Startups | NextBlitz

contrarian startups

applications, internet, startups View Comments

Nov 302011

Most batches of startups tend to ride a common set of waves. But there are also opportunities for startups that chart their own course. As the waves change, these contrarian-minded startups sometimes end up in front of the past waves. Though we can’t predict the timing or nature of the next blitz of waves, we do know they are always coming. And going.

Peer-to-peer work and the component software industry
Christina Cacioppo has a nice post up on what comes next for the software industry. It is focused on start-ups and consumer focused business models but many of the concepts stretch across the industries.

Christina writes very well about two trends – software as a component industry and peer-to-peer type workflows. We’re seeing this across early stage technology companies as Christina describes, and I believe we’ll see both trends in the forms of disruption of traditional product shops, as well as different models for “companies”, e.g. as transient flocks. This is the current set of tidal waves of the software industry, interwoven with Lean Startup principles. Some startups will no doubt ride these powerful waves to incredible success. But some startups will also go against, through or around these waves and it is sometimes more interesting to think about those opportunities.

Startup turtles swimming upstream
Some companies will take the contrarian path. For example, some companies will succeed by minimizing their use of other platforms and components. Near heresy today, which may mean it is more likely to be true. Wait, if I don’t take advantage of these platforms and components, then how do I race the hares to market? You don’t. You lose that sprint but may win the marathon.

Sustainability
I love the Lean startup concepts, and I practiced some of them, but we may be starting to over-emphasize the speed parts. Sustainability for example may include slowing down and minimizing the use of today’s powerful platforms, robust web services and third-party components, as crazy as that may sound against the deafening roar of today’s tidal waves.

Waves and innovation
Certainly I’m not recommending that all start-ups slow down. Some turtles will drown going against the current. Some rabbits will iterate into long-term sustainable businesses with indispensable platforms. But I think this current set of waves is so powerful – so hard to not ride if you are a startup – that it creates a contrary opportunity for some startups that go the other way and focus on sustainability, business model innovation and go to market innovation.

beware of the good answer

startups View Comments

Jun 022011

In a very good graduation speech, Clay Christensen highlights the importance of asking the right questions (and much more; read the speech).

This is absolutely critical in business and I’d add a corollary of sorts: good answers to the wrong questions are the single most important factor inhibiting progress in large companies.

In large companies, often the top critical thinkers lack the visibility to identify the right questions. They are either too far from the action (e.g. exec in ivory tower), or too deep in the weeds (e.g. engineer in very narrowly defined role within a larger team) to realize that the question may be wrong.

However, the same folks, and the multitudes of people around them, are quite capable of producing good answers, and then getting caught up in paralysis by analysis over the answer/solution/ROI etc.

So the answers can be quite good but the exercise is largely futile in that the most important question is not being discussed. The good answers become distractions and snowball into more good answers, bad questions and good answers. Meanwhile the right question gets buried that much more deeply in the process.

This is also a key reason why startups are often far more efficient and innovative – less people, more focus, more visibility per person, less time and resources to debate good answers, etc.

Beware of the good answer. It may be hiding a bad question.

LinkedIn IPO

applications, education, internet, startups View Comments

May 182011

Looks like LinkedIn will raise about $400 million via their IPO later this week, at a $4 billion valuation. Financial experts can debate the valuation but some quick thoughts on how LinkedIn can evolve to become a far different LinkedIn than what meets the eye today:

Integrations with applications such as video and telepresence
I’d like to interview you over video, but don’t necessarily want to give you my URI, SkypeID or E.164, and want to use some specific capabilities for the interview. LinkedIn could facilitate the video session and help integrate “purple” video-integrated applications such as content sharing, digital whiteboarding and recording that I may not normally pay for or have access to on a permanent basis, but would be willing to “rent” for such an interview session. Even better for all of us, including LinkedIn, if they can capture some of the data produced by such interviews (see below).

Education
Education, at least in the US, is in the process of being re-invented. 21st century desired outcomes are not the same as the outcomes of previous centuries upon which our classical education system is built. The tools and methods to achieve the new outcomes are of course not the same either, e.g the use of telepresence in education. Expect to see further convergence of traditional and online education and some companies directly offering virtual courses, in-person courses and entire degrees. LinkedIn could play a critical role in linking companies, teachers and students in this new paradigm; a paradigm where we may each fill every one of those roles.

