My life in the center of the world -- musings on my family, community (local, global, physical and virtual), people and more. Oh and of course, a few words on tech related start-ups, within the context of living in the ulimate start-up with humble goal of repairing the world. Venture backed by over 3,000 years of history, thought, culture, and angst.
By Jacob Ner-David
I was standing at our local community center Yom Hazikaron (Memorial Day) ceremony last night when I looked around and noticed my friend Aharon Horwitz (for more on him and his projects see here ) there as well, along with many other friends and neighbors, a true local community recognition of a national event. When I got home, and checked my email, found reflections that Aharon had already written and sent out, and far more articulate and personal than anything I would say. So Aharon is my guest blogger for the day:
Dear friends,
On Yom Hazikaron I try to personally honor--and ask those I
know to as well--two soldiers from my unit (Nachal 931, August '99 draft) who
died in service: Dani Cohen and Shani Turgeman.
Standing tonight at the
Baka community memorial ceremony my thoughts were already on Dani when, to my
surprise, a boy from Bnei Akiva read aloud to the community about him. Dani, so
it turns out, was a counselor at the neighborhood chapter. I didn't expect that,
didn't even realize that I was daily walking the neighborhood bereft of Dani,
the same neighborhood he'd invited me home to for Shabbat in the year 2000 (how
I wish I'd taken him up on that invitation). Dani's name joined tens of others,
sons and daughters of the assembled bereaved who sat among the rest of us
mourners. Seeing the families and accompanying friends and community members
reminded me that a soldier in Israel is never alone, accompanied as he or she is
by the hopes and dreams of a country, and by the love and firm faith of a
family. So much is risked on every soldier we send out. So much is lost when
they fall.
I, like each of you, honor those like Dani and Shani who
sacrificed for their friends, fellow soldiers, and for all of Israel, and pray
this Yom Hazikaron for the day when no more soldiers will be added to the lists
of fallen. The mitzva of Yom Hazikaron must be to rededicate ourselves to
personally striving for that future day. As Dani wrote in a letter of
premonition to his parents, "the point of life is to be the part of the puzzle
you were meant to be to the best of your ability....to give rise to future
generations better than yourself either by influencing your children or those
around you. I, it seems, am destined to be one of those who had to make his
difference by impacting those around me." To me that is the undying call to us
from these who have fallen in service: one's life is to be spent--as theirs
was--in pursuit of a better future for those who come after. And in that sense,
both Dani and Shani lived life to the fullest.
Dani died in the November
2002 battle near Ma'arat HaMachpelah in Hebron. Shani, serving in the reserves,
was killed near Lebanon during the attack that lead to the kidnapping of Regev
and Goldwasser. May their memories continue to inspire the
living.
If you have not yet heard of Twitter you are part of the blessed 99% of the population of the Western world that are not "early adapters." For professional reasons and general curiosity of the 1% (I consider myself to be a bemused observer of the early adapters) I signed up for Twitter back in January, although Twitter has been around as a public service since October 2006 (see here for more on history).
OK, so what is Twitter? Its is a messaging service limited to 140 characters...wait, all of you semi-Geeks ask, isn't that the same as SMS? Well, yes. And aren't there dozens of companies that allow you to message blast from/to mobile phones, PCs, etc.? Yes. So what is new about Twitter? Well, nothing and everything. Nothing technically new, that's for sure.
So what is/was new about Twitter? Well, they picked a funky name, that's always important (think Yahoo!, Google, Ebay...). And they specifically marketed their service to US semi-geeks (think self-important VCs and well-known bloggers). And timing was right, when [finally] the 1% crowd in the US felt comfortable messaging from their mobile devices. And of course after the first blogging wave, which already prepared us to be interested in complete nonsense(;-)).
One of the "features" that Twitter added (this feature exists in many blogging platforms) is to sign up to receive the tweets of a certain Twitter. Basically, to get their micro-blog feed. The 1% crowd loves this, all zapping messages to one other all day long.
As I said, I signed up, literally to just see what the sign-up process was like, see how it worked. Sent a few twits to test web/sms interfaces. haven't twitted in quite some time. But slowly slowly people have found me on Twitter and have signed up to "follow" me. So far only 18, but half of those people I don't even recognize their names! And there is nothing to follow.
