Space matters (Facebook certainly thinks so) November 2, 2009
Posted by Simeon Simeonov in startups.Tags: architecture, productivity, space, startups
8 comments
I visited Facebook’s new space a few months ago. VPE Mike Schroepfer gave me the tour. I did like it a lot, although I found a few of the areas quite dark. Maybe it was the jet lag. See the link below for an awesome visual tour.
SU – Facebook Headquarters by Studio O+A & CONTEMPORIST
Space can have a profound effect of culture, communication and productivity. Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs don’t think (or perhaps know how to think) about this enough. Make it a priority. It doesn’t have to be expensive to be good.
Yes, your startup won’t have as much money to invest in its space but that doesn’t mean you can’t create a really cool environment. Agile methodologies have helped spread the concept of more open office spaces. With less to spend on buildouts and partitioning systems there is more to spend on making the space project the energy and culture you want your company to have.
You’ll find two great examples of good spaces that didn’t cost that much in Boston at Allurent in Cambridge (which also houses Polaris’s Dogpatch Labs) and Visible Measures in Boston.
Who else’s space do you really like?
A new spin on pitching and fundraising September 20, 2009
Posted by Simeon Simeonov in VC, Venture Capital, startups.Tags: angel financing, funding, fundraising, MIT Emerging Technologies Conference, MIT EmTech, pitching, seed financing, VC
5 comments
Every conference having anything to do with entrepreneurship and venture capital has the obligatory “pitching & fundraising” panel. I’ve been on enough of them to have a sense of how disappointing they can be for the audience. Experienced folks hear the same old cliches with a slight twist based on the current environment. Newbies find what they hear random and mostly inapplicable to their attempts to raise money. So it may be a little surprising that when the organizers of the MIT Emerging Technologies Conference asked me to moderate just that type of panel I was excited to do it. The reason is that we’ll try to talk about pitching and fundraising in a different way. This post explains how and why.
First the details.
- The event: Tue-Thu next week (September 22-24) @ MIT. This is part of the Lab to Market workshop.
- The time: Tue @ 3:45pm at the Kresge Auditorium
- The panelists:
- Bill Aulet, serial entrepreneur who’s run an Inc 500 company now at MIT
- David Frankel, entrepreneur and super-angel now at Founder Collective, a new seed fund in Boston
- Jeff Glass, former CEO of m-Qube now at Bain Capital
- Rich Levandov, co-founder of Phoenix Technologies now at Avalon Ventures
- The details: follow @simeons and you’ll know
The secret to why we’ll do things differently lies in data. I asked the conference organizers to survey the audience about the types of financing they were interested in.
- A whopping 55% want to know about very early stage, non-VC financing (bootstrapping, customer-financing, pre-seed, seed, angel)
- Only 18% (1/3) were interested in early stage financing from traditional VCs (top-tier and smaller funds)
- 10% are looking to Uncle Sam for money
- The rest want to know about follow-on financings and M&A
At previous events, when I’ve asked about the split between VC and non-VC early stage financing the interest has been about evenly split. Here it’s 1 : 3. Is it just the MIT audience? I doubt it. More likely, the change is due to a big shift in the nature of startup creation as a result of the drop in the cost of building and distributing high-tech products and services. This is especially true of Web and cloud-based businesses but is also affecting life sciences and cleantech. (For more on that, stop by the panel I’m doing on cloud computing on Tuesday, the MTLC Innovation unConference on October 1st and by the Democratization of Innovation conversation Ray Kurzweil and I will have at the MIT Enterprise Forum on October 14.)
It’s a good time to have a conversation about what’s the right funding path for companies and the value-add of various investor types. The dialog has been heating up. The NVCA recently made some outlandish claims about the economic impact of VCs. TechCrunch responded with a guest post from Vivek Wadhwa. The summary is “when things go well, VCs take too much credit.” My two cents are that if VCs are guilty of claiming or receiving too much credit when things go well, they certainly get too much blame when things go poorly. And I certainly think it’s foolish to only blame VCs for investing too much money in companies. It takes two to tango. In the background there is the “the venture capital industry is broken” refrain delivered by groups with alternative investment models and Bill Gurley’s data-driven commentary (the strong will get stronger, the weak will find something else to do). All in all, a great setup for a no holds barred discussion about fundraising.
I recruited the panelists with the audience’s interests in mind. They have all been successful entrepreneurs. They all are or have been investors and they all know early stage well.
Come armed with hard questions and help make this a great event.