Enabling new business models and product development paradigms
Crowdsourced, peer-to-peer product development is starting to happen, and will accelerate and mature. LinkedIn could be part of the software in the middle, as well as provide the data underneath, to make this really tick. Ditto for any new corporate models, such as startup flocks.

Information
Information is king. LinkedIn has the raw data and more importantly the data relationships, metadata, context and feedback loops to both produce that data into valuable information and to continue to grow the data. Two areas of data that LinkedIn could develop to produce even richer information: interview results and annual evaluation type data from hiring managers. Most of this data lives in proprietary databases at best – e.g. good recruiters/placement agencies maintain candidate profiles with interview results – or in scattered emails, spreadsheets etc. There are some privacy issues to be worked but even in aggregate this data could be very valuable. LinkedIn could be an Information Service Provider – via APIs etc, as well as directly utilizing the information for LinkedIn apps.

Go buy LinkedIn IPO stock? I don’t know. No idea how many of the above items, and a million other examples along the same lines, are built into the LinkedIn valuation. But I do see enormous potential for LinkedIn to evolve into much more than what they provide today.

Clickpitch: birth of real video games

applications, internet, mobile, sports, startups, telepresence, video calling View Comments

May 032011

The hitter’s knees buckle as he can only watch a filthy slider catch the inside corner for strike two. The pitcher considers his next pitch choice, from the other side of the world, enabled by Clickpitch.

Video game baseball with physical hitters and actual pitched balls
The hitter digs in for the next pitch in a batting cage type facility loaded with sensors, video cameras and software that virtually transform the cage into a full-size field. 60 feet, 6 inches from the hitter is a sophisticated pitching machine, or even a robot pitcher, but the brain of the pitcher can be anywhere – the machine is told what pitches to throw from anywhere on the web, as part of sophisticated video games and training programs.

In this case, a boy in Japan, via his Droid, is considering following up the slider with an inside, shoulder high, 86 MPH fastball, a couple inches off the inside corner, trying to get the hitter to chase for strike three, although his tweet stream and GroupMe group is urging him to go back to the nasty slider. The pitcher could just as easily be an actual MLB starting pitcher, playing on his iPad in the clubhouse on his day off, and for that matter the hitter could be an MLB hitter getting his practice in.

Pitching from Android, Wii, Xbox, iPad
The boy in Japan is not just any pitcher – he is a superstar – he leads both the Facebook and MLB.com virtual Cy Young award voting for Clickpitch enabled baseball video games. If he still leads at the MLB all-star break, he will pitch an inning to the National League All-Star team at Citi Field, using his Droid. He’s a catcher on his school team so knows a thing or two about pitch selection.

The robot pitchers can emulate all levels from a Little League pitcher to a MLB ace, including software to manage margin for error by level, e.g. if the bot is a Little League pitcher instructed to throw an outside corner fastball then he might hit the hitter, whereas the MLB ace robot pitcher is going to paint the black. Actual MLB pitchers, based on their actual pitch data, can be imitated such that a hitter can choose to face Roy Halladay in the first inning, Clayton Kershaw in the second and CC Sabathia in the next. Today’s advanced statistics, pitching charts and sabermetrics could make this very sophisticated.

Hitting against smart pitchers instead of dumb machines
The hitter is enjoying the best offseason hitting practice of his life, as he’s now facing pitchers that are trying to get him out, based on his strengths and weaknesses, and the pitchers’ characteristics. The session are not lost when the hitter leaves the virtual field – the hitter uses telepresence to work with his coach at anytime and video to keep all results. Right now, the coach, from his basement office, demonstrates over telepresence a swing change that he wants the hitter to try. Video is tagged such that the hitter and his coach review all clips of swings on 90 MPH fastballs on the inner half of the plate over the past two months, or any other set of swings they want to analyze. A former coach that is in the hitter’s GroupMe baseball group may contribute advice about a subtle change in stance that he’s noticed in the hitter over time.

