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- How Great Entrepreneurs Create Their Own Luck
- Book Excerpt: Bruce Perry’s Fitness For Geeks
- Interview: John Robb
- Facebook’s Patent Acquisitions? They’re More About Google Than Yahoo
- Tumblr President John Maloney Steps Down, Promises “Awesome New Stuff”
- Spanning Stats Has Scanned 25,000+ Google Drives
- The Winklevoss Twins Are Now VCs: “We Think The Cloud Is Going To Be Huge”
- Misfit Wearables, The Startup From Agamatrix’s Founders, Former Apple CEO John Sculley, Raises $7.6M
- A Run Down Of The Mobile Startups At MLove, Monterey
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| How Great Entrepreneurs Create Their Own Luck Posted: 28 Apr 2012 08:00 AM PDT  Editor's note: This post is authored by guest contributor Thor Muller, a New York Times best selling author. His latest book, “Get Lucky: How to Put Planned Serendipity to Work for You and Your Business” is available now. This is the story of how a young British fine artist accidentally became a materials scientist, founding a high-growth company that created a whole new product category. It's also a parable for how great entrepreneurs systematically create their own luck. Jane ni Dhulchaointigh is the founder and CEO of Sugru, a London-based startup that makes an amazing moldable adhesive for repairing any physical object. It's a cross between silly putty and duct tape, a space age rubber that can be molded into any desired shape by hand, and that sticks to a vast array of surfaces. With customers in over 100 countries, and all seven continents, Sugru has taken the world by storm. What we see in Jane's journey, so far from California's tech startup scene, is the same thing we see in virtually all startups that work: the ability to harness serendipity, the unplanned discoveries, large or small, that end up being the turning points in careers and businesses. Hard work, training and process may be the foundation of success, but serendipity is where the magic happens. And even though serendipity is by definition unpredictable, its appearance is anything but random. Jane's stunning rise is the result of her mastering what we call the skills of planned serendipity, a set of behaviors that have allowed her, over and over again, to generate the chance discoveries, recognize the good ones, and take action on those that matter most. Here's how it happened, and what we can learn from her breakout success. Start With A "Geek Brain" Jane originally studied to be a sculptor, an interest that had possessed her for years. She returned to school in 2003 to study commercial product design at the Royal College of Art. It seemed a prudent career move given the high demand for designers (and the lack of jobs for sculptors), but it was a switch that proved difficult. Her impulse was to follow her own interests over solving the narrowly defined product problems discussed in class. Before long, her background in sculpture combined with her insatiable curiosity led her to begin experimenting with new materials. Jane was equipped with one of the great advantages in cultivating serendipity, a geek brain–what we define as an obsessive curiosity in an area of interest and the ability to notice anomalies, overcoming the conventional wisdom that constrains others. The geek brain gave Jane distance from the rote conventions of design school, allowing her to connect ideas from across domains in unusual ways. Find Space to Play Having a mindset geared for recognizing unexpected ideas is rarely enough on its own—Jane needed an environment that allowed her to explore and put this geek brain to good use. The workshop at her college served this purpose well: I was destroying things and putting them back together: chipping blocks of wood apart and putting them back together with other materials…One experiment I did was combining silicone caulk with very fine wood dust from the workshop. From that combination I made these fancy wooden balls. I found it fascinating that you could make something that looked like wood but had other properties—if you threw them on the floor they'd bounce. Jane's early explorations with her strange rubbery material was driven by a fascination with the possibilities of what she could make, rather than any specific purpose to which it could be put. This is the hallmark of a true exploratory mode, as premature focus can kill good ideas before they ever emerge. Still, as her discovery started to take shape, she began to spend more and more time wondering what it might actually be good for. Be Opinionated Jane's boyfriend noticed that she had been using her funny rubber to repair or customize things around the house—enlarging a sink plug that was too small, or making a more ergonomic knife handle. It had been so natural for her to use the rubber in this way because she personally believed in the value of repairing her things rather than running out and buying a replacement. The instinct was so natural, in fact, that she hadn't even consciously registered what she was doing. It was only when her boyfriend drew her attention to it that she saw the opportunity in a flash. Jane had stumbled on a product idea that mapped perfectly to a deeply held conviction: she hated waste. She was fed up with it and knew she wasn't alone. "In the past, some people would have thought that repairing something is a compromise because you couldn't afford to buy it new again," Jane says. "But now there are increasing numbers of people who would rather repair or reuse than throw something out and needlessly buy something new because of the waste involved." Her insight was that this space-age rubber she'd invented could be an essential innovation in this cause. She saw the potential in her chance discovery only because she had an overriding purpose that gave her a unique perspective. "Every granny who finds it hard to open a jam jar can manipulate this material," she said. "Anyone who has a stiff part on their bike can adapt it to be whatever the bike needs." Project the Possibility The only problem was that the material didn't actually exist yet. The makeshift rubber Jane had been playing with had all kinds of problems: it didn't adhere to enough surfaces, it had a terribly short shelf-life, and it was too high maintenance to make a successful commercial product. This was the do-or-die moment. As an artist, there was every reason in the world to give up—she had no business thinking she could solve this incredibly technical problem. Instead, Jane pulled a Jujitsu serendipity move: employing only her faulty prototype and her storytelling skills, she projected her vision as broadly as she could, telling anyone who would listen about it. Early stage entrepreneurs like Jane don't always know what exact outcomes to expect, but they are willing to publicly put their ideas into the world, allowing them to connect with the as yet unknown people and opportunities that make their products possible. It worked. Attention followed from the strength of her vision, attracting local press mentions, a set of science advisors, and a grant from the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and Arts. Follow Unplanned Paths The grant wasn't huge, a mere £35,000, but it was enough to start testing materials—as long as Jane did the testing herself. To do that, she realized, she would have to do something that was not only unexpected, but would have seemed absurd a few months before: she'd have to diverge from her career path and be trained as a lab technician and set up her own laboratory. She wasn't waiting around to find a CTO who knew better. This former art student must learn to be a materials scientist. It took her two years of painstaking trial-and-error, but eventually she created a brand new, patented class of silicone that worked for her aims. Only Jane's immovable sense of purpose kept her going through month after month of laborious formulation and failure, long before her work would bear fruit. This is a recurring paradox of serendipity: stick-to-itness—the ability to stay committed to a purpose—is often the very thing that allows new paths to be recognized and taken. Design Openness into the Product and Company Initially there was tremendous pressure to fit the new product into a well-worn category that the traditional business world would understand. Then it struck Jane that she could create a brand designed to activate the creative spark in people. She could leave the product's purpose intentionally open—the tagline would become "Hack Things Better"—so that customers could use their own imagination. One