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Posts Tagged ‘Fred Wilson’

LadyGaga as a Service: Bringing Apple and Google to Commerce 2.0

Lady Gaga, along with her record company, is evolving the album in the form of software as a service. Considering the content of her hit new video, Telephone, it is fitting that she would use software to tackle the hard problem of getting paid by amazing fans.

On her path to global dominance, the site, LadyGaga.com has innovated the next generation of brand management for artists. To do this, she creates a join between Google’s YouTube, Apple’s iTunes, Twitter, and Facebook. Way beyond having a an Twitter account, LadyGaga is hosting an interface party, and you’re invited. She’s a performer who is inventing ways to create the value of using multiple platforms to juice the network effects.

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Commerce 2.0

Like it a lot? Take a souvenir home from the party for the low introductory price of $1.99 in your iTunes.

Today, we noticed another cultural icon, VC Fred Wilson posted this question on his blog as to what will emerge as Commerce 2.0.

“So the question is who will the YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter of commerce be? Maybe they exist today and will emerge as large scale web services soon. Or maybe they are still ideas in the minds of entrepreneurs and will be hatched in the coming years.

It’s an area I am excited about and will be on the lookout for. Clearly I’m not the only one.”

This is where we think LadyGaga.com’s promotion for Telephone stands out as an example of the new world economy. This world is connected by the best ad engines of Google. And it is directly connected to Apple’s amazing commerce engine. Apple, in the context of digital goods is showing how extremely well it is positioned to be the industry payment engine.

Embedding YouTube: Get it Now, Anywhere

We witnessed YouTube transition from the Wild West to a control point for record labels. Now, a lot of the newest official artist videos flow straight to Vevo, the branded label friendly site that runs ads and controls the experience of the brand.

YouTube is taking advantage of its place as a channeling service for video. In this case, the top, most requested inventory pays for the rest of the service. The higher the demand, the more attention it gets.

LadyGaga.com, like many sites, uses embeddable YouTube. In addition to pointing to commerce services like iTunes, the video embeds curated links into other properties at Vevo. This provides the site custom promotion experience while leveraging the YouTube and Vevo distribution channel.

iTunes is prominently offered for both buying the video (which is also free on the same page) and also the album. So, there is a bet here that people want to own it, or place value in their iTunes library to offer this connected service.

This brings the user to a one-moment to buy scenario. Shown here, there is the familiar transition to iTunes from the LadyGaga site.

And, the authorization to ‘Buy Now’.

In default mode, iTunes is set to require a validation step (a second click) to buy the media. The user can can be set easily to bypass this step and enable the user one-click to buy from the web in the future.

This feature is available to any Apple affiliate, but we find it particularly effective coming from the artist embedded with the video and other endorsements.

Tweeting, End to End, Facebook, FTW

We noticed that with a simple interaction, we can logon to Facebook and Twitter from LadyGaga.com and drop a status post, or “tweet” into Facebook or Twitter. Incredibly, inside iTunes, both services are available as well. The real story is that social networks, and commerce networks work together, end-to-end, and, for-the-win.

In a twist of fate, in this version of digital music future the record labels win big. They do it by being close to both eyeballs (Google) and library (Apple), and bringing out the thing they know, the pop.

LadyGaga is on a roll

With the help of Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Apple she will connect to more platforms than ever before, with fewer clicks and passwords.

We wonder how this evolve further into other platforms. Will LadyGaga’s services continue to find new ways to leverage real-time services? We’re starting to envision personal mobile and location aware fan applications.

Will the forces of cloud computing and commerce force Apple and Google be best-friends-forever in music?

And, will we ever build a phone that doesn’t disrupt us while on the dance floor?

And, for god’s sake, damn, Beyonce’ has her back.

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Escape from New York: Is the Valley Necessary?

In an effort to highlight some of the emerging tech centers across the world we’ve written on a number of cities for our Never Mind the Valley series. We’ve featured the funding and opportunities available in places like Washington DC, Bangalore and Beijing. Our intent has never been to create regional rivalries, but rather to highlight the diverse landscape of the tech world in general. That being said, few stories got as much attention as the piece on New York as passionate East Coasters rallied around their hometown. Despite what seems to be a surge of love for the Big Apple, SpeakerText CEO Matt Mireless recently pointed out the shortcomings of the New York tech scene and announced his exit to the Valley.