To understand better how Twitter is being used by the 1% crowd, I popped over to Brad Feld's Twitter home page, and see that he has 1,383 people "followers" and that he is "following" 132 people. Very believable, and reasonable, given that Brad is one of the best living VCs, and prolific blogger. Persusing through his "tweets," I recommend he stick to blogging, and stop tweeting, but whatever makes you happy.
And then I looked at super-uber-blogger Robert Scoble's Twitter page, and see that he is sending tweets every few minutes (while awake, and sometimes while sleeping). He claims to be following 21,209, and to have 22,545 followers. Meaning every time he sends a tweet, goes out to 22,545 people. That's a lot of virtual ink. Does this make sense? Could he really be keeping up with 21,209 people? Doubt it, but maybe he has outsourced himself...
Bottom line: with all this tweeting, does Twitter make any money (you knew I was going to ask)????
Answer: a few weeks ago, on their Japanese version, started running some ads. Other than that, nada. no revenues.
The aptly named Peter Kafka wrote the other day on Twitter's current fundraising round, see here (asking the age old question, but this time for Twitter, How Much Is Twitter Worth?):
The bigger question: How do you put a value on Twitter, anyway? The
company has only just started seeing a trickle of revenue, via
advertising on its Japan version. But beyond that there's no money
coming in, and it's not clear what the model will be.
While Twitter itself has great buzz, we hear the majority of the
site's traffic comes from outside the site, via other apps like Twhirl,
mobile access, etc. So traditional online advertising--a difficult
prospect to begin with for a communications service (see the struggles
of various IM, email platforms) may be even harder.
That said, based on Twitter's growth and brand dominance, $75
million post-money seems plausible. There must be a pony in there
somewhere.
I am sorry, Mr. Kafka. A company that has no real technology, a usage base of uber-geeks, and no significant revenue should not be valued at $75 million. It's bad for the business of creating businesses.
Excellent posting by Hank Williams today on Silicon Alley Insider, which is one of my favorite sources. See full text of his original post below, and definitely check out the discussion that erupted within minutes on SAI...back and forth brings out the angst that many of us have been dealing with over the past few years.
With the success of Google, who weave billions of dollars of profit from millions of "keywords", convincing the world that a "click" has inherent value, there has been a run on the bank. Literally. Everything is now supposed to be supported by "advertising." But remember, as I have often said, in the end someone needs to buy something. That's how advertising works. Otherwise its a massive ponzi scheme.
Traditional media companies have always had (and will have) advertising as a dominant (and sometimes sole) source of revenues. But advertising was never 100% of the revenues, think of movies, video games, even most daily newspapers. There is a price. It is not free.
And now think of services that are not media companies -- there is no historical justification for free. Salesforce.com, a pioneer of using Web X.0, charges. And many gladly pay. Is Gmail free? For now. I doubt it will last, and if it does will mean a re-shuffling, but not complete revolution.
Advertising has its place, but I for one am tired of very smart entrepreneurs acting like deer in the headlights, who have been brainwashed by VCs with too much money that usage/users are all that's important. We will be facing a capital crunch in the days, months, and years ahead -- those who have developed real revenue generating businesses will survive.
I agree with Hank, that VCs are killing many businesses, but there will be a revival of the dead. Make sure you are prepared!
Free" is Killing Us--Blame The VCs
Hank WilliamsApril 4, 2008 9:20 AM
I believe it should be possible to start a small
business and to have a small number of profitable customers, and to
earn a living. From there, it should be possible to work hard, and to
grow your business into something substantial. Until recently, this was
the American way, and it applied to technology as much as to any other business. But no more.
In
today’s “free” world, in most online business categories, it is
inherently impossible to start a small self-sustaining business and to
grow it. This is because in the digital world, advertising, the only
real revenue stream, cannot support a small digital business. If
businesses were based on the idea that people paid for services then
small companies could succeed at a small scale and grow. But it is very
hard to charge when your competition is free.
