Better Advertising backs self-regulation December 7, 2009
Posted by Simeon Simeonov in Advertising, FastIgnite, startups.Tags: Better Advertising, online behavioral advertising, privacy, self-regulation
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Better Advertising has a new web site. Check it out.
Also, our corporate blog is up. The current post outlines the three pillars of behavioral targeting self-regulation:
- Education, to empower consumers
- Transparency, to make clear who is doing what to whom
- Verification, to make sure everyone is doing what they said they were going to do
It’s pretty simple stuff , except that it needs to happen billions of times per day in a privacy-safe manner without slowing down browsing and ad serving.
It’s the kind of problem that brings together people who like tough nuts to track. The Better Advertising team brings a lot of experience to bear from About.com, AOL, Carat, DoubleClick, Etsy, Federal Trade Comission, Google, Isobar, Macromedia, Right Media, TACODA, ThomsonReuters, TrustE and Yahoo.
Exploring privacy December 5, 2009
Posted by Simeon Simeonov in Advertising.Tags: Better Advertising, FTC, online advertising, privacy
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The title of this post is also the title of the first of three public roundtable discussions by the FTC focused on privacy online.
The Federal Trade Commission will host a series of day-long public roundtable discussions to explore the privacy challenges posed by the vast array of 21st century technology and business practices that collect and use consumer data. Such practices include social networking, cloud computing, online behavioral advertising, mobile marketing, and the collection and use of information by retailers, data brokers, third-party applications, and other diverse businesses. The goal of the roundtables is to determine how best to protect consumer privacy while supporting beneficial uses of the information and technological innovation.
The first roundtable is on Monday in DC. The Better Advertising team will be there.
We believe that it is an opportune time for the online advertising industry to work with privacy groups and regulators to improve the mechanisms for engaging consumers and doing so in a transparent and trustworthy manner. It is our mission to facilitate this.
Dave Morgan knows this space well. He is CEO of Simulmedia and previously founded and ran TACODA (where I first met him) and Real Media. Dave has a piece in MediaPost that is a good ouline of some of the key issues. I recommend it.
Competing for competition’s sake November 28, 2009
Posted by Simeon Simeonov in startups.Tags: business plan competition, entrepreneurship, MIT 100K, startups, TechCrunch, Vivek Wadhwa
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I don’t agree with Vivek Wadhwa that losing a business plan competition is better than winning it. However, I do think that business plan competitions force many teams to aim for the wrong target. Here is the comment I left on the TechCrunch post:
I’ve judged the MIT 100K for many years and am currently an EIR at the MIT E-Center. The biggest problem with business plan competitions is that they skew incentives. An entrepreneur’s incentive should be to build a winning business, not win a business competition. Conversely, good business plan competitions should aim to help build great companies.
The benefit of business plan competitions is that they pace a team and force it to deliver on a schedule. Many teams benefit from that process and from the feedback they receive along the way.
The biggest problem I’ve experienced as a judge is that there is no diligence process. Judges are supposed to pick winners based on the claims of the entrepreneurs alone (and a bit of face-to-face time). Without diligence, the teams have an incentive to exaggerate as there is no penalty for slight exaggeration. Judges can only react to gross exaggerations. Teams that are in touch with reality, customers and that understand the challenges involved in building successful businesses have a higher likelihood of being subtly penalized during judging when reviewed alongside folks more likely to over-promise. No, it’s not easy for judges to correct for this.
The solution is to introduce diligence as an integral part of business plan competitions. The suggestion I made to the 100K was to organize a diligence team that runs alongside teams participating in the competition. The goal of the diligence team is not to poke holes at the entrepreneurs’ dreams. It is to make the teams and the companies they want to build stronger and more likely to survive in the real world. And, yes, in the end, hopefully more deserving companies would win and there will be a higher correlation over time between companies that win and companies that succeed. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Alas, the student-organized MIT 100K competition is finding little interest inside the MIT and Sloan student bodies to participate in the diligence process.
In the end, it is the entrepreneurs that lose.
Better Advertising Launches November 19, 2009
Posted by Simeon Simeonov in Advertising, FastIgnite.Tags: Better Advertising, FastIgnite, online behavioral advertising
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Exciting day today. Better Advertising just came out of stealth. I’m acting CTO & co-founder, much in the way we started Plinky/Thing Labs last year. In fact, I got to know Better Advertising CEO Scott Meyer though the Plinky diligence process.
It’s been very rewarding to work with the founding team and our advisors, especially because the company’s mission is to improve the relationship between consumers and advertisers online.
Without going into too many details at this point, here is what the company is about:
If you read this blog you are probably familiar with my views on targeted advertising. Better Advertising is not in the ad targeting space. Instead, it will facilitate visibility, transparently and accountability through the advertising ecosystem, allowing those players with respectable business practices to operate at scale.
