Posted 5 weeks ago
Download the MP3.
 |
Not to be called a one trick pony, Sam Wyly's turned himself into a billionaire by starting and growing companies in technology, oil, retail and even in the restaurant industry. Coming from a modest upbringing, Sam worked in sales at IBM and Honeywell before founding University Computing in 1963 at age 29 with just "$1,000 and an idea" as he puts it in his book of that title. The company IPOed and grew to over 5,000 people. Sam hired CEOs and stayed an entrepreneur. He's founded and acquired numerous companies including Bonanza Steakhouse (grew to 600 restaurants), Earth Resources Company, Sterling Software (sold for $3.3 billion), Sterling Commerce (sold for $4 billion), arts-and-crafts chain Michaels (sold for $6 billion), Maverick Capital (a hedge fund with over $10 billion under management) and clean-energy producer Green Mountain Energy. Despite being soft-spoken, Sam's fought and won several high profile proxy fights. Sam's been undeterred as several of his ventures have had visible failures over the years and he's lost audacious bids to take over Western Union and Computer Associates. On the whole, Sam's created a huge amount of value that's put him on the Forbes list of the 400 richest people. Hear how he does it.
Show sponsor: FreshBooks - an easy online invoicing provider used by Venture Voice
[Link]
Posted 8 weeks ago
Download the MP3.
Jeff Stewart needed that done yesterday. Jeff became an entrepreneur when he founded the web consultancy Square Earth in 1995. Only three years later he became a serial entrepreneur by starting Mimeo, a service that lets you send a file directly from your computer to be printed, bound and shipped overnight. Mimeo struggled in the dot com crash of 2000-2001 just as it was getting off the ground. Jeff was able to pull Mimeo though the downturn despite almost running out of cash, which has allowed the company to flourish and make $55.4 million in 2007 revenues. Ironically, Jeff didn't have the same success in good economic times with ample cash after he raised $20 million for Monitor110. He discusses the company's shutdown and lessons learned. Now Jeff's focused on allowing businesses to hire good salespeople faster with Urgent Career. He announces on this show for the first time that he's just raised a six-figure angel round to speed up Urgent Career's success.
[Link]
Posted 11 weeks ago
Download the MP3.
Last time Derek Sivers was on Venture Voice three years ago he told us he had to "whack 'em [investors] off with a stick". Now we know why. Derek announces on our show for the first time the amount he sold his company for this past summer: $22 million. Derek owned 100% of the equity. Though he might have made more money than most of his fellow music entrepreneurs, Derek's no Gordon Gekko. In this interview, Derek tells us how he put all of his money from the sale into a charitable trust, that he didn't even visit CD Baby's office once during the last year he owned it, and what he's up to next.
Want more Venture Voice? Become a Venture Voice member or contact us about sponsoring the show.
[Link]
Posted 5 months ago
It's great to hear stories like the one where Andy Bechtolsheim handed the Google founders a $100,000 check before they even set up their bank account. Convince an angel to invest and you're off to the races! However, what many aspiring entrepreneurs don't know is that after the one or two page term sheet there are dozens of pages of documents that go into even an angel financing.
Since law firms have templates for these deals you might think it's no harder than copying and pasting. The problem is there are lots of different templates floating around law firms, and a countless number of terms that could be changed. Many of these terms really don't make too big of difference, or if they do their effects are so hard to anticipate that arguing over them isn't worth the time. Lawyers get paid by the hour so they have an incentive to find terms they don't like (and there are always terms to not like). So lawyers will often spend weeks bickering over trivial issues, racking up $10,000s of legal fees, delaying the financing and putting the deal itself at risk.
Enter angel fund Y Combinator, which has just released the financing documents it has standardized and used with dozens of entrepreneurs. If these documents get a reputation for being fair (which is likely given the Y Combinator's good reputation), they could save million of dollars in legal fees for startups. The key is that both the entrepreneur and the investor trust that the Y docs are a fair deal for all, and trust enough to tell their lawyers not to mark it up! This could do to angel investing what Creative Commons did to copyright or what McDonald's did to hamburgers.
UPDATE (8/14): Scott Rafer (a past VV guest) posted his convertible debt note (direct link to doc) he's using for his current company, Lookery. Rafer did a convertible debt deal, which has many advantages as my friends at Venture Hacks have argued. On the other hand, Josh Kopelman has argued against it, pointing out several disadvantages. It seems to be the type of issue that could go either way depending on the dynamics of the particular company, oppertunity and investors — but if we had a standardized set of docs for each verified by a trusted third party it'd be very powerful. The NVCA did this for later stage docs (of course they're funded by the VCs). Who could do this for convertible debt rounds?
[Link]
Posted 5 months ago
Download the MP3.