of the first things she did after launching the product was create an online community for customers to share their ideas. Creating permeability at the edge of her company allowed new directions and opportunities to serendipitously emerge. As a result the company and its customers have developed a truly symbiotic relationship. That "perfect fit" Jane had been seeking for her unusual rubber years ago? Her customers are telling her what it is—or rather, all of the perfect fits they've found. Repairing computers, cables for laptop chargers, phones, and outdoor equipment have emerged as the leading uses for her one-of-a-kind product. Jane is finding the company being pulled by customers in directions she could never have imagined during those years of painstaking materials research, but in each case the path is perfectly aligned with the company's purpose. The Kind of Luck That Matters Entrepreneurs often cite "luck" as a key ingredient of success, yet this means far more than just being in the right time, right place. The luck that builds careers and companies is the kind that unfolds gradually, choice by choice, as people recognize and seize surprise opportunities, attracting others to them long before it's obvious that their business is the next big thing. These skills of planned serendipity are not vague, metaphysical concepts; they can be mastered by any of us, and can shape how we run our startups as they grow. We can learn how to make our businesses luckier. Image via [stock.xchng
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| Book Excerpt: Bruce Perry’s Fitness For Geeks Posted: 28 Apr 2012 06:45 AM PDT  This is an excerpt from Bruce Perry’s Fitness For Geeks, a blueprint for getting healthy in a connected world. In this section, he outlines the typical day for someone who wants to get healthy without gym memberships, expensive diet plans, and odd tactics. And Now for Something Completely Different It was a good sleep; you went to bed just after nine o'clock after having a snack consisting of coconut milk blended with blueberries and a little whey powder. You're already savvy about getting enough REM sleep, but now you aim to bump up your deep sleep, or restorative NREM. You might even check out the wave chart your Zeo produced. The first thing you do is pour a cup of black tea or coffee and go outside to this pool of sunlight you've noticed out your window. You bask and reflect in it for a minute, perhaps followed by a few Tai Chi moves, push-ups on the lawn, or pull-ups on the jungle gym across the street from your apartment. You sip a bit more coffee and return to your living space to get ready for the commute. Technically speaking, as you gazed up into the sky and basked in that sun, the light rays touched your retinas and were transduced by the hypothalamus and pineal gland in your brain, which has now helped set your circadian rhythms for the day. Mindfulness The sun you got wasn't much, not like spending the morning on the beach in the British Virgin Islands (gotta do that someday…), but it had the effect of lightening your mood, clearing your head, and kick-starting the day. You've sent the message to your body and your brain, "It's morning and I'm well rested and ready to go." Every other day you stop at an intervening fitness facility to lift a few weights or do a 300-yard swim interspersed with a handful of 25-yard sprints—nothing too much, but today you're biking to the train station, where they've thoughtfully included a place to lock your rig. The train ride into the center of the city (Boston, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, Montreal; Zurich, Frankfurt, Copenhagen, London, Sydney, Wellington, Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto…) takes 35 minutes, and you stand for most of it, just because it feels better. Geek Gear Gathering data is not useless when you act upon it. The tool for adding up your daily motion mileage works with an odd "tail wagging the dog" effect; you seem to move more when you're wearing it. Further, you never really knew that ordinary movement could equate to that much mileage during the day. More than six miles sometimes, even though your walks were broken up into several smallish ones. Plodding along on a treadmill just isn't necessary anymore. You love looking at the stats at the end of the day. Just keep moving, you say to yourself. Seek the sun. Hard-Boiled Eggs to Go You've got a little plastic bag in your backpack containing the rest of the salmon, a mixture of almonds and walnuts, an apple, and a square of 85% high-cacao chocolate. In a pinch, there's a good salad place near work. It only took a couple of weeks not to miss that bagel anymore, and especially all that crappy margarine (you go for really yellow butter now)—the sluggishness and lack of satiety it seemed to leave you with, and the way it seemed to take half the morning to digest it and the donut and scone you piled on top of it. Hopping off the train, you walk about 30 minutes the rest of the way to work, on the sunny side of the street, even though you could have dipped into the subway or hopped on a bus. Dude, Take the Stairs You take the stairs two at a time, simply because the heft in your upper leg feels good. Your heart rate gets going, but not that much; you've noticed that improvement over the months. OCD About Health About every hour or 90 minutes during the day, you head down those stairs again and back outside into the sun. When you get blocked on a sticky piece of code or logical problem, this brisk walk helps almost every time. Often, you experience casual moments outside that you always will remember and never would have experienced if you'd stayed in your cubicle all day, like that majestic hawk that hovered in the blue sky before it alighted on the ledge of a distant building. You tried to estimate its wingspan as it hung frozen in the cerulean blue. Hey, He Likes Me! You take longer walks sometimes in the city, until you find yourself drifting around with a relaxed aimlessness, kind of like Owen Wilson in the movie Midnight in Paris. You have the usual "meetings" (the quotation marks question their purposefulness) in the mid-morning and afternoon. You stand during both, and it seems to have a contagious effect. Two other people stood up during the second meeting, and you could have sworn both confabs went a little faster. You're beginning to get a rep as "that healthy guy" around the office. Knock Off Some Bench Presses Your workouts almost never exceed that length of time. When they do, horsing around would be a better way to describe them than workouts or training sessions: playing catch using a winged Nerf football with your son or a friend, or gliding along a country road on a mountain bike. It All Adds Up to Something Good The intent of the last assemblage of paragraphs wasn't to get all vainglorious and virtuous about healthy lifestyles—although it was fun to write—as much as to paint a narrative about surviving the Digital Age and emerging from your days mostly unscathed (maybe an occasional bruised ego, but it comes with the territory, right?). This chapter has introduced some basic fitness concepts that the rest of the book will cover in sometimes extensive detail: • Living in the Digital Age, where culture, data, and networks never sleep, but still incorporating the sun, lots of walking, and outdoor experiences— living closer to the imperatives of our preloaded software (our very deep past). • The benefits of whole, non-processed, real food—and even a bit of "intermittent" fasting every week. • The advantages of incorporating ordinary exercise regimes like stair climbing, lengthy, aimless walking (no matter how cold it is!), sprints, jumps, and hill-climbing extemporaneously, when you can. • Using useful tracking tools and personal metrics to augment your fitness, share your progress with friends, help others work through some physical glitches or sleep issues, or for just plain time-wasting fun (when you have that time, that is). • The importance of sleep and de-stressing; they could save your life. • The advantages of other lifestyle tactics like freezing swims, saunas, and fasting, not to mention moderate exercise and a good drink now and then. These are examples of "hormesis," or good stress (see Chapter 11). Unlike many faddish weight-loss and fitness schemes, the changes just described do not involve any expensive program or club fees, or drastic dietary changes (like "zero carb or fat"), except for the optional purchase of a few fun and useful gadgets or tools when you have a little extra change.