Speaking at Cloud3 Forum November 17, 2009
Posted by Simeon Simeonov in cloud computing.Tags: cloud computing, xconomy
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I will be leading an unPanel (like unConference but smaller) at Xconomy’s Cloud3 Forum. Great lineup of speakers and the audience will be full of pundits (trust me, see the invite list) so the conversation is guaranteed to be both interesting and educational. This isn’t yet another “intro to cloud” or “cloud 101″. Expect a much deeper and more engaging and interactive forum. CloudCamp comes right after. Register here.
Personality test for entrepreneurs November 16, 2009
Posted by Simeon Simeonov in VC, Venture Capital, startups.Tags: financing, personality test, Series A, startups, Venture Capital
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I’ve had several interesting conversation following the article on negotiating a better series A deal. Entrepreneurs write and ask for advice on a specific situation. Unfortunately, it’s really hard to give specific advice in these cases without a fair amount of additional information. There are too many variables and a lot depends on the goals of the entrepreneur.
I wish there was a standard questionnaire, like one of those pop psych personality tests, that entrepreneurs can fill out to get the background information out. However, I’m not interested in whether someone wants to be an entrepreneur (they are rarely talking to me if they are not entrepreneurs already). I’m more interested in what they consider a success, what type of company they want to build, the impact they want to create, etc.
Here is some of what I’ve found.
Have you found a test you’ve liked? Have you seen a test that goes after what I’m interested in?
Which type of investor makes the best board member? November 16, 2009
Posted by Simeon Simeonov in VC, Venture Capital, startups.8 comments
A few days ago, WSJ’s startup & VC blog referred to an NVCA study where entrepreneurs complained about the lack of operational experience in some VC board members.
I’ve been an entrepreneur as well as a VC. The biggest travesty that VC firms can visit on a portfolio company is putting an inexperienced representative onto its board. Too many VCs have no real operating experience (sorry, having been a I-banker or recruiter does not count as experience).
I think this is an overly simplistic way of looking at things. Here is a quick test. Which one would you choose as your VC board member for your pre-product Series A startup:
- A really experienced former CEO who can’t get used to being a board member and thinks he can run the company better than you
- An really experienced former head of sales who has scaled companies from $10M on several times but who has never been in a pre-product startup
- A former lawyer or banker or accountant who’s had more than a decade of experience as a VC and a fantastic early stage investment record.
Not sure about you but, assuming the personalities work out well, I’d go with the VC w/o operating experience any day of the week. In fact, my first startup, Allaire, went exactly this way.
Two take-aways:
- Comparing between board members is very, very hard. Especially if you don’t have competing offers to compare. Do not underestimate the impact that your investor board member will have on your life. First and foremost, talk to good people with good track records. Do not get tempted by the cash. I know this is very hard to say in the abstract but it is true. Go talk to CEOs of companies who’ve had a serious falling out with their investor board members. Listen closely to what they tell you.
- There is no simple rule of thumb for comparing between investor board members. The key is to understand what you are comparing. You are not looking for a CEO or an exec. You are looking for one board member who’s part of a larger board. Boards are about strategy, governance, fundraising, exits and supporting the CEO. They should not be a crutch for your team, unless this is by design, e.g., with an executive board member.
from Start-Up CEOs Gripe About VCs’ Lack Of Operating Experience – Venture Capital Dispatch – WSJ.
Mobile advertising got more (less?) competitive November 9, 2009
Posted by Simeon Simeonov in Advertising, Google, Industry News, Mobile.Tags: AdMob, Google, mobile advertising, Nexage, Omar Hamoui
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Google just nabbed AdMob for a handy $750M. Congrats to AdMob founder Omar Hamoui who got into the space early and executed very aggressively. More details on the acqusition here.
The background story here is of the explosion in mobile browsing and mobile applications driven by the iPhone. That s what fueled a lot of AdMob s growth in the past 18mos. I was at a dinner with Omar about a year ago. He had the numbers in his sights and predicted growth will accelerate.
This is mixed news for the other players in mobile advertising. The gap between the largest player and the next one down just got much, much bigger. Key takeaways:
- Google s reach with advertisers and their targeting technology are likely to improve the performance of the AdMob network measurably. It s difficult to see how others can compete meaningfully on scale.
- Startups main advantage is technical innovation and business agility. Both should be severely discounted in mobile where, in addition to the device & network fragmentation, operators and app store owners exert a significant degree of control which, often as an unintended consequence, slows the pace of innovation.
- There is an opportunity to shift competitive advantage from volume to quality as Quattro has done but that s a tough business to scale even in a growing market. In the end, the biggest risk here is that large players such as Google can always buy your customers with guaranteed minimums.
It s time for mobile publishers to take more control over their inventory by looking at players such as Nexage.