The
economic problem with advertising businesses is that advertising
businesses do not work without really significant scale. In the past, a
good product or service could address a niche and succeed without being
a home run. Today, a home run is required because if you do not reach a
massive scale, advertisers are uninterested. And even if advertisers
could be attracted, CPMs are so low that the revenue would be
inconsequential. Small Internet businesses don’t work.
So how did we get here? In a word, VC.
Venture
capital has totally distorted the market. VCs are investing billions of
dollars in companies with instructions to get big fast and to worry
about advertising revenue later. As a result the competition is for
users and not for paying customers.
Unfortunately, to fix this, many more companies need to die.
With
less “free” floating around, a more regular supply and demand dynamic
can take hold, customers will have to pay for the things that are
important to them and non-quantized growth dynamics can return. In the
meantime, why should consumers pay for products and services that VCs and their pension fund investors are willing to give away for free?
The
good news is at some point VCs will indeed realize how dumb all of this
is and stop giving away everything of value on the Internet. This will
all stop when the average VC can’t get any of his/her companies to scale because there is just too much VC sponsored free stuff out there. Then and only then will this crazy eyeballs business model redux finally be put to bed.
.When I started my "career" as an entrepreneur, I knew that two things would guide me, luck and determination. While it is difficult to control the former, it tends to happen more when you actually work at it, i.e. the determined part. Reading the posting below, many budding entrepreneurs will think wow, it looks so easy, Loic "just" talked to all these famous [and rich] people in the tech world and they all decided to invest...
What he leaves out is the countless hours (over the course of many years) he has spent building his network, and his absolute determination to be at the upper levels of the "conversation." Loic recently started Seesmic, and without going to all those dreaded VC meetings, he raised a nice sized round from a group of "stars" of the tech world.
A few comments on Loic's strategy:
1. He raised what he needed, not some crazy amount.
2. Pay attention to the "pre money" valuation..high for a concept, but not high considering who Loic already was, and how much $$ he was trying to pull in. All in all, about 50% dilution to him and other staff/founders.
3. Investors are all strategic in some way. Whether they actually offer any advice worth anything, or simply are nice window stressing, all the investors add something to the mix.
4. Loic lives and breathes the world he is trying to monetize through Seesmic. He is not approaching this as an MBA "just" looking to score a buck, he lives this stuff (much more than I do, which is why I am not trying to start a Seesmic like company myself these days, as a "founder" or CEO).
5. Seesmic is a big idea, and is intended to scale that way quite quickly.
6. And back to the investors, notice that the forum for many of the conversations were conferences--Seesmic is about the IP enabled "virtual" conversation, but the in person relationship building is still crucial. Going to conferences means travel, means showing up, physically as well as virtually.
As a somewhat related note, I am writing this blog posting from an airport lounge in Prague, on my way back from Barcelona (more on that in separate posting). I was in Barcelona to attend 3GSM/Mobile World Congress. Or more accurately, to meet a lot of people who were also there. I shudder to think how much was spent on that conference by companies large and small for all kinds of impressive and not so impressive booths (some bigger than my house, I kids you not), when for most of us the important element was the human one-on-one, the conversation. Just think, a massive gathering of people to celebrate remote communications...
Anyway, back to Loic and the story of the funding of Seesmic. Enjoy. See you at the next conference!
I closed the initial funding of Seesmic in September 2007. The main investment came from Atomico's Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis (they invested $5.5 million on the $6 million). Talking to bloggers all the time, I have not been very good at keeping the secret as Om Malik was the first to talk about it on October 8, 2007. On November 28, Liz Gannes got almost the entire list of investors right. We have never really hidden the funding as a partial investor list was even on our company backgrounder at the last Demo conference (by the way see our DEMO video if you want to learn about Seesmic in 6 minutes). So the only real news today is the full list of investors.
We should have made it "officially" public for a while but I did not want to do it until all the paperwork was done and signed. That happened last week. Getting 14 investors on board – most of whom are individuals and not through funds - takes time.
Niklas Zennstrom and I have been friends for years and we have been wanting to launch a project together for a while. We both know that the media that has not really changed since the growth of the Internet is TV. Most of our friends do not watch TV anymore or watch it only with a laptop on their knees. TV will totally change in the future, we all know that. While Niklas and Janus are focusing on the high end video content with Joost, I have always been fascinated by the conversations.