The next generation of baseball video games and video game ecosystems
Clickpitch turned legacy baseball video games into typewriters – most people barely remember them. There are hundreds of different video games on various platforms that simultaneously utilize each at-bat between hitter, robot pitcher and pitcher controller, creating millions of parallel games for players to join at anytime. Some video games for example create entire games for their users, enabling broadcasting students to call each game, whereas others are geared purely towards training and practice.

Little League numbers have soared as well as America’s pastime has been reinvigorated by kids being introduced to baseball on their iPad apps, going to the hitting zones to compete against their friends and then finding their way to their local Little League programs.

Clickpitch is the software and algorithms platform, built in the new peer-produced, crowdsourced product development model. Many companies have leveraged Clickpitch data and APIs to add various sensors, telepresence solutions, video games, statistical packages, iPhone and iPad apps, browser-based games, robots, pitching machines, video footage review products, social net integrations, etc. Some college coaches run full live practices but with the pitcher replaced by the Clickpitch/bot/virtual pitcher combination. In this way, pitchers’ arms are saved from practice innings, while the hitters still face top quality pitching and all the statistics and video clips are archived away for follow-up.

Note: ClickPitch doesn’t exist. I offer the idea out to the interwebs in the event that someone wants to run with parts of the idea. Meanwhile that boy in Japan is anxiously waiting for the opportunity to pitch to David Wright at a future MLB All-Star game.

startup flocks?

internet, startups View Comments

Mar 172011

I recently posted about on demand application development – the upcoming disintermediation of many of the current layers that stand in between idea and production. After reading this post from Fred Wilson, I’m thinking my post may have been short-sighted. The democratization of app development is one thing, but maybe an entire new class of business model is about to emerge.

Groups often form temporarily to get things done. Community-improvement type initiatives, school projects, support groups. In nature too – birds joining a flock, fish in a school. Not so much in the business world, at least not at the corporate level. Yet.

Entire verticals are moving away from models of scarcity. Media and news are the easy examples – the web and friends destroyed the old models in which content creation, production, marketing and distribution were scarce, centrally-controlled entities. That was low hanging fruit, ripe for disruption. Where do we go next?

In Fred’s post, he talks about how Pair Up enables startup founders to come together. That got me thinking – what about the rest of the startup? Startups, at least software based ones, have already been disrupted by the web paradigm – e.g. today’s tiny startups on shoestring budges.

What if we go a step further – a business and operational model that is constructed as transient from the start – groups of people hyperfocused on a specific and bounded mission. Startups sometimes start similar to this today but they often evolve into less disruptive orgs – they turn into companies – partially because that was the vision at conception. But companies are not as necessary or beneficial when we move away from models of scarcity. How would a business model evolve differently if the vision was not to turn into a company?

A new model could be to plan from the start to assemble a flock that will build a product or service and then disband. The members then join new flocks. Startups, models and software would emerge to take care of the operational and support layers (which often isn’t the strength or desire of the original flock anyways). Startups and solutions that build the business model wrapper around on-demand, crowdsourced, peer-produced app development.

Part of the new world is you don’t always need a company to do what you used to need a company to do. I’d argue the company gets in the way in some cases. Inefficiencies like this are opportunities for disruption, perhaps at the overall business model level.

crowdsourced application development

applications, internet, mobile, startups View Comments

Mar 102011

You want an app and it isn’t in Apple’s App Store or Android’s Market? Order it and get your order fulfilled by a team of people that forms to respond to your order. Better yet, be a part of that team.

We’ll be at a couple billion smartphones with broadband Internet access within a few years. That will fuel an incredible demand for apps. An on-demand, crowdsourced type model of app development will evolve over time to respond to that market.

I want a custom app so I float a description, mock-up or prototype across the internets and build a specification with the feedback. My app spec then goes into a queue of sorts with 50 customer names behind it. Or maybe 5000. Folks that want to help develop it – design, architecture, programming, testing, documentation, support, GTM…any part of the life-cycle – can then form a team to build it (and as the “requester”, I may also be a part of that – a dev, a tester, etc. – the traditional boundaries between product type folks and dev type folks start to go away). The traditional product or dev cycle becomes more open, peer-produced and crowdsourced.

From another perspective, I’m a pure application developer. I review a queue of requests (ideas) that are looking for a dev to join the team and hand-pick the ones I want to develop – the ones I care about the most, the people I want to work with. I have at least one customer that has expressed interest, maybe 5000, so I also have some requirements, a pilot user group, a feedback loop, a QA group and people to market the app if I get it right.Inefficient layers between idea and execution are eliminated.