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| Posted: 28 Apr 2012 06:00 AM PDT  John Robb is an astronautical engineer turned US Air Force Special Operations pilot turned Forrester lead analyst turned startup CTO/COO turned military theorist and author, to oversimplify. His writing has heavily influenced my own (eg you’ll find his phrase “open source insurgency” several times in my novel Swarm.) He blogs at Global Guerrillas and edits Resilient Communities. Q: Your writing has focused on three themes: global guerrillas, resilient communities, and, more recently, drone disruption. Could you give the quick nutshell summaries of each of those?
Q: A common assumption among all three, it seems, is that increasing economic and technical connectivity will lead to increasing military/political instability, which in turn will reveal the fragility of our existing infrastructure. What would you say to those who argue that this is excessively apocalyptic, and that the West’s existing society and infrastructure are already plenty robust?
Q: Technology and creativity are becoming increasingly crowdsourced: not just open-source software, but also Kickstarter, Thingiverse, Ushahidi, etc. Do you view these as steps in the direction of resilient communities, or do you think something qualitatively different needs to be done to get there?
Q: Your writing deals extensively with “open-source insurgencies.” Can you give a couple of concrete example of those insurgencies, how they work, and how they’re enabled by modern technology?
Q: You believe drones, and in particular autonomous swarms of drones, will soon revolutionize warfare and military thought everywhere. How do you see this happening over the next ten years, and what milestones do you think will be reached along the way?
Q: What steps do you think nation-states will take to ensure that drone military power will remain their exclusive preserve? (I’m thinking of Cory Doctorow’s The Coming War On General-Purpose Computing.) Do you think they’ll ultimately succeed, or will that technology metastasize to insurgents (open-source or other) and other non-state groups? If so, what will the geopolitical effects be?
Image: DronesHawks swarming over Panama City, by yours truly.
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| Facebook’s Patent Acquisitions? They’re More About Google Than Yahoo Posted: 27 Apr 2012 10:00 PM PDT  Editor's Note: Leonid ("Lenny") Kravets is a patent attorney at Panitch, Schwarze, Belisario and Nadel, LLP in Philadelphia, PA. Lenny focuses his practice on patent prosecution and intellectual property transactions in computer-related technology areas. He specializes in developing IP strategy for young technology companies and blogs on this topic at StartupsIP. Follow Lenny on Twitter: @lkravets and @startupsIP. In the past few months, Facebook's patent portfolio has grown exponentially as a result of acquisitions of patent portfolios from IBM and Microsoft. After acquiring 650 AOL patents and patent applications from Microsoft, the company now has approximately 1,400 patent assets. Amazingly, only 46 of these assets (24 issued patents and 22 published applications) were originally filed by Facebook. In recent years, Facebook has consistently looked to the outside to augment its IP holdings with strategic acquisitions of patent assets. The company paid 40 million for the Friendster social networking patent portfolio, acquired a group of patents from Walker Digital, and another from Hewlett-Packard. These deals expanded the portfolio to approximately 160 patent assets prior to Yahoo's lawsuit being filed. After Facebook's IPO decision, and the subsequent patent suit by Yahoo, Facebook has kicked its patent acquisition program into overdrive. Many point to the Yahoo lawsuit as the reason for the Microsoft and IBM acquisitions. The the AOL portfolio could useful to Facebook in defending itself against Yahoo. However, now Yahoo is trying to have other patents Facebook bought after being sued by the web portal invalidated because Facebook purchased them specifically to use in a retaliatory counter-suit. In any case, it would have been significantly cheaper for Facebook to settle with Yahoo instead of taking this aggressive approach. So who is Facebook so worried about that it would spend so much on buying intellectual property? The types of patents being acquired tell part of the story. Facebook has emphasized acquiring older assets, which it could not have developed on its own. Facebook's oldest patent was filed in 2004, the same year the company was created. A typical patent application currently takes approximately 3-4 years to be issued. Developing a patent portfolio in the social networking space is challenging because the popularity of social networking companies has resulted in the space being littered with both patent and non-patent prior art. As a result, companies, such as Facebook, that initially largely ignored growing their IP portfolios, cannot rely on filing its own applications to develop a substantive IP portfolio. The IBM and AOL patent acquisitions give Facebook access to IP that is significantly older than Facebook's own IP. Older patents are subject to fewer prior art, making them more difficult to defend against. In addition, older patents provide leverage for the asserting party by allowing collection of up to six years of damages from the infringer. Such patents are therefore especially helpful in dealing with established parties having significant resources and sophisticated legal teams. The technology areas of the IBM and AOL patents are also telling. The patents Facebook acquired from IBM are rumored to be in the networking and software space. AOL's patents are largely directed to email, instant messaging, web browsing, search, ads, mobile, & ecommerce. Together, these are technology areas that Facebook likely never expected to find itself competing in when the company was first founded because it may not have realized that their product would evolve into the messaging/advertising/ecommerce platform that it is today. These are also technology areas that are core to Google, one of Facebook's biggest threats. In the past year, Google introduced Google+, a direct competitor and challenger to Facebook. While Google+ has only had moderate success to date, Facebook likely felt exposed against Google's significantly larger and ever-expanding patent portfolio. These patent acquisitions provide Facebook with some protection as the competition between the two companies heats up. In addition, the rumors of an Android-based Facebook phone have been revived, which could bring Facebook directly into the litigious mobile space, where Google is one of the main players. Interestingly, this is not the first time that Facebook and Microsoft have worked together with Google in mind. In October 2007, the two companies entered into an Internet advertising partnership. That deal was seen as a way for Microsoft to counter Google's Internet advertising position. It makes sense that the two companies would again collaborate to respond to a potential threat from Google. Thus, while the acquisitions may be helpful to Facebook in dealing with Yahoo, it is likely that these acquisitions have less to do with Yahoo than with Facebook's anticipation of future litigation. Specifically, Facebook appears to be preparing for increased competition with Google. It bears watching whether the companies will look to their patent acquisitions as part of this strategy. Of course, such protection has the added benefit of helping to increase Facebook's IPO value, making this decision a no-brainer for the company.