I explained to Niklas that for me, the quality of conversations that I have enjoyed on blogs and social software since 2003 had to happen in video and that simply isn't happening yet. I said I wanted to make this happen and make it my next company and Niklas immediately said he was interested in funding it, as a real partner, as a cofounder, not just as an investor. He quickly introduced me to his long time partner Janus Friis and we immediately got on very well and started to talk how we should make it happen. Mattias Ljungman who works at Atomico with them quickly worked with me on the terms and the deal happened at an unusual pace for a funding this size. Niklas, Janus and Mattias are just the best investors to deal with. They think as entrepreneurs and behave like entrepreneurs. The trust they have given me is unique and I know exactly what it means. Niklas, Janus and Mattias spend an incredible amount of time with us, we were just a full day in London with them, see what they say about Seesmic.
What is the most important for me is how Niklas and Janus reached a massive adoption for Skype without any marketing ("in fact marketing sucks" - as Janus often says), how they turned it into a global product (Niklas and Janus are pushing us to support tens of languages on Seesmic since launch which is what we are working on) and also obviously how to scale, to name a few things.
I started thinking about launching the company. It was back in May and I of course remembered the several startups I launched before Seesmic. What I really wanted with Seesmic, is a global conversation, involving people from as many countries as possible. What my previous companies taught me is that it is very difficult to build a global company in Paris. Just because the center of the Internet is Silicon Valley and will remain, because if you are in Paris you tend to focus on France or Europe naturally. There are exceptions like the dating site Meetic who managed to become #1 in Europe and reach a size that can compete with Match.com, but it is rare (disclosure, I am a board member at Meetic). During the same dinner with Niklas, I decided with my wife Geraldine to move to San Francisco with our three kids to give Seesmic the highest possible chances of becoming a global conversation from day 1.
In two months, we changed our life, our house, the kids' school, our main language switched to english (keeping our accent, though !), got our 5-year long investors visa in the US. I changed phones and computers, leaving my ten-year old business network and friends in Europe.
In September 2007, I felt like I was graduating from business school again and starting from scratch here. Fortunately it was not totally the case. I spoke twice in a row about entrepreneurship at Google Zeitgeist Europe then Google invited me to Zeigeist in the US and that is how I met Steve Case. Conferences often help creating a network very fast and this is why I go to so many. I did not really need to raise anymore money, I could have just settled for the $5.5 million, but I really wanted to have entrepreneurs and friends help me launch Seesmic. I started calling my friends and I won't name them all here of course (please do not be offended if you helped me and I did not quote you here, I did not mean to be comprehensive). Jeff Clavier, Freddy Mini and Scott Rafer helped a lot in setting up everything even before I got my visa.
After formally announcing I was moving here, Michael Arrington and Jason Calacanis gave me my first speaker role as they invited me to become an expert judge at TechCrunch 40, which gave me great connections. I sat next to Ron Conway, introduced by Conrad Riggs. The minute I talked to Ron about Seesmic, he immediately invited me to have coffee at his San Francisco home, and he decided to invest in Seesmic after one hour. Ron introduced me in turn to so many people I had trouble to keep track of them - including Michael Parekh who gives me tons of advise, like building a reputation system in Seesmic for example.
If you asked me to name only one difference between Europe and the US it would be the positive attitude that floats constantly around here. It is the "how can I help" by default. Trust is by default. You can probably lose it fast but you have it much faster than in Europe where the attitude is more suspicious, more negative. Each time I launched something in Europe I started by getting the criticism and listening people who would explain me why I would fail. Here I have troubles counting how many people offer their help. I spent two hours with Mark Zuckerberg in Davos this year, I enjoyed of course every minute and Mark repeated three times "how can I help you". It is still so unusual for me that the only thing I had to answer was "I do not know yet, but thank you, and let me know how I can help you too". That was exactly the attitude of Mark Pincus. Mark immediately made time for me in his schedule last summer and helped me. Seesmic's office is actually located at his building at 365 Vermont St and I usually get a piece of advice when I bump into him in a corridor as well as English accent lessons.
