It wouldn’t have occurred to me to write about how to make introductions, but I’m surprised at how many people get it wrong. The most common error is making a connection between two people when at least one of them doesn’t actually want to be connected.
VC’s tend to receive a lot of…
Observed: 5/5 TechCrunch 2011 Crunchies Nominees for Best Shopping Application (i.e. E-Commerce) Startups are located in NYC. Conclusion? Industry specialization now matters more than just technology and New York will continue to grow as a “technology” hub.
I think I should get one of these blown up and framed for my office.
I just did something quite ordinary…checked some football scores on my ESPN app on my iPhone. Just a normal day here in 2011. Then briefly my mind flashed back to 2006 and ESPN MVP, which if you don’t remember was ESPN’s failed MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator - business that leases network access from someone such as Sprint who owns it).
Laptop Magazine called ESPN MVP on the Sanyo MVP “a touchdown, a game-winning shot, and any other victory-celebrating sports cliche you can conjure…its innovative interface will surely be imitated by many handset makers.”
Surely.
Think of how far the world has come in just five years? Want to develop an app in 2006? Phones were so heterogenous and data plans were so rare, ESPN had to launch their own cell phone network to get their app to actually work reliably on customers mobile phones. Talk about boiling the ocean! Wow. Not only were phones totally non-standard and nearly impossible to develop across (unless you were JAMDAT whose entire business was basically SKU’ing up a game for every phone) but also the carriers restricted innovation via their “walled gardens” which Verizon treated like an iron curtain.
But no, today, I didn’t need to ditch AT&T just to see some scores. I simply tapped on the shiny ESPN logo on my iPhone.
What’s the lesson in all this and how does this tie back to startups and VC? Timing and platforms. It’s important to get them right and understand the climate and ecosystem that need to exist for your startup to thrive. MVNOs such as ESPN MVP spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to do what today would be trivial. There is such thing as being too far ahead of the curve.
Be conscientious. Are you developing a platform or developing on a platform and is that platform ready for primetime? Don’t get caught in the middle.
Focus is critical. Whether you are at a startup or a large multinational corporation, the ability to focus helps both the good and bad become easier to spot. Particularly with any company and especially any startup that ships hardware, having a common platform and few product lines radically simplifies engineering but also gives a huge boost to sales and marketing efforts. In my time in marketing at Drobo we took advantage of this. Sure we have a few different product lines but they are all really the same thing differ according to interface and number of drives supported—but the core technology is the same across all platforms. That enabled us to market and champion essentially all our products at once. How can Samsung for instance hope to achieve any scale, efficiency or efficacy in their marketing budgets which are spread out across so many products?
As an aside, one of my favorite courses in business school was the “Marketing Strategy” course which uses a multiplayer computer game to simulate running many product lines. It really helped reinforce the lessons of focus and “knowing your target customer” (ie making a product for a very specific customer and not trying to straddle multiple targets) I had experienced firsthand. Spread too thin and somebody more focused and specialized will beat you.
Thanks to the talented John LeBaron at Cisco for originally sharing this link with me.
I was at the “Raise Cache” fashion show to benefit HackNY last night at the armory on Lexington. A few things occurred to me:
That’s when it really hit me. No, not that “New York has made it.” That already happened at least in the eyes of most industry and media observers twelve months ago. What really struck me is that New York has its own scene now.
For background, I’ve worked in startups and VC in New York, Silicon Valley and Chicago. I’ve gotten a pretty good sense over the past decade what each is like, but up until a couple months ago I hadn’t lived in NYC in a while. For the past four years I took a little sojourn and spent a couple years at a startup in the Valley and a couple getting an MBA and working in VC in Chicago.
Unlike five or so years ago, New York now feels both extraordinarily vibrant and authentic. The event itself was a fashion show. It was young and full of 21-35 year old urbanites. The companies in attendance were authentically New York representing many of the industries headquartered in New York including fashion (Birchbox, BaubleBar, Bonobos, RentTheRunway, Gilt, etc.), advertising (SailThru, OnSwipe, etc.) and media (Thrillist, Business Insider, Tumblr, TurnTable.fm, etc.). On top of that, New York now has its own set of homegrown heros to look up to. The folks coming down the catwalk and seated around it in the VIP chairs, from Fred Wilson of USV to David Tisch of TechStars NYC to Carter Cleveland of Art.sy, create a sense of community and shared identity that really brings people together in our already dense urban jungle and makes things tick.
My point is not that last night’s event couldn’t have physically happened in the Bay Area. Of course you could find hundreds of folks in SF to get together to celebrate tech, but it would have been different. Different is neither good nor bad. Different is New York not trying to be “a mini-Silicon Valley” (something we are often accused of) which we would surely fail at. New York now has its own tech thing going on. I think this means NY will evolve on a completely different and new trajectory from the Valley. The rules and specific ingredients required for the Valley’s growth and the characteristics those produced do not need to be replicated in NY. Just like Facebook did not follow HP’s path from garage to IPO, New York doesn’t need to follow the Valley’s path from fruit orchards to tech Mecca.
The New York Tech Scene has not only arrived, but it is different and it is defining its own trajectory. It is characteristically and unabashedly New York.
When I see a startup’s logo I size it up. It often makes the first impression. Hokey? Terrible? Awesome? Do these guys get it? Do they understand how important design and customer-centric thinking has become today? Are they the sort of entrepreneurs I will get along with, that I will want to sit across the table from?
I spend more of my time meeting with enterprise, SMB and financial services startups than pure-play consumer, but these sensibilities are still important in my mind at least.
The problem is that they are not important 100% of the time. In some businesses you can over-think UI and UX. But I still analyze the logo. These days I do it consciously and try to handicap how much weight I put on the logo by the type of business I am looking at. I try to always account for stage too. If a team is in alpha or beta, they obviously get more slack.
But then there’s the question of what to do with, what to think of Twitter’s original logo. Even for an early stage company that thing was bad. (Note: If the first words that pop into someone’s head upon seeing your logo are “sinus infection” this is not good.)
In the end here’s where I come out, logos are first impressions; it is just better to get them right. Get them wrong and you just have to dig yourself out of a hole whether you like or not. It’s a small hole but a hole nonetheless.
