It's a great time to be in Australia at the moment

Posted by Ian Holsman Wed, 18 Oct 2006 03:32:00 GMT

With PBL getting $4.5b for selling it’s stake of channel nine, internet startups might have a new partner knocking on their door.

Sure.. I’m guessing most of that money is earmarked for gambling things, which is where PBL is focused, but the announcement also made mention of ‘new’ media… which means internet startups, and internet small companies.

One of the largest whines I’ve heard from Australian startup people is the lack of money available to fund startups (and hence why they are all moving to the US).

I think this is bullshit personally.

Australia has a superannuation contribution scheme which forces people to put at least 9% of there salary into investment funds (like a 401k). People can either elect to run their super fund themselves (which makes sense if you have more than $300k in it), or join a professional fund manager.

These funds are BIG. I was speaking to one fund manager who gets $1b of new funds a year. They are always on the lookout on ways to invest that, and startups are a good way to get a return which has a different risk profile than other investments (diversification of risk is what fund managers are after)

So what is the problem then.. people want money, people have money.. sounds like a perfect pair. Well.. speaking to a local VC, it seems that there are a couple of reasons.

1. Funds (LP’s) are not asking for a high enough return from local VC’s. This presents a problem as a low/medium return means you should be looking for things with a low/medium risk. By asking for a medium return for your money, it ties the hands of VCs, as they can’t fund a high-risk project without re-negoating with their LP’s.

2. The sales funnel is small. A way of countering a high risk project is with other high risk projects in different areas (diversifying and lowering your overall risk) so it matches the risk requirements of your LP. Because there isn’t many new projects coming up, or the ones which get proposed are very similar and facing similar risks it means they can’t get funded

3. Lack of experience. There are serial entrepreneurs in the US. people who have gone through it several times.. they know how to write a business plan, and what happens if you get funded.. To be fair, there are a couple of successful entrepreneurs in the internet space here, but they are still running their original businesses.

4. Lack of networking. I don’t think there is a place for people with ideas to meet each other, and swap war stories/experiences.

So why is Packer/PBL’s money any better ?

Well.. PBL is one of the companies who has the money, experience, and networks available to help. It is the ‘smart’ money that people always talk about. Here’s hoping they can start the virtuous circle going in Australia.

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Looking for a startup in New Jersey

Posted by Ian Holsman Thu, 02 Feb 2006 21:47:00 GMT

Hi.

I have a friend (seriously.. I don’t want to move back to the USA) who wants to work for a startup in New Jersey.

The problem is .. he doesn’t know of any ..

so.. if you know of companies in NJ doing cool stuff either leave a comment here (which he can read) OR

ping me directly

ian at zilbo.com and I’ll forward it to him.

Thanks

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How high do you lift your skirt?

Posted by Ian Holsman Sun, 18 Dec 2005 00:35:00 GMT

So, as some of you might remember, I’ve thinking of startups, and think I have got a pretty good idea.

But in order to fulfill my vision, it would involve writing a bit of infrastructure which isn’t there. Now my plan isn’t to use this to enable my site, not to sell or to make money directly off.

So.. here’s the dilemma, should I make the infrastructure an open source project in the hope of sharing the R&D effort with some other developers and then run the risk of a potential competitor using it, or do I assume that the pie is large enough for multiple players?

Right now I have chosen the middle road, and am going to opensource the components which are ‘commodity’ stuff. for example the user registration, captcha, and auditing to name a few, and It’s been evaluated/used by at least 2 people. I think I’ll leave it at that for a while.

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What is 99% uptime anyway?

Posted by Ian Holsman Thu, 08 Dec 2005 13:17:00 GMT

in Don’t scale: 99.999% uptime is for Wal-Mart he mentioned that 37signals is quite happy with 98% uptime, and the cost of increasing uptime isn’t worth it.

Here is a brief summary of what a extra ‘9’ will give you as far as uptime. (as a rule of thumb, each extra nine you add a extra zero at the end of the price it will cost you to get there).

UptimeTime lost in a year
98%7.3 days
99.0%3.7 days
99.9%8 hours
99.99%1 hour
99.999%5 minutes

Personally I think uptime is more a measure of reliability and redundancy than scalabilty, and would be sceptical when people talk about uptime.

why? well.. what is uptime? in most cases it means that a service is up and handling requests.

what it doesn’t measure (and hence not tell you)

  • How responsive that service is. people will stop using your service if it is too slow. uptime does not measure this.
  • *when* it was down. having something go down at 3AM is not the same as it being down at 3PM. while the world is global, most people only care about the USA. uptime doesn’t not know when your core business hours are.
  • when something is partially down. Do you define yourselves as being ‘up’ when only half your site is functioning?

I think companies should define a metric more along the lines of: the time taken to complete XXXX operation, between the hours 9AM and 9PM. and then combine these timings into a weighted average. The weights being how important that operation is to your core business.

measure & monitor that. not uptime.

Have a look at Grab perf for an example of this. Stephen measures the response time as well as availability.

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Working for the man

Posted by Ian Holsman Fri, 18 Nov 2005 22:20:00 GMT

So recently I have been thinking alot about my career, and what I am doing with my life.

About 2 years ago I (well my wife +I) made a decision to focus more on quality of life than quality of a job, and we left San Francisco to return home to Australia after being there for 6 years.

So recent events have been brought the question back up again, but this time It is slightly different.

Why should I work for someone else?

Why don’t I set up a shingle and go into business for my self, as Marc Fluery said become a ‘professional’ open sourcer.

So what is stopping me?

well.. there is a certain comfort of getting a regular paycheck and the lifestyle one gets from that (house & school payments won’t take stock instead of cash ;()

So.. how do you ‘professionals’ do it?

Do you just have a large buffer, or significant other with a ‘real’ job to tide you through until you flip/get clients?

Or am I just too scared of failure?

Is the answer to just take a deep breath, write a plan, and just Do It?

If I were 20 again with no dependants It would be a different story.. people with nothing to lose have everything to gain.

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