Joining the MIT E-Center September 20, 2009
Posted by Simeon Simeonov in FastIgnite.Tags: Bill Aulet, EIR, entrepreneur in residence, MIT, MIT E-Center, MIT Sloan
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I’m excited to join the Entrepreneurs in Residence at the MIT E-Center. It’s a new structure for fostering innovation and venture creation pushed forth by Bill Aulet who runs the center now. I’m fortunate to be doing this with great group of entrepreneurs including:
- Susan Whoriskey (Cubist Pharmaceuticals, Momenta Pharmaceuticals, Whoriskey Associates)
- Jean Hammond (AXON Networks, Quarry Technologies, Spider Systems, ZipCar, HubAngels)
- Brian Halligan & Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot)
- Roger Freeman (Solventera Energy)
Having been involved with MIT for years in various ways, I look forward to more regular contact and engagement.
More cloud computing September 15, 2009
Posted by Simeon Simeonov in cloud computing.2 comments
I am doing another cloud computing event next week, this time moderating a panel at a MassNetComms event titled “Cloud Computing – Beyond the Hype – A Discussion on the Real Benefits and Issues.” There is a great speaker line-up:
- John Considine, CTO, CloudSwitch
Cloudswitch is about helping enterprises get into cloud computing on their own terms. This is a hot area of innovation. Even Amazon got in the game with their Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). - David Skok, General Partner, Matrix Partners
David invested in CloudSwitch and has spent a lot of time looking at various investment opportunities in cloud computing and related spaces, trying to separate hype from reality. - Omer Trajman, Senior Director for Cloud and Virtualization, Vertica Systems
I’ve known Omer for many years. He is a sharp technologist, always aiming to tackle the next big problem. He is also not at a cloud computing company per se and will bring the valuable perspective of a vendor looking to the cloud for their own benefit and for the benefit of its customers. - Michael Werner, Senior Platform Strategy Advisor for Microsoft’s developer and cloud-services technologies, Microsoft
Mike wins the award for the longest title of any panelist I’ve had the pleasure of working with over the years. Beyond that, he’s someone who’s deeply versed in technology distribution and adoption by developers and companies and will have an interesting perspective on when and how cloud computing will become broadly deployed.
I hope to see you there. Bring your enthusiasm, skepticism, ideas and questions.
Twitter gets in the privacy game August 25, 2009
Posted by Simeon Simeonov in Advertising, Twitter.Tags: Advertising, bahavioral advertising, FTC, OBA, privacy, Twitter
1 comment so far
TechCrunch saw Twitter re-writing all links to point to their site. Great idea as it gives them wonderful data. Potentially bad idea from a privacy standpoint if they do anything more than count how many times a link is clicked. If the link is to a URL shortening service, they’d get a lot more data by looking at what the link redirects to. The problem is that the end URLs can be parameterized in any number of ways, including with information that can be considered personally identifiable by the latest thinking from industry associations and the FTC (per David Vladeck’s recent interview).
Q: The marketers make a distinction between personally identifiable and non-personally identifiable information, that they’re only collecting anonymized information.
A: Well, but we saw what happened. There’ve been all sorts of disclosures with allegedly anonymous data. The problem is that it’s like a mosaic. If you have the information released and you can match it to other publicly available data about somebody, you can often put together a pretty complete picture. You know, I think were past that debate. At least, I think the F.T.C. is past that debate; whether the rest of the world has caught up with us, I don’t know. But we don’t find that a tenable distinction. And if you look at our online behavioral advertising report we make this point, I think, pretty emphatically.
I recently went to the OMMA Behavioral conference in SF and talked to a number of chief privacy officers about problems at the intersection of data collection, advertising and privacy. The bottom line was that many companies unknowingly make false claims to consumers and violate laws and self-governing principles. One of the stories I heard was the epitome of how easy it is to get into trouble. It had to do with an SEO change made to a publisher’s site resulting in personally identifiable information going to an ad targeting company. Previously, the targeting company had been collecting some basic URL info from the publisher. The SEO change moved potentially sensitive data from query strings into the path of URLs. The SEO team had no idea of the impact of their change–they didn’t even know about the data sharing deal. There was no notice to consumers or the targeting company. The ad targeting company discovered this after the fact (and after both they and the publisher had significant liability exposure).
I’d love for Twitter to collect and make use of more information about how people use the service. As volumes increase, they need more meta-data to create a better service. However, I hope they have experienced advisors on the privacy side, e.g., folks like Dan Jaye who co-wrote the P3P spec and later did TACODA.
The great terrible CraigsList August 25, 2009
Posted by Simeon Simeonov in startups.Tags: CraigsList, doing more with less, startups, Y Combinator
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Lots of press recently about CraigsList given Y Combinator’s call to entrepreneurs last year to find a way to create a more for-profit version. The call was repeated again this year. Lots of analysis followed with plenty of opinions about what’s good and bad about CraigsList. Bottom line is that the site works and it works well despite all its warts. The business should be an inspiration to entrepreneurs everywhere about how to do more with less and how to win through simplicity. Fred Wilson has a good summary post of that.