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Similar to Yammer CEO David Sacks’ move from West Hollywood to San Francisco, Mireless is moving his company to where he believes he can find more opportunities. In an article for Business Insider, Mireless explains that while legendary VCs like Chris Dixon and Fred Wilson are in New York, they are only a fraction of the investors that companies are pitching.

He writes, “In reality, the capital markets in NYC are flooded with Wall Streeters turned venture capitalists. These are people who know how to analyze and pick in assets, not people who know how to build companies. These are people who do dumb s@#$ like ask about pricing for a premium version of a genuinely novel product (in a category with no existing market) that hasn’t even launched yet…in the first meeting.”

On top of the shortage of experienced tech VCs, Mireless complains that New York has a weak angel network with only a few groups to pitch. Because of this, entrepreneurs only have a few shots to get their pitch right and they’ve got little opportunity to drive competition when negotiating deals. Mireless believes the result is lower valuations and slower deal cycles. He also believes that because Wall Street has skewed programmer expectations in regards to salaries, it’s very difficult to find talent who will take a pay cut in exchange for equity. A month ago Venture Hacks’ Naval Ravikant also made the case for startups to move to the Valley. Nevertheless, Hunch cofounder Caterina Fake makes the case for New York adding that the city needs a billion dollar company exit in order to free up some talent and resources.

While we’ve seen our fair share of non-Valley startups succeed and grow, it’s interesting to see so many tout the opportunities of the region. Having covered so many startups, we know that you can pen a deal through your global and online network. But is it possible that just as certain employees and partnerships are more appropriate for a particular stage of the product lifestyle, that certain locales are more appropriate as well? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Photo Credit: Epicharmus / Michael

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Can Entrepreneurs Be Made?

Silicon Valley investors often have a picture in their heads of the type of person who is worthy of funding: young, brash, stubborn, and arrogant. They believe that successful entrepreneurs come from entrepreneurial families and that they start their entrepreneurial journey by selling lemonade while in grade school. Angel investor and entrepreneur, Jason Calacanis said as much in his recent talk to Penn State students. And after meeting Wharton students, VC Fred Wilson expressed shock when a professor told him that you could teach people to be entrepreneurs. Wilson wrote, “I’ve been working with entrepreneurs for almost 25 years now and it is ingrained in my mind that someone is either born an entrepreneur or is not.”

Jason, Fred, and Silicon Valley VCs, I’ve got news for you: you’ve got it all wrong. Entrepreneurs aren’t born, they’re made. And they aren’t anything like you think they are. My team surveyed 549 successful entrepreneurs. We found that the majority didn’t have entrepreneurial parents. They didn’t even have entrepreneurial aspirations while going to school. They simply got tired of working for others, had a great idea they wanted to commercialize, or woke up one day with an urgent desire to build wealth before they retired. So they took the big leap.

We found that 52% of the successful entrepreneurs were the first in their immediate families to start a business — just like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, and Russell Simons (Def Jam founder). Their parents were academics, lawyers, factory workers, priests, bureaucrats, etc. About 39% had an entrepreneurial father, and 7% had an entrepreneurial mother. (Some had both.)

Only a quarter caught the entrepreneurial bug when in college. Half didn’t even think about entrepreneurship, and they had little interest in it when in school.

There was no significant difference between the success factors or hurdles faced by entrepreneurs who were extremely interested in entrepreneurship in school (and who likely set up the lemonade stands) and the ones who lacked interest. But entrepreneurs with extreme interest started more companies and did it sooner. Of the 24.5% who indicated that they were “extremely interested” in becoming entrepreneurs during college, 47.1% went on to start more than two companies (as compared with 32.9% of the overall sample). Sixty-nine percent started their companies within 10 years of working for someone else (as compared to 46.8% of the rest of the sample population).

What did affect their successes?  Education — but not the college they graduate from. In a different study of the 652 CEOs and CTOs of 502 tech companies, we researched the correlation between education and the sales and headcount of companies founded. We learned that the there was a significant difference between companies started by founders with just high-school diplomas and the rest. Education provided a huge advantage. But there wasn’t a big difference between firms founded by Ivy-league graduates and the graduates of other universities.