Back to Michael Arrington. Michael was the first to see Seesmic and was also the first to become so excited about it. Michael sees hundreds of startups a week so coming from him it was a important for me of course. It was the first validation of the video conversation possibly being a big opportunity for me. Michael asked me if he could invest even though it would create issues about investing and writing at the same time, even though disclosures are always in his posts. We would for example have made it to the Crunchies but got kicked out because Michael invested and I said I would still prefer Michael's advice.
Reid Hoffman has been a long time friend, I was fortunate enough that Reid let me invest at the very first round in LinkedIn and Reid was willing to invest in my next venture without even asking what it was. Same story with my buddy and one of Europe's best entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky who told me for years he would be very offended if I did not let him invest in my next startup so here they are both friends and investors in Seesmic. I remember so well when Reid shared with me the LinkedIn slides deck he used to raise his first round, with the entire strategy. I have always been such a fan of Reid. Reid explained that there was no point in getting any revenue in LinkedIn before there is a very large community using it every day. And that is exactly how he did it. I do not think LinkedIn has charged anything before they reached like 3 to 5 million members. Now LinkedIn will generate around $80million in revenues in 2008 (disclosure, I invested in LinkedIn's first round). Seesmic will I hope be as successful but in any case follow the same launch, focusing entirely on its community for now.
Ted Wang, our lawyer, introduced by Jeff Clavier played an amazing role in closing the Series A and I recommend him to any entrepreneur. Actually you will be lucky if you can get Ted's time because he is the lawyer of so many great startups that it's more about being lucky enough to have him as lawyer than the opposite. Ted introduced me to Ariel Poler who in turn decided to invest around a coffee (and help!).
Of course Robert Scoble gave me precious advice (after he also broke the news on launching Seesmic as a rumour) on how to launch and I spent time with him, Robert also participated in the very early conversations at Seesmic. Robert gave me amazing feedback and also introduced me to countless great people. Robert liked the way we shared the idea of Seesmic on a daily basis on loic.tv and gathered feedback from bloggers the very first day. Robert pushed me to continue in this direction, Shel Israel liked the approach too.
One of the first person I called and became friends with is Dave Winer, that I had been reading since I launched my own blog in 2003 and talked to him about Seesmic, how he thought I should launch, how he saw the future of TV. Dave first asked me if he could invest and I immediately accepted of course and then decided he should not invest in company stock whatsoever with the stock market crash. And it's fine, it's not about money, it is about friendship and advice. Jeff Clavier wanted to increase his investment allocation in Seesmic in any way he could so he took Dave's allocation in a second when I told him it was there. Dave, I will still ask you what you think about what we are doing anyway !
I have watched how Steve Garfield and Jeff Pulver have been creative with videoblogging and online video in general for a while and learnt a lot from them. I was very happy when they asked if they could invest too, it was another validation that building a conversation platform for videos makes sense. Dan Gillmor's book, "We the Media" inspired me a lot in the way media is evolving and of course in creating Seesmic. Dan helps on a daily basis, he currently says we should ad Creative Commons support in Seesmic "for yesterday" and that is what we are doing.
Having friends as investors if is a very difficult exercise. It is in principle the best of course because trust is here by default but there is an additional responsibility in taking their money, especially if you fail. It is very risky and all my investors know that. I discussed it with them and want to stay friends with them whatever happens. I have personally invested in about 15 startups, many with friends and lost my money in many so I know what I am talking about and I would hate that investing in Seesmic would change anything in our friendship. In fact I could have not taken their money at all and just built Seesmic with Atomico. It is an additional responsability on my shoulders to take friends money but their advise is so valuable that I wanted to do it.
There are many other people who asked me to also invest in Seesmic. Unfortunately even though we announced the funding today only, it was actually closed for months (most of it in September 07), I just did not want to announce it before all the paperwork was done.
I thought that sharing how Seesmic got funded was important, just like sharing and being honest are the most important parts of both the Seesmic community and the product. We are building Seesmic since day 1 based on the community feedback. We have now a few thousand members of Seesmic around the World who post more than a thousand video a day in average and our active members love it. That is what matters. The people and the product. The funding is "just" the fuel.
Next steps: add the key features which are missing and launch very soon in public. You can follow daily how we build it, join Seesmic and give us your feedback. We will listen to it as much as we can.
