got involved in the discussion to much amusement in the longer run.

If anything speaks volumes about the relationship between VC’s and those that they give money to, this April Fools joke showed just how much acrimony there can be between the two groups. While it is hard to get told no, the realistic issue is that there are too many Web 2.0 applications that all look alike. These are “easy way out” startups, where there is little original thinking and little original creativity. That alone can cause VC’s to just roll over and go to sleep during your presentation. They have seen it not only before, but hundreds of times before.

Come up with something new, neat and cool, maybe you might get told yes. Plain vanilla speeches about taking over the world or the 1% solution is one thing, but you as a company need to be working on a technology that will be able to take 10% of the market. Even Google got told no, not everyone calls it right the first time, walk away, know you are doing good, and see if someone else will fund your original cool idea.

Keywords: vc, funding, the funded, the unfunded, april fools joke, gone, awry, humor, fun

Most likely the banking industry implosion that we are watching this week will not hit tech startups as badly as the dot com bust did in 2000/2001. The sharp movements in the market in the day to day ups and downs might remind people of what was happening with the markets behavior in 1999/2000, but are we better protected as a startup this time around.

Mainly, the real question is what is happening in the banking industry, what are the exposures that VC and Angel funds have to the same thing. Money is not just sitting in some low end checking account earning 1% interest, no they are most likely going to be wrapped up not just in startups and other businesses, but in other accounts that make a bit more than the default 1%. For right now funding is not an issue, but can it become one?

“I don’t think people here are feeling what the folks are feeling elsewhere in the country,” says Weissleder. “Locally, we have a resilient economy. There are a million and one entrepreneurs, and I haven’t heard from [one] who has had a hard time securing capital. Zivity, a user-generated porn site, just secured $7 million. I would venture to say that a company that’s posting nudies on the internet doesn’t need $7 million to do that. I’m not sure if it’s dumb money, or if it’s a sign that people are still investing, but I’m seeing a lot of young companies get funding.” Source: Wired

If we are as insulated in Seattle (which I think we are given the community, the number of startups, and the number of VC/Angel funds in town) as they are in Silicon Valley, it might be a while until any kind of recession hits the area.

The question is not one so much of money, but the idea that companies can be started for so little money, that anyone who is really interested in starting a company can do it for as little as 12,000 dollars based on recent Seattle events (startup weekends). Even in a recession people will be able to find 12K to get their idea off the ground. Growth will not be quick, but the developer or inventor of the company will still be able to grow their company.

Advertising will also not go away, prices will come down, but startups will still be able to make some money off of advertising. The idea behind that is that the internet has become such a ubiquitous service that people cannot imagine or afford to be off the internet. Most business, resumes, e-mail, and other ways of staying connected are all internet driven. The growth of internet social sharing around jobs, open positions, and others will enjoy a booming market in a recession. Colleges and Universities that teach on line will also see a boom in business as people retool, and some people become teachers to supplement income while a recession is going on.

In all, with so many positive scenarios, if the VC’s and Angels blow out because of the banking collapse, and jobs become scarce, there will be a boom in people starting their own companies, and bootstrapping themselves into their own business. When economic recovery happens 18 to 24 months down the road, they will have people who have been in college retooling to choose from. It is possible, and it is reasonable to think that if everything goes down the tubes, that there are still reasonable expectations for startups to bootstrap themselves, and deliver good quality applications, and make some money along the way. Even without the VC or Angel being able to give them money to grow larger quicker.

The Alliance of Angels is having a 10 Minute Pitch session in Seattle on January 8th 2008. If you have wanted to see about getting money from an angel fund, these kinds of workshops and pitch sessions are vital to learning how the business works.

Raising capital from Angel investors can be a challenge, particularly given just 10 minutes to distill your entire business plan into a compelling presentation. What information is critical? How much detail is enough, or too much? What do angel investors consider when evaluating an investment opportunity? Source: Alliance Of Angels

Getting an angel fund to take a look at you can be difficult, unless you know the rules. While they will tell you what works for the alliance of angels, and they are asking for 110 dollars at the door, this kind of insider information will keep you busy for months.

