A bit of an altercation

Posted by Ian Holsman Tue, 15 Aug 2006 09:04:00 GMT

I got my first ‘hate’ blog post a couple of days ago, about Parent Chatter one of the bloggers accused me of stealing his content.

I found it quite interesting, as most of the bloggers I know actually blog to get their message out and to be heard, not for a living. my bad.

So you’ll see what I hope is a good compromise. I just display excerpts of their posts online, in order to encourage people to click through to the original sites.

I am also proposing a revenue-sharing deal on the ‘chatter’ type sites I run with the participants. a 50/50 revenue split, giving people the option to donate their portion to charity if they so choose.

Naturally when I think participant, I’m not just thinking of the bloggers.. the people using the site should also be rewarded. Without their preferences the site would be just as useless as it having no feeds either. If you want to have your say feel free to on Zilbo Partners

I am also rolling out a new feature on most of them. I call it ‘links’. It is a mini-digg service, where users of a site can submit useful bookmarks via delicious and have them appear on the site.

for example.. if you think a link would be of interest to people in the VC community you would add a ‘for:vcchat’ tag when you bookmark it via del.icio.us.

It would then show up on VC Links so that others can see it (and rate it etc etc). At the moment anyone can submit a link. If the spambots figure it out, I’ll have to narrow it down, but for now it’s a free for all.

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Web 2.0 Companies DO NOT need To Scale

Posted by Ian Holsman Wed, 07 Dec 2005 15:13:00 GMT

In Jeremy’s Article: Web 2.0 Companies NEED To Scale, he highlights a certain process that he belives most start ups follow.

Yeah. Here’s their process:
  • 1. Start with a handful of users. This is too much for ded box.
  • 2. Move to dedicated server.
  • 3. Add a few more users til they’re at 100. This is too much for one box.
  • 4. Add more hardware. It’s obvious this isn’t enough.
  • 5. Recode.

Here is my view (albeit never working in a startup, but having working on integrating a couple of small-large ones) of how it works.

  • 0. get your savings together
  • 1. build a prototype, show it to some friends and put your hand out for some $$$
  • 2. with something functional, approach the VC’s
  • 3. use VC cash to just buy more machines, and concentrate on adding features to bring in the money, not ‘optimized’ solutions
  • 4. concentrate on your growth rate. you need to have this as high as possible, not your user base
  • 5. once you have become a ‘market leader’ and have series ‘B’ funding, then concentrate on employing a person to tune your application, or just buy some new machines which are 2-3 times faster than the ones you originally have
    • OR
  • 5. Flip it
  • 6. Let the buyer integrate the application into their infrastructure, processes and standards. From my experience this will double the user-base and increase the growth rate as they put your application on their scalable services, and optimize the unscalable bits by replacing them with their exsiting stuff, or rewriting them. Maybe it’s just me, but the value of the aquisition isn’t the technology, it’s the userbase.
  • 7. Wait a year till your options vest and repeat/buy a yacht

If I was starting my own company, I would be concentrating on increasing the value of it ASAP, and I would do it in two ways. Increasing the features and user base as fast as possible, making it as hard as possible for anyone else to enter in just after me.

as long as the user experience is acceptable, I would not be concerned about scalability in the slightest, especially if spending $5k to buy another box will make the problem go away for 3-6 months/until I can get some more funding.

This article can be summarised as “I would rather have a developer working on something which will increase the money coming in today, rather than having him work on something which will increase the money coming in a month from now, as I don’t know WTF will be happening in a month”

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Startups.. is it a all or nothing bet?

Posted by Ian Holsman Thu, 27 Oct 2005 17:45:00 GMT

MBS, the university I am doing my MBA at recently had a night were they invited 4 Entrepreneurs to talk to some of the students about what it was like to start/run a small business. and I thought it had a couple of key points to share with you.

  • Have a business plan, and try to keep it current. This is more for yourself to keep focused
  • Have an exit strategy, one of the people said that the team forming the startup is the ‘B’ team, and they will slowly be replaced by the ‘A’ team when they get funded. ie.. as a local VC I to chatted to recently said: ‘sometimes it is better for everyone if the founder went for a holiday while they take the business to the next level’.
  • Be Frugal, for whatever reason Australia is risk averse. Getting funding (either private or via a bank) is HARD. and the supply is limited. I also think the return rate expected by VCs is less over here than in the US, so they don’t need to fund as risky ventures.
  • You need to lose the ‘day’ job. You can’t think you start a business while doing your full time job. Although I have met two now successfull ‘old’ companies which did start in that way (a toy party plan company, and DWS, a IT consulting company I used to work for AGES ago did that) so it is be possible.

I guess the most frustrating thing I heard was the aversion to risk taking and giving people a go which is present over here. Hopefully one day when I get a ‘real’ job I can change that, and make Australia more entrepreneurial like the SF bay area I left behind a couple of years ago.

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Are you interested in startups? (or VCs?)

Posted by Ian Holsman Mon, 17 Oct 2005 20:12:00 GMT

Then you should take a look at the Entrepreneur Exchange. A knowledge base created by entrepreneurs’ to document their experiences.

What I really liked was the Startup kit which gives people a easy starting point on all the ‘boring bits’ of the company.

Thanks to Ross Mayfield, CEO of Social Text for having the insight and forethought to set this up.

I just wish there were some Australian VC’s out in the blogosphere.. proove me wrong please!

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