Product shops will be disrupted, at least the weak ones. We don’t usually know what we want, and we tend to extend our current world, rather than leap into new ones, so the truly innovative, game-changing, reality-distorting product shops will still thrive – e.g. Apple, Amazon, Netflix etc. It is the shops that build the other 99% of software-based products that will be disrupted.

We need software in the middle to make this really tick. An eBay, Amazon, oDesk, Elance type layer to manage the queue and transactions, provide reputation and recommendations, manage signal to noise, etc. Probably done by a start-up. Similarly, start-ups will evolve to take care of the business, operational and support models.

Most of the rest of the ingredients are coming together: high velocity software dev enviros, third party components, libraries and platforms, open source, market of billions, ability of people to virtually work together across the world, ability to market and distribute without enormous budgets, cloud computing and storage, etc.

The software product industry is going to be disrupted by this type of disintermediation, democratization, unbundling and crowdsourcing that we’ve seen in media, entertainment and news.

Facebook is dead. Long live Facebook.

internet, startups View Comments

Jan 172011

The inflection point at which large companies start to flat line is very close in time to the point where their revenue goals drive their roadmaps more than their users drive their roadmaps. Facebook is there.

FB is now a huge company. To grow even small percentages annually will require massive absolute growth. For FB, massive growth means mainly enabling more third parties to have better and deeper ways to monetize more Facebook users. That grows revenue but won’t always provide more value to Facebook users.

When talented FB engineers work on a revenue-driven initiative, what’s the opportunity cost? Many features that provide users with great value don’t start that way – they iterate. If the grandfather of feature x isn’t released now then the killer feature grandson will be birthed elsewhere.
When FB makes changes or adds feature for revenue, how many of those will annoy me from user perspective? How muddy does the FB water become over time? We’ve seen FB do this already but so far they’ve survived each storm of user protest – but very few, no matter how strong, can weather too many of these storms.
How many times will dirty words like self-cannibalization and competing interests enter design discussions where they don’t belong? Big companies like Amazon have brilliantly avoided this for the most part – but that will be harder for FB with their revenue reliance on third parties and advertising.
On a micro-level, would FB have done an Instagram two years ago? On a macro level, should FB have a mobile platform that’s in the ballpark with Android and iOS?
How many things would FB have done without a second thought as a small startup that they wouldn’t be willing to do as a large company with more hierarchy, bureaucracy and legal considerations?

FB won our social graph by being the best for basic online communication, social discovery and media sharing. FB hit those use cases within a simple, powerful, engaging, interactive, social user experience. Not easy and FB crushed it, and as a result now own our social graph. But the world changes:

How many good choices are there now for those use cases? How many of them are in your pocket on your phone?
How much of what used to be done on Facebook is now done on Twitter, Instagram and mobile IM? How much will be done on GroupMe, Beluga and The Next Big Thing?
How different is what you would have done on Facebook four years ago to what you’d do now with the amount of eyeballs and APIs exposing that data to third parties? How will FB competitors take advantage of that?

Facebook does own our social graph, but even that is under pressure as we really have social graphs, plural, and will demand control of each. FB could potentially innovate in key adjacent areas such as mobile, virtual goods, gaming, analytics and location. They obviously have very talented employees, good processes and an excellent foundation. They should have some funds to buy external innovation. But I think Facebook – the original Facebook juggernaut – is dead. If Facebook is to survive, they’ll evolve to a different company than the one we know today. Not many big companies pull that off.

Disclaimer: I pronounced Facebook dead a few years ago too, and being wrong then was one reason why my startup failed (more startup learnings here), so maybe I should move on to being wrong about something new.

lessons for entrepreneurs

startups View Comments

Jan 052011

My learnings are unfortunately from a failed startup, LocalReplay, but you learn more after you fail (while you are failing, you are still seeing the world the way you want to see it).

Lesson #1: you don’t learn anything that your customers don’t teach you
Go live and iterate. Rapidly. Now. Eliminate long development cycles – you’re not learning while you are in a long dev cycle. If you are not learning, you are going backwards. Iterate rapidly, quickly analyze customer usage, measure, subtract, add, measure, build. Quickly – your analytical and predictive capabilities are not as good as you think – more important to move as only by moving will you really find the path.