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| Tumblr President John Maloney Steps Down, Promises “Awesome New Stuff” Posted: 27 Apr 2012 06:14 PM PDT  Tumblr President John Maloney just posted (on his Tumblr, natch) that he’s stepping down from a day-to-day operational role at the company. “It's the right time for me and a good time for Tumblr,” Maloney writes. “We're in great hands with David and the excellent leadership team we've built.” However, he says he will stay involved in what sounds like an advisory role: “The transition from running ops is effective immediately, but I'm sticking close w/ [founder and CEO David Karp], the team and company. There's more work to do and I want to help see it thru”. Maloney became president of Tumblr in 2008, but his history with Karp goes back further — before starting Tumblr, Karp worked at Maloney’s startup UrbanBaby. Oh, and Maloney also says that “the team will ship some awesome new stuff next week.” He doesn’t say what that will be, but he could be referring to the new paid promotional units that Karp mentioned would launch on May 2. (Random note: A Tumblr spokesperson previously told me that it’s not an “ad unit per se” but rather “a package of native promotion for the Tumblr post.”)
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| Spanning Stats Has Scanned 25,000+ Google Drives Posted: 27 Apr 2012 04:52 PM PDT  Spanning, which already offers a backup service for Google Apps, is now riding the coattails of Google Drive, promising to help people see, “What’s in your Google Drive?” Two days after the Drive announcement, Spanning released a free tool called Spanning Stats that analyzes your Google Drive account. The company says its report provides data including the percentage documents in your Google Drive by type, the 10 newest and oldest files, how much of the total storage quota you’re using by file type, the 10 biggest files, and the 10 users using the most storage space. It sounds like there were people who really wanted to see those charts and graphs. The company now says that people have used Spanning Stats to scan 25,000 Google Drives. The app is now listed as one of the top installs in the Google Apps Marketplace and the number one install in the Document Management category. That probably also reflects the initial excitement about Google Drive. In fact, after the announcement, the the data uploaded to Google Docs by Spanning users exploded — before the announcement, the average amount per day was 5 megabytes, but on the day Google Drive launched it went up to 36.8 megabytes, and then 22.6 megabytes the next day.
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| The Winklevoss Twins Are Now VCs: “We Think The Cloud Is Going To Be Huge” Posted: 27 Apr 2012 04:10 PM PDT 
Anyway. On air today, CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin talked with everyone’s favorite Harvard grads cum Olympic athletes cum Mark Zuckerberg nemeses about their latest foray into the tech startup space as individuals with significant financial reserves and no apparent engineering credentials. They’re becoming venture capitalists. The VC Gold RushAs PandoDaily’s Paul Carr has quite humorously written, this is just one example of the larger VC boom that’s happening: “In the coming weeks and months, I look forward to headlines about: An infant who has decided to call herself a VC. A robot that has decided to call itself a VC. A duck that has decided to call itself a VC. An infant robot duck that has decided to call itself a VC.” The Next Web’s Drew Olanoff had a good point about their prospects as well: “Personally, I'd rather take money from the guy who played them [in The Social Network movie], Armie Hammer.” But we really shouldn’t take away from the Winklevii’s vision preemptively. It’s entirely possible they have deeper insights into this whole space than many realize. “We think the cloud is going to be huge,” Tyler Winklevoss told Sorkin today, after all. They’re focusing on “early stage disruptive startups” who are “shifting the paradigm.” I mean, Marc Andreessen, watch your back. It’s Not Actually All BadOK, all snark aside. Like it or not, this really is just the beginning. The Winklevii have actually had their hands in the web world in one way or another for years — so if Silicon Valley peeps are feeling appalled at them jumping into the scene full time, they should really brace themselves for what’s coming in the future. Wall Street isn’t as lucrative as it once was– and for many years, the most ambitious, savvy, money-oriented people from top universities just went straight into investment banking. Now that those jobs have dwindled and seem unlikely to make a resurgence anytime soon, those same people are now heading west and hitching their wagons to the tech industry’s star. I actually think that this shift away from Wall Street and into Silicon Valley is a good thing, on the whole. The best and brightest young people in our society have been going into the finance world for far too long. And whatever we think of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss in particular, they are part of a larger class of people who have made the business world go around for many years: They’re well-educated, quite intelligent, and clearly don’t give up without a fight. It’ll be interesting to see how much more the tech industry goes into turbo-drive as more of these types enter the fray.
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| Misfit Wearables, The Startup From Agamatrix’s Founders, Former Apple CEO John Sculley, Raises $7.6M Posted: 27 Apr 2012 03:30 PM PDT  Google Glass isn’t the only game in town. Misfit Wearables, a wearable computing startup from the founding team of mobile health company Agamatrix and former Apple chief executive John Sculley, just raised $7.6 million in a round co-led by Founders Fund. The other notable firm in the deal isn’t disclosed, but we hear through a source that it’s Khosla Ventures. Misfit isn’t saying too much about what it’s working on, except to say that the next generation of wearable devices shouldn’t compete with fashion, has to be ambient and has to have functions outside of sensing. It has to be the kind of thing a consumer wouldn’t need to remember to wear and ideally, it would be something that’s so critical that a person would go back home if they left it there. “Wearables from the 1.0 era make people look like Iron Man,” said chief executive Sonny Vu. The name of the company has a super-interesting backstory. Up until last fall, Vu, Sculley and his Agamatrix co-founder Sridhar Iyengar, were tossing around some pretty lackluster name ideas like Etherware. He, Iyengar and Sculley were sitting around at a table at the Rosewood on Menlo Park’s Sand Hill Road, having trouble deciding when news flashed that Steve Jobs had passed away. “It was a real shame we never got them together after John’s departure from Apple, so we decided to name the company in honor of Steve,” Vu said. The name Misfit Wearables is inspired by the opening line in the famous 1997 Apple commercial that launched the “Think Different” slogan: “Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.” The other thing that’s notable about the company is the team. Vu and Iyengar co-founded Agamatrix. It isn’t a household name in Silicon Valley, but it made the first medical device add-on that Apple approved for the iPhone. It’s a glucose meter that diabetes patients use to test their blood sugar levels regularly. Over 10 years, Vu and Iyengar built it into a business that makes between $50 and 100 million per year through the sale of glucose test strips. The two of them started tinkering with glucose sensing technology, and found a way that was twice as accurate as the leading technology on the market purely through better math. Vu said since most research and development teams working on glucose sensing were led by biologists, his team could fix inefficiencies that experts from other disciplines couldn’t see. When Agamatrix originally entered the market, there were more than 30 competing products. Yet they managed to gain a foothold. Then when the iPhone came out, they dreamed up a new concept: a glucose meter that would upload and track a patient’s blood sugar levels through an app. It took nine months of back-and-forth with Apple to get approved it for the iPhone. It also took a few years for them to get insurance companies and Medicare to cover the cost of glucose meters for diabetes patients. The FDA cleared it last December and pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis now markets it under the name iBG Star. So for all of you who might complain about how hard it is start a mobile or Facebook app company, this was crazy hard! Vu says he’s using the new round of funding to grow his team. He’s relocating to San Francisco from Boston where he’ll build a hardware and industrial design team locally. Then, interestingly enough, Misfit’s software team is located in Vietnam, because Vu found some world-class machine learning experts there that were trained in good U.S. technical Ph.D. programs like the one at University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. (Honestly, this isn’t so crazy though. I run into companies every week that have serious development studios in Eastern Europe, Pakistan and East Asia.) “We’re doing algorithms (machine learning) and app development in Vietnam because of speed, not just cost,” Vu said. “There’s lots of this kind of talent in Silicon Valley but they’re just not readily available, at least not to newcomers like us.”