I am composing this blogpost at the DLD conference in Munich, Germany, convened by
Burda Media. DLD stands for Digital Life Design, and many of the names you
would expect are here, about 1000 people representing all the players in the
connected world today.
And yet I am having a similar experience to that at CES
2006, when I saw dozens of WiFi networks but none would allow me to connect,
see my posting "Water, Water, Everywhere, Not a drop to Drink.” I ideologically
do not carry a Blackberry or any other always on device, because I know that
for most people these are prohibitively expensive, and because they are
addictive (and distracting in public). So I depend these days on finding stable
WiFi to connect.
When I first arrived in Munich and checked into my hotel, the trouble started. I picked the hotel from
Hotels.com, because it advertised WiFi, was cheap, and short walk from
conference venue. Turns out the hotel was practicing marketing using Bait and
Switch, claiming it “offered Wifi,” but
it was additional fee. OK, I said, am prepared to pay. But then they explain
that I needed to load some special software from a CD (I kid you not). I
immediately called Hotels.com, and rebooked myself into nice hotel (for few
dollars more, but WiFi included!!!).
At conference expected to have ubiquitous WiFi…and instead
what I found (while listening to CEOof
Deutche Telekom speak about seamless mobile connectivity) is that the WiFi
network was overloaded, incapable of the traffic being generated. Could barely
get websites to load. For techies out there, see ping results (when I could get
connected, which took a few tries):
For the rest of you, what the above numbers tell us is that
the WiFi network at DLD is incapable of supporting VoIP, Video streaming, or
any other real time web service. In fact, wrote this blog off-line in word to
prevent losing it when trying to post (I usually use on-line Typepad tools from
SixApart).
All this got me thinking that we are so far from the promised
land in some many ways. In time I will try to address all of these, and in some
way am working to cure these issues, for now just going to highlight:
-Connectivity has a long way to go before, outside some
bubbles (office, some universities, etc.) we in the Western world are far from
“always on”
-Most people in the world, even if they have a mobile phone
that gives them some voice communications, are still cut off from broadband
world (further digital divide)
-Often hype creates value way before reality is there. Sure,
there are the Googles that manage to score big from revenue point of view, but
infrastructure is a blocking point for many
Just read a wonderful analysis of a real-life case study as to whether to go the entrepreneurial route or take a job at a "big company" (obviously a relative term, for me anything more than 3 people is a big company).
Robert Scoble has worked at small companies and big ones...and just joined Fast Company/Inc. I have never met Robert, but long been a fan of his blog, called Scobleizer, and many of his insights. His [almost] real time step by step comparison of life as entrepreneur or part of existing team is better than anything I could put together, so have posted in its entirety below. Pay special to how self-aware Robert is on a personal level--and where he puts his priorities. I agree with his priorities, but also fantasize that all possible. Read on, let me know what you think.
First of all, thanks to John Furrier, James McCormick, and the
entire PodTech team. I grew a lot over the past year due to the
opportunities they gave me and that turned into hundreds of interviews
on ScobleShow.com.
Wednesday (today) Rocky Barbanica and I are moving to work for Mansueto Ventures. They are the producers of Fast Company and Inc. magazines.
What will we be doing? Helping to build a new, interactive, online
video community called FastCompany.TV which will open on March 3.
Back when my career moves were leaked over on TechCrunch I said I
was considering another option. What was it? Starting my own business.
Here’s why I chose FastCompany.tv instead.
But, first let me back up and talk about what I’ve learned about the
media business. Here’s the four things you need to have to see success.
Content. This should be obvious, but you’ll see
where I’m going with this point later. Key here is to make content that
no one else has. Content that’s better quality. “Special” in some way.
Gets viewers access to something they couldn’t otherwise get access to.
Revenues. If you don’t have them, it’s hard to buy
cameras, lights, microphones, or take the time to do things right.
Yeah, you can bootstrap for a while like Rocketboom did in its early
years, but at some point if you don’t have cash coming in you’ll need
to find a real job and stop working on media production.