Our successes at LocalReplay came when we made changes based on user feedback (direct and observed), but we were doing too much analyzing and not enough iterating, so we were moving too slowly.

This doesn’t mean only build what customers ask for – they don’t know the future and think of extensions more than disruptions – build your dream, build your disruption, but do it in small, quick, measurable steps. Update: came across this great graph from Ash Maurya which demonstrates this well:

Amazon, from the outside, seems to do this very well.

Lesson #2, “system functionality” is an oxymoron; UX is everything
At LocalReplay, we too often prioritized functionality over usability. System functionality doesn’t mean anything – users define actual functionality – what they perceive, how they use the system, how they don’t use it. Put expertise, time and dollars into UX. It is a science. It is an art. It is absolutely critical, especially in today’s ADD society with our low signal to noise ratios. It is there but users haven’t started to use it yet? Then it isn’t there and doesn’t matter.

Many Google products are good examples of hyperfocus on usability – consider the simplicity of Google’s search page compared to Yahoo’s – and that was before the overwhelming noise of today’s web.

Lesson 3, KISS, hyperfocus, don’t get distracted
We had a KISS strategy – we’d succeed in one type of community in one local market – and then expand. But we didn’t stick to it – we had some growth in other areas and lost focus on our initial set of simple goals. We started building cities before we really nailed the first building. Ironically, our belief was that the big social networks – mainly Facebook – were too big and too horizontal and more focused startups could provide users with more value in specific verticals. And yet we didn’t KISS – we immediately made our world more complex than it needed to be. Hyperfocus is an advantage of being startup, one of the few you’ll have, don’t let it escape.

Lesson #4, forget about going viral
Lots of things can succeed if they go viral. The fact that your plan works if you can get network effect doesn’t mean much. Learning how to succeed on a smaller scale is invaluable and you won’t do it if your plan is built on going viral, including goals, cost management and design decisions.

Lesson #5, move to plan B based on pre-set criteria
We had a plan B, multiple plan Bs, but never pulled the trigger. You are partially blind when doing a startup so you may see a red flag as a small bump in the road (or rationalize it that way). You’ll make changes to deal with the bumps, but will stay on that street. You need to establish some pre-set markers to force you to get off that street when it is necessary. You don’t need to abandon the course – you may well come back to it – and you may still get to the same destination. Twitter may be the best current example. I don’t know their evolution track, but I know their initial plans were nothing like what evolved.

Lesson #6, go with your gut
Not enough information to make the decision? Welcome to start-ups. Keep moving – don’t use too many cycles for individual decisions. You’ll make lots of good decisions and many bad decisions but the sum of your decisions will be positive as long as you keep moving and keep learning.

meet you at Starbucks in 10 minutes, any Starbucks

startups, telepresence, video calling, video conferencing View Comments

Dec 032010

Meet your friend for coffee in 10 minutes, no matter the distance between your cities. Your friend appears on the screen in front of you as if he was across the table from you. Check-in (Foursquare, Google, Facebook, Gowalla etc.) to your local Starbucks and instead of just seeing the two people physically at your location, see any of your friends from around the world that are checked in to their local Starbucks, a telepresence call from virtually joining you for coffee.

You’ll eventually do this from your PC or mobile, from anywhere. However, mainstream consumer video calling will be closer to phone calls than to face-to-face conversations until we get better end-to-end IP (especially for mobile), improved cameras, more processing power on the consumer PC or mobile device and a better, easier overall user experience. In the meantime, get it at your local Starbucks.

This type of face-to-face, distance independent interaction telepresence quality exists today within heavily engineered public telepresence rooms and private enterprises. The public telepresence rooms are great for large corporate meetings – hundreds of dollars per hour – boardroom type environment. But we need a Starbucks type solution for the individuals that want the telepresence experience now, and in a much more social, ad-hoc way.

Of course, doesn’t just have to be Starbucks. This is an opportunity for startups to build businesses from scratch around telepresence integrations, as well as service providers to virtually join the various islands such that I can easily and seamlessly call you, regardless of which type of telepresence location you are at.