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| A Run Down Of The Mobile Startups At MLove, Monterey Posted: 27 Apr 2012 03:21 PM PDT  MLOVE is a European mobile conference with a difference. If a mobile conference was crossed with TED and a music festival, that’s vaguely like MLove. Its big annual event is in an old East German castle 200 miles outside of Berlin. Yes, it’s as exotic as it sounds. But this week it took the plunge and brought its special atmosphere to Monterey. Amid the excellent speeches about the future of mobile, and the future generally, organiser Harald Neidhardt throws together a diverse range of speakers, from Grammy Award winning Musician Chamillionaire to “CameraGirl”, who runs tech at Burning Man. As one delegate, Dr. Robert Daubner of billiger, put it to me, “mobile is poised to disrupt the world.” Never were truer words spoken… Amid the high concept presentations from the likes of the Singularity University and others were a number of startup pitches from U.S.-based startups. Here’s a run-down on those: House of Mikko ArtKollect Marvin HereOnBiz Embee mobile
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| YouTube For Google TV Gets Recommendations, Smoother Playback And A +1 Button Posted: 27 Apr 2012 03:01 PM PDT  Google TV, the company’s first serious foray into the living room, hasn’t exactly set the world on fire. That doesn’t mean Google has given up, though. Far from it. While there hasn’t been much news about Google TV itself lately, the YouTube app for Google TV is getting an update today. Google says that its developers have “been working like it’s a 24/7 hackathon over here to bring all of YouTube to your Google TV.” With this update, the developers have added recommendations, a Google+ button and the ability to search for channels. The new version now also handles suddenly drops in bandwidth more gracefully. For users who previously had to suffer from constantly buffering video, this update should be a welcome relief. YouTube for Google TV now automatically detects when there is suddenly less bandwidth available for it and switched to a lower resolution instead of rebuffing. Given that Google is building Google+ into each one of its products, it doesn’t come as a surprise that this app is getting some Google+ love, too. You can now +1 videos from the app, though it doesn’t look like you can actually share videos from the app (+1′s appear on your profile and in search results, but not in your main Google+ stream). Adding recommendations and channel search to the app is a logical next step for Google. YouTube put a very strong emphasis on channels in the latest version of its desktop service, so making these channels easier to find on the TV makes sense.
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| Gripevine’s Dave Carroll Tackles Customer Service Resolution After United Broke His Guitar Posted: 27 Apr 2012 02:01 PM PDT  It’s an interesting story. One day, Dave Carroll was taking a flight with his band-mates on United Airlines. When he landed at his destination, he noticed that United staff were throwing his $3,500 Taylor guitar around, and ultimately, damaging it pretty badly. When United did nothing to help, Carroll took matters into his own hands with the help of a little video sharing site called YouTube. His music video, “United Breaks Guitars,” took off like a rocket, and after realizing the power of social media, he joined up with his other co-founders to build Gripevine. The service basically connects customers with businesses when they have customer service issues. Businesses can sign up to hear complaints and resolve them in an open, transparent fashion. Not only does the consumer get a chance to voice their issue to the company and the world, but the company gets the chance to make it up to the user publicly. It’s a win-win.
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| Study: 95% Of Independent Restaurants Don’t Have Mobile Sites, Only 40% Have Online Menus Posted: 27 Apr 2012 01:35 PM PDT  Restaurants just love to put Flash intros with auto-playing music and animations on their front pages. If you are trying to look at one of these sites on your mobile browser without Flash, chances are there is no way to bypass the animation and get to the information you want because the complete site was designed in Flash. It’s not just these obnoxious animations that make accessing restaurant websites on the go a hassle, though. According to a new study by Restaurant Science, a restaurant industry information and analytics provider, only one out of eight full service restaurant chains and a depressing one out of twenty independent restaurants have a mobile website. What makes this even worse is that according to some reports, half of all visits to restaurant websites are from mobile devices. Not having a mobile site may be forgivable for some small family businesses (though restaurant chains really should know better at this point), but the bad news doesn’t end there. More than half of the restaurants surveyed in this study didn’t even have a website to begin with (the researchers actually called all these restaurants to make sure they really weren’t online). What most users – mobile or not – really want from a restaurants site is probably to look at a menu. According to this study, though, fewer than 40% of independent restaurants actually display their menus on their website. Compared to other businesses, the study argues, restaurants still have a long way to go in using the potential of the Internet. That doesn’t come as a surprise to anybody who has ever tried to use restaurant websites on a mobile phone, but it’s still rather shocking that so many restaurateurs just don’t get how important their websites are for their businesses.