Distribution. If no one sees your videos you won’t
get revenues, so getting viewers/participants is key. Now, you can
either get viewers by doing stunts (like Gawker Media did at CES) or
you can get it by making deals to distribute your videos into places
that have high viewership. Revision3, for instance, has reportedly made
deals to distribute its videos into several airplane video systems.
Mansuetto’s magazines have more than a million readers, which will make
it easier to get people to come visit the new network.
Scale. The SuperBowl has all the above three,
right? But the place it really makes sense? Is part of a network. Why?
Because then there’s more for audiences to engage with than just one
football game a year. Also, there’s economies of scale since the camera
crews can work on other stuff while they aren’t working on the Super
Bowl.
As I considered job opportunities I kept these four things in mind.
Could the new company we’d join deliver on all of these? How about
working for myself? Could I be successful? Both Mike Arrington and Om
Malik (and others) urged me to start my own company. But, when I looked
in the mirror I just didn’t have that passion for doing it all myself.
Why not?
I don’t love doing much except for interviewing and blogging and my family.
I’ve run the books at UserLand Software. I hated that. I’ve tried
managing people at PodTech and found that I wasn’t particularly
interested in doing more of it (which is one reason why Rocky’s going
to play a key role in the development/production of the network — it’s
important that we build a strong team, but I’d rather focus more of my
energies on getting great content than on finding and keeping great
people).
Building a diverse set of income requires a sales crew and attention to client happiness.
It’s one thing to take care of one sponsor. It’s a whole nother thing
to make magic happen for a wide range of sponsors. That takes a team of
professionals. I don’t have the time, nor the skills, to build a
world-class sales team and if I took the time that’d cause me to take
my eye off of doing my videos, which would be the life-blood of the
organization.
Setting up a business requires a ton of other tasks.
HR. Banking. Invoicing. All the other drudge work that takes time away
from doing interviews, going on photowalks, reading feeds, hanging out
and networking with industry leaders, etc that leads to great content.
Doing a business is stressful on everyone involved.
Om Malik’s heart attack had an impact on me. So did Marc Orchant’s
death. Life is too short and if that means I leave a few million on the
table because I gave up equity in my own thing, so be it. I’m happiest
when behind a camera talking with someone like Doug Engelbart or taking
Patrick, my son, to MacWorld. Anything other than that I’m going to
outsource, ala “the Four Hour Workweek.”
Brand extension is hard when running your ass off to build your own business.
For instance, I want to build communities that lead to interesting
events. But if I did my own business, running an event team would have
to wait until I got my business on solid ground. That could be a year
or more. That would mean opportunities lost. Fast Company and Inc have
awesome event and marketing teams — I’ve been to their events and if I
wanted to build a team like that it’d take capital, time, and talent
that I don’t have.
Getting access to things, when running your own business, is tougher.
Yeah, I can get access to a lot of things, but did Steve Jobs invite me
to attend his keynote at MacWorld? No. If I was part of a bigger team
with a more established brand, would it be more likely that I’d get
invited? Yes.
So, why FastCompany.tv? Why not something else? Several reasons.
Fast Company (the magazine) has seen a resurgence in the past year.
The content has gotten better. Ad sales were way up. They have new
offices in New York City (I won’t be moving, rather staying in Silicon
Valley).
The editorial team at Fast Company and Inc. Magazines is getting
cover articles that few others are able to get and the whole team will
drive a lot of great content that’ll show up on my show and on the
network.
They have invested in a major new social networking site that’ll be
revealed soon. Fast Company was one of the first magazines with a
social network, called “The Company of Friends” and the new site, built
in open-source Drupal, excited me because of the distribution and
community it brings.
They are working on a new magazine aimed at startups, too, which obviously I’m interested in.
They have a sales team that’s already successful in selling to
clients outside the tech industry (getting diversity is important to
protect independence and also to bring fresh approaches to events and
advertising).
They liked my participatory style of video better than other
companies and want to expand it. Excited about technologies like Qik,
Kyte, Seesmic, Mogulus, DotSub, etc. Other people/companies I talked
with had blank stares when I talked about these technologies and how
they might change the media business.
They have a tech team who understands how to integrate various Web technologies together. My column’s page on Fast Company
, for instance, has a calendar from Upcoming.org and a feed from Google
Reader integrated into it along with video interviews and other things.