The education and training of entrepreneurs is something that the Kauffman Foundation has been researching extensively. Over the last six years, it has invested around $50 million on academic research to understand what makes entrepreneurs tick and what policies are most conducive to entrepreneurship and to construct data bases to permit analyses of these subjects. (Kauffman has also funded some of my research at Duke, UC-Berkeley, and Harvard.) Its VP of Research, Bob Litan, says that Kauffman has learnt conclusively that entrepreneurship can be taught. The key is to provide education at “teachable moments” — when the entrepreneur is thinking about starting a venture or ready to scale it. What entrepreneurs need isn’t the type of abstract course they teach in business schools, but practical, relevant knowledge.  That’s why Kauffman created a program called Fast Trac, which has trained 300,000 entrepreneurs so far.

One of the findings of Kauffman research is that of the appx. 600,000 businesses that are started every year, less than a fraction of 1% become high-growth “scale” businesses. These new firms, especially the “scale” firms, have added all of the net incremental jobs to U.S. economy since 1980 (about 40 million), and probably account for about 1/3 of GDP growth since then. So the key to boosting economic growth is to increase the number of successful high-growth startups.  After all, the growth rate of our economy is nothing more than the aggregation of the growth of our firms.

That is why Kauffman (which has a $2 billion endowment) is investing heavily in an ambitious new program called Kauffman Labs.  This aims to dramatically increase the ability of small businesses to become big businesses. The Labs program is built around a novel idea: that highly motivated individuals with “scalable ideas” can be recruited to be entrepreneurs and to be made successful, by surrounding them with a network of other experienced entrepreneurs; sources of money; and mentors. The goal is to educate entrepreneurs and surround them with a powerful network. This is like a Y Combinator on steroids.

Anecdotal evidence also shows that there are many more factors at play than that of genes. Note this BusinessWeek article about waves of spinoffs from Google. I doubt that all of these Google employees who are starting successful businesses were born with entrepreneurial genes. VC and former entrepreneur Brad Feld also blogged about how many of his frat buddies at MIT had become successful entrepreneurs. Were all of these people born to be entrepreneurs as well? I don’t think so. It is probably education, exposure to entrepreneurship, and networks that led these people to pursue the entrepreneurial path — which means that Kauffman Foundation may have hit on the right idea with Kauffman Labs.

The reason this topic is really important is that, as Wilson writes, “Venture Capital is a lot about pattern recognition”. The reality is that VCs like him make quick judgments about people based on the stereotypes in their minds. So, like the women that I wrote about in my previous posts, we may be disadvantaging another important segment of our population – a segment that is older, more humble, more sensible, and more realistic than the population that is getting all the attention (and the money).

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

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In Hindsight: When VC Associates Misread the Landscape

When a startup entrepreneur tells the story of his/her mistakes and how they’ve corrected them, it’s endearing. When an investment associate for one of the more prestigious VC firms does it, it’s surprising.

Union Square Ventures’ Andrew Parker recently started a Got It Wrong Series on his Gong Show blog where he identifies his own mistakes and mis-judgements about the industry.

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While investment analysts and associates don’t directly control the money in the VC world, a large number of our readers believe associates help drive the decision-making process. When someone like Parker decides to air his mistakes for all to see, he’s giving us a glimpse at the information that guides the future of the tech landscape and whether or not the funding will follow. Some of Parker’s mistakes have included:

1. Privacy: Parker was adamant about user privacy and assumed that others were the same. He watched as personal finance site Mint, Loopt and Twitter gained ground despite the expectation that privacy concerns would prove to be a bigger barrier to adoption.

2. Mobile Browsers: In 2006 Parker told investor Fred Wilson that he did not expect the mobile browsing experience to catch up to the laptop in the next 5 years. He believed that the form factor of handheld devices was to small to make it easy to reformat pages on the fly, design mobile web pages and zoom into regular pages. Parker admits he was proven wrong by the iPhone.

3. Taste-maker Risk: Parker explains that certain sites succeed on the ability to popularize content from taste-makers. When he first saw the Huffington Post close a $5 million dollar round he was unsure of the investment thesis. Says Parker, “In hindsight, I think I have a blind spot when it comes to first-party content and editorial choices in web services.  The taste-maker risk is a risk, but it’s not nearly as important as I thought it was, and additionally, it’s a risk that smart technologists can navigate well.”