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| Target Neutralized: Amazon Beats Tablet Makers At Their Own Game Posted: 27 Apr 2012 01:24 PM PDT  With the announcement that the Kindle Fire has grabbed 54.4% of the Android Tablet market, it’s clear to see that Amazon’s Trojan Horse strategy paid off. As I wrote back in December, the Fire is Amazon’s way of making all of their offerings “real.” Movies, books, and games were Amazon’s core competency back when all of that stuff was on disks and on paper and that core competency is repurposed now for the Information Age. That’s what all of the other Android tablet makers missed: people don’t want general-purpose devices anymore or at least general-purpose devices in tablet form. There is little need to be “productive” on a tablet when consumption is why most people buy them. Sure someone out there is SSHing into their servers and editing documents in Pages, but the average user plops down on the couch with the iPad and calls up some IMDB or some NSFW Reddit, not a text editor. The laptop is the last general-purpose mobile device left out there and unless you’re a full bore Open Source user, your laptop is barely your own to begin with. With more and more data migrating to the cloud, the vision of ChromeOS’ refusal to acknowledge local storage may soon be ubiquitous. What Amazon knew is that nobody cares about tablets. They care about the things they represent. The iPad represents iTunes and its attendant media sources. The Kindle represents books. The GalTab? The Transformer? What do those represent? Angry Birds? There are plenty who will disagree, citing all of the exciting things they’re doing with their tablets. But what is the tablet you’re going to give for someone’s birthday or a holiday? It’s not the latest from Asus unless that’s definitely on your list. Instead, the use case will trump speeds and feeds and the price will win the day: “______ likes to read, so I’ll get her this Kindle Fire. We can maybe watch a movie on it.” Once Amazon has all that hardware in the wild, then the real change happens. The Fire gets an upgrade – maybe adds some sharing features, maybe a better screen – and all of a sudden we have a two horse race where once there was a herd. Considering no other Android tablet can touch Amazon’s market share, it won’t be long before Google will be pointing to the Kindle as their Android success story.
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| Sony’s Gamer-Friendly Xperia Play Could Have Had A Real QWERTY Keyboard Too Posted: 27 Apr 2012 01:15 PM PDT  Sony’s Android-powered Xperia Play debuted to mixed reviews last year, but according to a newly published patent, Sony was apparently toying with the idea of making something much more interesting before settling on the design they ran with. Not content with a single physical keypad meant strictly for gaming, the images associated with the patent depict a Sony smartphone with two of them — one with the game controls we’ve become familiar with, and another with a full QWERTY keyboard that would slide down over the game pad. The company first filed for the patent back in October 2010 (back when they were still Sony Ericsson), just days before Engadget first published their spy shots of what we now know as the Xperia Play. There’s no way of knowing how close a device like this got to actual production, but I’d wager it didn’t last too long before Sony Ericsson’s design and production team passed it over because of the problems it could potentially raise. On a basic level, more moving parts means more things that could potentially break, but there’s an even more pressing issue than that. Practically speaking, this thing would’ve been a chubby little beast — the Xperia Play isn’t a particularly thin device as it is, so who knows how hefty a device with two slide-out keyboards would have been had it ever seen the light of day. Still, I can’t help but love the concept — though developers are crafting amazing experiences that are well-suited for touchscreens, some games just work better when a physical control scheme is part of the mix (anyone who’s tried playing the recently released Marvel vs. Capcom 2 on their iPhone would probably agree with me). The chances of Sony Mobile bringing a device like this to market aren’t nil though — after all, they already seem set on delivering phones with some wacky features.
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| Gillmor Gang Live 04.27.12 (TCTV) Posted: 27 Apr 2012 12:39 PM PDT |
| Yahoo’s Five Counter-Counterclaims Against Facebook. #1: Throw Out Retaliatory Patents Posted: 27 Apr 2012 12:29 PM PDT  Today Yahoo hit Facebook with five big counter-counterclaims designed to invalidate the patents cited in the social network’s infringement countersuit. If the court concurs, Facebook could be left wide-open in settlement negotiations, and might have to pay Yahoo a hefty sum of cash and/or stock. Specifically, the old web portal claims that after it sued for patent infringement, Facebook bought patents ”for purposes of retaliation”. Therefore they don’t meet the U.S. Patent Office’s “Duty of Disclosure, Candor, and Good Faith” and should be thrown out of Facebook’s countersuit against Yahoo. Yahoo also claims Facebook broke their agreement to inform each other of IP issues, couldn’t legally know if Yahoo was violating its patents, and that several of Facebook’s new patents were illegally filed. Finally, Yahoo filed two more advertising patent infringement claims against Facebook that look to be quite incriminating. Here’s breakdown of the five claims and how they’ll influence the outcome of the case. CNET reports a statement from Yahoo that details its position, and also using the word “innovation” to try to seem less troll-like:
Facebook responded:
Oddly, when Facebook bought AOL patents from Microsoft last week, Yahoo said “Companies who purchase patents are often working from a position of weakness and take these actions to strengthen their portfolio.” However, the two new patent infringement lawsuits it filed today and three of the original ten are based on patents Yahoo itself had purchased in the acquisition of Overture. Here are Yahoo’s five counter-counterclaims and what they mean for the case: 1. Facebook’s Patent Countersuit Not In Good FaithYahoo says of the ten patents Facebook countersued with:
Since these were bought from non-practicing entities (aka trolls) rather than being originally filed to cover Facebook’s own technologies, they could be ruled to lack “good faith” and be thrown out, leaving Facebook nothing to offset Yahoo’s infringement claims with. 2. Facebook Infringes On Two More Yahoo Advertising PatentsYahoo Claims that in addition to its ten original infringement claims, Facebook also infringes on: Yahoo’s U.S. Patent No. 7,698,315 for ”System and method allowing advertisers to manage search listings in a pay for placement search system using grouping” – Essentially the ability for advertisers to see their ads grouped by campaign, assess performance, and make changes to multiple grouped ads simultaneously. Specifically, the technology “enables the advertiser to simultaneously modify a plurality of advertisements” as well as “calculating performance metrics for the advertising group; and producing a display showing a statistics view.” Facebook’s self-serve ad tool and Ads API both have this capabilit, and therefore may very well infringe on this Yahoo patent. and Yahoo’s U.S. Patent No. 7,933,903 for “System and method to determine the validity of and interaction on a network” – Essentially this means assessing whether an ad click is fraudelent by looking at the clicks per IP address, clicks in a given time period, and other factors. If these signals indicate a high risk of click fraud, the click is discounted. Facebook very likely uses this or a similar method to attempt to protect advertisers from paying for fake clicks. 3. Facebook Failed To Inform Yahoo Of IP Issues Before CountersuingYahoo claims:
This break in the agreement, and that fact that Facebook countersued with patents issued and that it had bought that day could lend weight to Yahoo’s previous claim that Facebook’s countersuit lacks “good faith”. 4. Facebook Couldn’t Know Yahoo’s Technology Violates Its PatentsYahoo claims:
Indeed, when I reviewed all of the patents Facebook was countersuing with, it was difficult to determine their validity of ones like Patent 6236978 because they claimed infringement by back end tech of Yahoo’s. Facebook therefore may essentially be guessing, meaning it “failed to perform a good faith investigation into its counterclaims prior to asserting them” to the court. This could cause several of Facebook’s patents, specifically No. 6,236,978, No. 7,603,331, No. 8,103,611, No. 6,411,949, U.S. Patent No. 6,216,133, and No. 6,288,717, to be thrown out. 5. Patents Facebook Is Countersuing With Were Illegally FiledYahoo says that Facebook patents No. 8,005,896 and No. 8,150,913 were improperly registered by Chris Cheah and C. Douglass Thomas. The inventors of the patents were improperly listed, and and additional filing was made to retroactively apply patent ’913 to social networking. Yahoo says therefore “Every claim of the '913 patent is unenforceable due to inequitable conduct and every claim of the '896 patent is unenforceable under the doctrine of infectious unenforceability.” If the court concurs, these patents of Facebook’s could be thrown out, further weakening its bargaining position in a settlement. In conclusion, Yahoo makes some powerful and well-backed claims today, but it will come down to whether it and Facebook believe a court would throw out most of Facebook’s countersuit. This “good faith” strategy from Yahoo is smart because no patents purchased after its initial infringement suit –whether from entrepreneurs and academics, the bundles it bought from IBM and Microsoft, or even future purchases from Sony or someone else, would save Facebook. Even if the risk of having its countersuit invalidated is low, it could be enough to force Facebook into a settlement. Here’s today’s full filing from Yahoo:
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| Barely 3 Months Post-Launch, Loyalty App Punchcard Is Live In 15M Locations, Nears Profitability Posted: 27 Apr 2012 12:22 PM PDT  The mobile apps from stealthy loyalty startup Punchcard have only been on the market since February, but the company is now reporting it’s close to being cash-flow positive. Like a digital version of paper punchcards which reward repeat customers for their business, Punchcard’s app lets customers snap photos of their receipts in exchange for cash payouts or other rewards directly from the merchant. While not a new concept in and of itself, what’s interesting about Punchcard is how it’s been acquiring its business: it just switched on loyalty programs for millions of locations across the U.S., even if they didn’t ask for it. “We’re looking at this as seeding the market, essentially,” explains Punchcard CEO and serial entrepreneur Andy Steuer of why the company has seemingly put the cart before the horse. In other words, usage and rewards first, paying customers (i.e., businesses signing up) second. “If you look at other location-based apps, they’ve turned on the ability to check in anywhere,” says Steuer, “and we’ve turned on the ability to check-out anywhere.” Consumers use the app, which now works at 15 million (!) locations in the U.S., to verify their purchases by snapping a photo of their receipt. As they collect punches on their virtual cards, they can earn their way to cash, freebies and other rewards. Generally (unless a merchant has specified otherwise), the rewards arrive after the 10th purchase, and, if cash-based, are the equivalent of the average order value up to $30. But how many of these businesses are actually paying for the system? Steuer declined to give exact numbers, only saying that Punchcard is “generating revenue from the sales of several thousand locations.” Nor is he sharing the download numbers or active users numbers associated with the mobile applications. He did note, however, that the company has paying customers, mostly in southern California where Punchcard got started, including a newly added Subway franchise. He also says that Punchcard is seeing a “huge conversion rate” from app download to usage and repeat usage, with transactions doubling every week. (But again, no exact numbers were provided.) However, Punchcard has just partnered with KDA Group, one of the largest local marketing agencies, which will begin selling Punchcard to their network, which includes major retailers and chains, operating at around some 300,000 locations nationwide. The company currently offers the service in two tiers (one for $29/month, another for $99/month), which provides businesses with access to an analytics view into who their customers are, and an automated re-marketing program that pushes offers back to customers to incent them to buy again. The solution works best for retailers, restaurants, grocery stores, coffee shops, and other local businesses that want to increase the frequency of their customers’ purchases. Punchcard isn’t the only startup trying to digitize the loyalty space. Facebook just acquired loyalty play Tagtile, for example, Google acquired Punchd, while others like Perka and Perkville are also working on similar programs, to name just a few. But Steuer says that Punchcard has some advantages over other efforts, as it doesn’t use QR codes, in-store hardware, nor does it require connecting a credit card to your account to use. Having to snap photos of receipts, though, does involve some friction, he admits, but he says the company is working on other solutions that would allow customers to earn rewards in other ways. (More on that later). Punchcard was founded in Q3 2011, but the mobile apps didn’t officially launch until February 8, 2012. You can try Punchcard on iPhone or Android by downloading it from here.
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| The IPO Boom Is Back: Pricings Hit A 12-Year High, With Tech Stocks Leading The Way Posted: 27 Apr 2012 12:13 PM PDT  It’s official: We’re back in boom times from a tech IPO standpoint. 2012 is now on pace to be a record-breaking year for initial public offerings, and technology companies are leading the way. Fifty-seven IPOs have been priced since January 1st, which is the most U.S. IPO pricings the U.S. market has seen during the first four months of year since 2000, according to new data out of IPO-focused investment bank Renaissance Capital. The overall pace seems to be picking up even more, according to the firm — 14 new pricings have been made in the past week alone. Not surprisingly, the tech sector is a big part of the ongoing IPO boom, with the industry accounting for 21 of the 57 IPO pricings made so far this year. And the biggest deal of them all — Facebook, of course — is still yet to occur. A lot of people are crying “bubble” right now, which is understandable. But it’s important to remember that just because IPO numbers are up at 2000 levels does not mean we’re all primed for a 2001-like fall. For one thing, as a lot of people who actually were around in the first Dot Com boom will tell you, things are actually nowhere near as hyped up right now in tech as they were then from a money-spending standpoint (which is kind of a bummer, as I would selfishly like to go to more epic parties.) But most importantly, a huge number of people are actually on the Internet this time around — meaning that many of the web-based companies debuting on the stock market now are actually pulling in serious profits that just might justify their big valuations. It’s reasonable to think that this tech wave is one that could actually last.