We’ll expand that kind of integration on the new network.
FastCompany.tv is not just me. They made a
commitment to getting a great lineup of other stars in the industry to
be part of the network — my show won’t be the only one on
FastCompany.tv and we’ll be adding more shows even after our March 3
start date.
Anyway, what’s next? FastCompany.tv will start on March 3. Between
now and then we’re working on finding some great content (I’m working
with editors of the magazines, as well as looking for the hottest
emerging tech companies along with leading business
executives/strategists and visionaries). I’ll be going to the World
Economic Forum and then to LIFT in Europe to find stories that are
outside the United States and the “tech bubble.”
We’ll have lots of surprises too, and will be stepping up the
quality of my shows — Rocky’s already working on that as we speak. But
most importantly I haven’t seen a business network that treats viewers
as partners. See, most of the TV (either mainstream, like CNBC, or
“new” like that from Revision3 or elsewhere) treats viewers as, well,
viewers. The thing is that the new technology lets you PARTICIPATE with
the people who are in front of the camera. You got a taste of this
while I was walking around CES with a cell phone and you could ask
questions WHILE I WAS FILMING LIVE. That really changes the equation a
lot and that’ll be a key differentiator on FastCompany.tv. After all,
if we’re talking to Fast Companies, why shouldn’t they answer YOUR
questions live as well as mine?
Anyway, to wrap this all up. This was the best “win-win” for you,
for me, my employers, and for my sponsors. That’s why I’m proud to be a
member of the Fast Company and Inc. families today and I’m looking
forward to participating with you on March 3 on fastcompany.tv.
In between now and March 3? I’ll continue to post videos (yesterday alone I posted about a dozen videos on my Qik channel from MacWorld conference) and other items I see in the industry on my blog on scobleizer.com.
Happy to report that I have [finally] passed 10,000 unique page views of my blog. Obviously the blog reaches many more people than that, because I have subscribers (through email, RSS, etc.), people pass from one to another, and so on.
But it is at least one indication.
One the one hand, nice that over the past year, since I created this blog, there have been 10,000 views of what I spend time to create. I have not parsed to see "unique" visitors (even that stat would be fluffy, as the same person without a static IP address or cookies from this site would appear different every time). But all the same, 10,000 is nice round number.
On the other hand, how depressing. Some ridiculous postings to Youtube have garnered hundreds of thousands of views, that took minutes to create. Some even millions of views. Why aren't I more viral? How come millions are not flocking to read my pearls of wisdom? One reason could be that I spend zero time and energy on marketing this blog...but that should not stop viral effect in its purist form.
This brings me back to something Elie Wurtman said to me about the blog when I started -- it should be about quality, not quantity. So thank you, dear reader, for sticking by me. And pass this on to a friend;-).
OK, so between Jerusalem ROCKS , my day job as Managing Partner of Jerusalem Capital and my all consuming life as husband of Haviva Ner-David, and father to Michal, Adin, Meira, Hallel and Nachum, I have not found time to blog. Not that I have a lack of things to write about, living in the very earthly Jerusalem, operating at the edges of the virtual world, and involved in intense debates about the future of life as we know it.
Just that found myself recently barely treading water, and at times drowning, needing to cut out what I deemed, on the fly, to be lowest priority.
Now with the move into a new year, I have a fresh resolve to organize and prioritize my time (and life) in a more strategic way--and will attempt to keep blog current at least on a weekly basis. If I don't -- please say something.
As I say to all those who work with me, I believe in interactive management. Which means on some level we all need to manage each other.
All that is a big intro to me saying a belated HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Just as I often vent against normal voice calls being labeled something different (Internet Telephony, VoIP, etc) just because "new" technology is being used to carry the call, so too is my frustration with the world of television. Yes, Youtube is interesting at times, and useful as a place to store video to be widely shared, but it is not television. And you would not kick back at night to "watch Youtube." Or at least I hope not.
I am still formulating my own thoughts and ideas, but see this discussion on Kfir Pravda"s blog (which itself in general is worth tuning in to...): here or http://pravdam.com/2007/08/20/can-someone-please-create-the-hbo-of-online-video/
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