To keep an eye on the series visit Thegongshow.tumblr.com.

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Twiangulate Who You Share In Common With Other People On Twitter

Here’s a good virtual parlor game. Pick any two or three Twitter users, and Twiangulate which friends or followers they have in common. Twiangulate is a site that shows the overlap between your social graph and any tow other people on Twitter. It shows the resulting names as a list or an interactive social map.

For instance, if you click on the image at right, you will see an enlarged version of a map I made to see who I follow in common with @fredwilson and @anildash. Fred Wilson follows 463 people, Anil follows 573, and I follow 315. Yet according to Twiangulate, we have 81 common “friends,” which perhaps says something about how insular the world of Web startups and social media can be. In contrast, Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) and I only have 15 common “friends.”

So who are some of the people Fred, Anil, and I all listen to on Twitter? Some of the common people we follow include Josh Kopelman, Chris Dixon, John Borthwick, Dennis Crowley, Doc Searls, Steve Case, Joshua Schachter, Danny Sullivan, Bradley Horowitz, Michael Arrington, and Jeff Jarvis.

Are we listening to the right people or do we suffer from groupthink? Who do you overlap with the most on Twitter?

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NYC’s BigApps Winners Announced: WayFinder, NYC Way Lead the Pack

Last fall, we told you about an exciting and innovative competition to find – and fun – civic-focused web abd mobile apps in New York City.

Tonight, after an all-star panel of judges had reviewed more than 80 apps over a month-long period, a handful of winning applications were announced.

These apps include WayFinder, a resource for navigating around the city; Taxihack, a live-feed commentary on New York City taxis; Big Apple Ed, a guide to New York City schools; and seven others.

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Judges for the competition included such media and technology luminaries as NY Tech Meetup co-founder Dawn Barber, Betaworks CEO John Borthwick, Mahalo co-founder Jason Calacanis, EDVentures Founder Esther Dyson, FirstMark Capital CEO Lawrence Lenihan, AlleyCorp co-founder Kevin Ryan, DFJ Gotham Ventures managing partner Danny Schultz, and Union Square Ventures managing general partner Fred Wilson.

The BigApps prizes also included a Popular Choice Award, which was decided by an online public vote from people around the world.

The grand prize winner for the competition, Wayfinder, is actually an Andoird app that allows users to find the nearest and best directions to New York City subway and New Jersey PATH stations. It was also selected as the Grand Prize winner for the Data Visualization Award. That team received a total of $7,500 for both prizes.

Other winning applications include:

• Actuatr, a platform that simplifies opening up data to developers;
• NYC Way, an iPhone application that bundles a variety of NYC resources for tourists and locals (also the Investor’s Choice for monetization potential and Popular Choice winner, a $5,000 prize altogether);
• PushpinWeb, a platform for public data;
• Trees Near You, an iPhone app that shows data about trees around New York City;
• UpNext 3D NYC, an interactive 3D map for exploring and discovering the city;
• Overview New York City Parks and Recreation Online, a web app for finding New York City parks; and
• Bookzee, a location-based library book search.

“We opened up the 170 datasets of City information to unleash the creativity and ingenuity of New Yorkers, and we were not disappointed,” said Mayor Bloomberg, who announced the awards at a dinner tonight. “The apps submitted offer a range of unique capabilities, many of which use the data in ways we hadn’t considered. We want New York City to stay ahead of the innovation and technology curve, and we’ll continue to capitalize on our greatest asset – New Yorkers – to make sure we do. Thank you to all of those who submitted apps, and congratulations to the winners.”

The New York City Economic Development Corporation and the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications worked with around 30 agencies to provide more than 170 datasets for the competition. The data included geographic locations of all sidewalk cafés, laundry facilities, playgrounds, dog runs, city landmarks, as well as census data, extensive property valuation and assessments, the results of restaurant inspections, lists of permitted citywide events and even side parking and traffic updates.

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How To Find a Great Startup Mentor

If you’re an early-stage entrepreneur and this is your first startup company, you are not alone. Thousands are toiling over code in the hopes that their product will gain users and revenue. The problem with being someone who can build a great product is that you might know more about your core technology then you do about the business of startups. In the past few weeks ReadWriteWeb has covered emerging tech hubs in Israel, Austin and Boulder and the common thread amongst them is that each community encourages mentorship. Today we’re looking at what you need to know to find a great mentor.