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| All-Star Cast Invests 750K In Ben Huh And Matt Galligan’s Mobile News Startup Circa Posted: 27 Apr 2012 11:46 AM PDT  SimpleGeo’s Matt Galligan and Icanhascheezburger’s Ben Huh have teamed up to change the way people consume news via mobile. Their startup Circa, which boasts a newsworthy list of advisors like former Digg CEO Jay Adelson, has just raised 750K in seed funding from eonCapital, Quotidian Ventures, Techstars’ David Cohen and David Tisch, Tumblr’s David Karp, Eric Norlin’s SK Ventures, Manesh Arora, Pedro Torres-Picon, Rick Webb, Scott Belsky and Soraya Darabi. “40% of our current funding is provided by Davids,” Galligan jokes. As to what Circa will actually be when the product finally launches? Well, the company is keeping many details under wraps. “A lot of what we’re doing is entirely new and I don’t say that lightly,” Galligan explains, revealing that the startup is committed to solving the information overload problem, “There are no sacred cows in this.” While Galligan is keeping mum on what exactly the play is, he does divulge that the idea for the startup grew out of Ben Huh’s “Moby Dick project,” which aimed to find a solution for humanity’s current state of TMI. He also reveals that it is not a pure news aggregation play like Digg or Techmeme, “We’re solving a different kind of problem. There is more information created today than ever before. But as a society we’re less informed.” The five person company plans on using the funding to hire more engineers who are enthusiastic about building a mobile experience — And who want to make consuming news and staying engaged with stories much easier via mobile. “We’re trying to make it so that people educate themselves for 5 minutes as opposed to play Angry Birds,” Galligan says.
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| 42Floors’ PDA: The War For Talent Among Startups Needs A New Approach. Here’s Why Posted: 27 Apr 2012 11:16 AM PDT  Startups do the darndest things. As you may or may not have seen, Y Combinator startup 42Floors made a bold and fairly unprecedented move today — as hiring goes, in any case. 42Floors Co-founder Jason Freedman had been following the work of UPenn sophomore Dan Shipper on Hacker News. The two had chatted a few times by phone and on Twitter, and Freedman was so impressed by the quality of Shipper’s programming, design skills, and smarts, that he decided to publicly offer the sophomore a job — via the company blog. Why? Well, first off, it was likely to turn into publicity both for Shipper and for 42Floors. So there’s that. It was also done somewhat with an ulterior motive. As Freedman says in his post, the team believes that “hiring is dead.” And he has a point: If you’re looking to hire the kind of talent that is out there actually building products, companies, etc. (and who isn’t?), those men and women likely aren’t filling out job applications. So if you want them, you have to court them. Of course, when it comes to courting, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. 42Floors went with the public, honest, flattery approach. Freedman knew what he was getting into — “it may take us three months or three years before we get Dan to join us full-time … These things take time and perseverance” — but the startup is about to announce funding. And new capital means hiring, scaling, and building. Like every other startup out there, 42Floors wants to have the best talent on staff to help them build something that’s better than the rest, but, in the industry we live in today, even with capital, the competition for top talent is fierce. And young companies can’t be competitive when it comes to salary. So, what do you do? As Freeman implies so intuitively, if you can’t compete based on wages, or equity, you compete with what you can. In the case of Freedman and 42Floors (and many others in the same boat), it’s “personal development,” it’s making it known that you value their talent, what they’re capable of, and want to help them reach their goals — while contributing to yours, of course. You have to be willing to invest more than just money in talent, and if you don’t have the money, you have to work even harder — even enjoy (gasp!) — cultivating young talent when you find it. Freedman believes there’s a war for talent out there, and he’s not wrong. Few will tell you that, with education beginning to change, with talent existing and developing in and outside of the classroom, there’s plenty of talent out there that doesn’t have a Harvard or Stanford Business School degree. And in many cases, that talent may even be superior. But, this landscape requires new ways of thinking about hiring, evaluating non-traditional talent, and convincing these men and women to come on board. Smarterer, Gild, Bullhorn Reach, Entelo, and solutions like them can’t launch (or grow) fast enough. But, as to Shipper? In a way, his deciding to drop out of UPenn and join 42Floors would have been immediate validation of Freedman’s tactics and philosophy. We caught up with Shipper today, who tells us that, although the experience was both startling and humbling, he’s not ready to join 42Floors at this point. That’s partly because, unlike his friend and UPenn classmate Wesley Zhao, who’s part of the current Y Combinator class with FamilyLeaf, Shipper isn’t ready to drop out of school. He wants to finish his education if he can. It’s also because he’s busy building a startup. Back in September, Shipper and two of his classmates founded AirtimeHQ, which they launched two months ago. Airtime, put simply, allows businesses to market their products via that valuable and oft-unused real estate: The email signature. Airtime offers users the ability to set up company-wide email signature marketing in 30 seconds, with flexibility — in that signatures change based on device, and users can optimize and modify email campaigns on the fly. Oh, along with offering integration with both Outlook and Google Apps. What’s more, Shipper says that the startup already has 200 businesses signed up and using the service, and have integrated with over quarter of a million emails. The co-founders will be staying in Philadelphia this summer when classes get out, and will be working on Airtime. Shipper says that he has no idea where the road will take them, but they want to take a shot — see if they can reach critical mass. So, simply put, he’s more focused on building and following the entrepreneurial path than joining another company — and he’s certainly not alone. The UPenn sophomore says that he’s definitely open to the idea of joining 42Floors in the future, but that it all depends on what happens with his startup. While it’s not the ideal result for 42Floors and Freedman, it’s good to see young engineers and designers just getting down to it — and building. Of course, if you’re of the same mind as Sean Parker, Shipper is (in a way) demonstrating a part of the problem. Speaking at the Techonomy Conference last November, Parker said that the industry is overcrowded with small startups. And because there’s so much capital going around, many of these find funding. Although many of those will fail in the end, in the short-term it makes for a talent drain. So this line of thinking goes, in the end, many of these entrepreneurs could have more of an impact at places like Facebook, or Twitter, but they opt instead to start their own businesses. Then, they, in turn, have trouble finding top talent as they scale because it either gets bought by Facebook for more than they can pay, or the talent, like they did themselves, goes off to found its own venture. Needless to say, what started off as a move made (in part) for free publicity, in the end becomes a catalyst for a conversation about how to address the talent drain in technology, and what startups and founders can do to help themselves get ahead in the race for talent, even if they don’t have the money or equity to win outright. As always, entrepreneurs without the big bank account have to do more with less, and find better, savvier ways to get what they need. 42Floors may not have gotten a new employee, but they at least got his attention, made their goals transparent, and in so doing got a fan — and potentially a future customer or partner. That’s smart hedging. So, perhaps, in the end, Freedman got what he wanted anyway. What do you think? For more, check out 42Floors’ full blog post here, and find Airtime here. Note to Shipper below:
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