Time to perfect your 10 minute pitch.

Startups are being more bootstrapped as Hardware as a Service (HaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) has a bigger and bigger influence. It is easier today to carve out a market niche today than it ever has been before. Forget millions; think in terms of thousands and a lot of hard work and time. The entire infrastructure you need is going at bargain basement prices, meaning more people are able to take into account that startups are easy in terms of dollars, but still hard in terms of time, commitment, and getting the word out.

This time, the cost of everything from laptops to programmers is lower and no one is splashing for fancy office space, so starting up a company is cheaper, said Chris Shipley, executive producer of the DEMO Conference, a new-technology showcase.

“The Aeron chair is out, the Starbucks latte is in,” Shipley said. “If your team includes some engineers, you’ve got a laptop, you’ve got an Internet connection, you code like hell and see what you can come up with,” she said. “It costs your time, it costs a lot of sleepless nights.” Source: Yahoo News

While things go minimalist, there are ways of stretching dollars, doing your startup part time, and doing what you need to do to bring money in, while building your dream. There are so many low cost avenues to starting a business, that the entire franchise pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the name is ending up looking almost obsolete.

What makes this interesting is that startups are so cheap to start, is that a startup can almost be considered a cottage industry. You do not need an office, you need a laptop, you do not need fancy chairs, you need the sofa, and everything can be centered on the house. Moreover, if you are fortunate to be a telecommuter, as long as you put in 8 hours a day on your paying job, there is nothing that does not say you cannot and most likely are working on something nearer and dearer to your heart.

Usually you can at least find some coder or engineer to help you set up your idea. The proliferation of open source software is also something that is well worth considering. Do you really need a fully custom solution, or can you refit something from the open source community. The total custom solution might be able to be sidestepped if there is a good enough, or customizable solution from the open source community.

The real cost effectiveness in bootstrapping is to work out what you can do with minimal dollars and how that supports what you are good at. If you are a great sales person, but a poor coder, find something open source that works, and start blogging about sales, no coding experience required. There are lots of way to save money, lots of ways to extend dollars on bootstrapping, and the good part of boot strapping is what you build it totally yours, not a VC’s or someone else’s creation.

With RIAA celebrating the triumph they had over P2P in court last week, Nine Inch Nails, Oasis and Jamiroquai are thinking of doing the same thing that Radio Head did last week. That is going it alone on the internet, no one between them and their fans. The problems that will be encountered by the bands are minimal, the problems encountered by the Music Industry, possibly insurmountable.

Even the hardiest music executive is going to struggle to spin this news. There’s no hiding what’s occurring here. The music industry is on the threshold of disintermediation, a fancy word that means the Internet is threatening to blast a thick layer of the sector’s infrastructure into blue oblivion–just like it has with travel agents, stockbrokers and newspapers. Source: CNet

There is a lot of changes that will be coming, and it all depends on how the industry reacts. Given that artists are paid very little for the album unless they are able to negotiate a better contract, free might just be the answer. Artists have been able to make good money from concerts, that will not diminish because the music is on the internet.

The longer term ramification of this one is if there are no more A&R reps, and no more music industry as we know it, there are going to be a lot of changes in how we interact with music. Radio stations, streaming media, internet radio, and the whole system breaks. There is no possibility of getting royalties when the object is free; there is no room for error here on this one. The industry much like the travel industry, much like book selling, has been altered by the internet. How people interact with these kinds of systems, the whole process changes.

It might be bumpy at first, but given the success and support of MySpace or the next level of music/fan interaction kind of web site, we may be watching to see who will be the next Amazon or Google of music. It will not be RIAA, it is going to be someone who can build the next commodity delivery system wrapped up in advanced Web 2.0, or even a start on Web 3.0.