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Says Union Square Ventures VC Fred Wilson in a recent blog post, “The young entrepreneurs who are starting companies for the first time are best served by seeking out and getting experienced serial entrepreneurs as angel investors, board members, and mentors. We encourage all of the first time entrepreneurs we work with to do this.”

In a perfect world, launching a successful product would simply equate to building something phenomenal. But in reality, an isolated phenom can get buried beneath the noise of thousands of other startups. Wilson and a number of other investors ask first-time entrepreneurs to bring on trusted advisors in the hopes that newbies will broaden their social graph and avoid making the mistakes that others have already made. Below are some of the things you should consider before choosing a mentor.

Success: Just because someone speaks at conferences and has been in the industry for 10 years, does not mean they are qualified to be your mentor. Look at the individual’s past successes and find out exactly how they’ve contributed to them. Check with others to gauge this person’s visibility in the industry and determine whether or not that success is directly related to the type of business you want to build.

Connections: A good advisor/mentor will open doors in the places you need doors opened. If you’re a music content provider and you need help with licensing, find someone who knows the legal and business development side of major labels. If your revenue model is based on advertising, find someone who can help broker deals with ad networks and agencies. If you’re building your business on a 3rd party platform, get an advisor with friends on the inside.

Personality: Determine whether or not your potential advisor is famous or infamous. Sites like The Funded allow entrepreneurs to share their good and bad experiences of investment groups and individuals. While these reviews should be taken with a grain of salt, you want a mentor that is present to answer your questions, engaged enough to offer suggestions, patient enough to explain some of the basic tenets of startup life, and finally, mature enough to have their suggestions occasionally rejected.

Let us know how you chose your mentor/advisor in the comments below.

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Search, Monetize and Fact Check YouTube Transcripts with Speakertext

You’ve probably never heard of Matt Mireles and Bjorn Liljequist but with a $4000 dollar budget and an engineering team paid in iPhones, the two already have Meebo founder Seth Sternberg as their advisor and praise from VC Fred Wilson. The duo’s filtering service Speakertext will launch at tomorrow’s New York Tech Meetup and the concept is a simple one – to make video interesting.

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Like Tubechop, Speakertext allows users to omit the boring parts of a video; however, the service’s transcription component offers a new and important twist. Says CEO Mireles, “At some point, longer videos become useless. It’s the metadata and the fact that we’re allowing it to be indexed that make this a great tool.”

The service uses the YouTube API and replaces the YouTube player with a Speakertext player. Users can search video text for relevant quotes and embed the linked quote or the Speakertext player and video into their blogs. To index your own video with the system, you can either transcribe it yourself or opt into a Mechanical Turk package. For $20 dollars per hour of video, you can have speeches, events and podcasts transcribed. The company plans on creating a premium service and launching on additional video platforms in the months ahead. For now, Speakertext offers the following benefits:

Attribution & Monetization: Says Mireles, “Video piracy often happens because users can’t get the clips they want from the original publisher. We’re building a monetizable search strategy for video publishers.” Because Speakertext just sets the original video to a new start point, there is no need for a new file to be uploaded by a secondary publisher. In this way, the secondary publisher highlights the content they want and the original publisher maintains credit, links from search and potential revenue channels.

Accuracy: Stop for a moment and think about the quagmire of misinformation swimming across the web right now. From religious figures to political candidates to CEOs, there is no shortage of misquotes in the media today. If you want to be a transparent company, government or influential entity, video transcription is a great way to dispel myth from fact. The company will also crowdsource transcription accuracy in a method similar to that of the Worldwide Lexicon Project.

Education and Research: Video has been a boon for visual learners. Now, rather than simply searching titles and descriptions, transcription will allow users to find valuable educational resources. The company is already speaking to open courseware proponents to increase access to quality materials.

Mireles points out that Google is currently in the process of automating captions for YouTube. Says the startup founder, “We have no doubt whether searchable video like this will be the standard in 5 years. We just want it to be us that does it.”

Speakertext will launch to the public at 5pm PST tomorrow evening at speakertext.com.

Thanks to David Cohn for the tip!

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