Attention entrepreneurs dealing with the current economic downturn: This interview is for you. After working as a journalist for Jason Calacanis at Silicon Alley Reporter, Rafat Ali ended up broke in a market with a dearth of employment opportunities. To try to find a new job, Rafat created paidContent.org as an "interactive resume." Luckily, no one hired him. From these humble beginnings, Rafat bootstrapped his blog holding company, ContentNext Media, for four years before taking a small investment from famed media investor Alan Patricof in June 2006. From its inception paidContent has doubled revenues each year and was recently acquired by UK-based Guardian Media Group for a rumored $30 million. Listen in as Rafat outlines the past, present, and future of online media, while sharing his war stories from another uncertain economic time.
[Link]
Posted 6 months ago
The folks at Uncensored Interview were nice enough to turn the tables on me by interviewing me on their show. You can watch all the clips here. Here's me talking about what makes a good interview:
Please join our new Venture Voice Facebook Page.
[Link]
Posted 7 months ago
When: June 24-25, 2008
Where: The New Yorker in New York City
What: Venture Voice is a media sponsor of the 8th Annual New York Venture Summit that will feature over 25 Venture Capital Speakers, 3 Venture Capital Panels with open discussions and 40 of the most promising Emerging Companies seeking funding.
For more information and a list of VC’s confirmed to speak: http://www.vcsummit.com/ (for $100 off current registration price enter code: venturevoice2008)
[Link]
Posted 7 months ago
In our last round of questions on this blog, we asked each former guest about his or her first time (raising money). What should our next question be?
Give us your ideas in the comments or via our contact page.
We’ve got a number of new audio interviews scheduled. To support the show, please consider becoming a Venture Voice member by clicking here. (Just like NPR, but for entrepreneurs and without the tote bags.) More members = more interviews.
[Link]
Posted 8 months ago
This is part of a series on Venture Voice where we ask a bunch of past show guests a simple question and post their answers.
How’d you raise your very first round of financing?
David Sacks: I asked Peter, Max and Elon to finance "Thank You For Smoking" with me. I didn't have to do too much selling since I had worked with them at PayPal and was putting in my own money.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
This is part of a series on Venture Voice where we ask a bunch of past show guests a simple question and post their answers.
How’d you raise your very first round of financing?
Kelly Perdew: I raised my first round of financing ($500K in equity) from friends and family while I was still in business school. Be very careful about taking money from friends and family… while it is easier to access, if things don't go well, you tend to stay in the deal much longer than is good for you to try and save their money!
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
This is part of a series on Venture Voice where we ask a bunch of past show guests a simple question and post their answers.
How’d you raise your very first round of financing?
Ev Williams: I asked my mom for $10,000. She gave it to me.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
This is part of a new series on Venture Voice where we ask a bunch of past show guests a simple question and post their answers.
How’d you raise your very first round of financing?
Jay Adelson: The first round of financing I ever raised was from angels. I was working with Al Avery, who co-founded Equinix with me in 1998. A good friend of mine, who had founded a company in Silicon Valley in the mid-nineties and sold it to Cisco, was mentoring me to avoid going initially to the VCs.
From his perspective, nothing could be worse; Showing up at VC with a business plan, with no executive team, no execution, amounted to no valuation, and the VC taking way too much of the company for a series A.
Instead, he felt, do everything you can to bootstrap or angel fund it, then go back (even a month, or six months later) to the VCs with something they can't argue is as risky.
This friend of mine went to two friends of his, and we raised $100,000.00 to start. We followed his instructions to the letter; We hired some executives, we started the process of operating our business, got an office, etc. We made the business real. Most importantly, we found a great corporate law firm to start all the paperwork, who later would help us negotiate and deal with the VCs.
Three months later we gave away roughly 40% of the business for $12 million dollars. The $100k was set up to convert to essentially $200k worth of stock at the close of Series A. I think they did quite well, and we're all still good friends.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
This is part of a new series on Venture Voice where we ask a bunch of past show guests a simple question and post their answers.
How’d you raise your very first round of financing?
Joel Spolsky: I put in a very small amount of money (I think it was about $50,000) from my own savings. That carried us to profitability.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
This is part of a new series on Venture Voice where we ask a bunch of past show guests a simple question and post their answers.
How’d you raise your very first round of financing?
Fabrice Grinda: The first time I had to raise money was for Aucland, a copy of eBay for Southern Europe which was my first Internet startup. I was lucky not to have to raise seed money. While in college at Princeton, I built a company exporting high end computer equipment to Europe (motherboards, memory, CPUs, hard drives, etc.). Given its profits, I left Princeton in June 1996 with $50,000 in cash.
When I joined the McKinsey New York office as a consultant in September 1996, I ran a sophisticated real estate rent versus buy model. The model and my rule of thumb analysis (see Rent … unless you want to buy) were screaming BUY! I bought a large 1 bedroom apartment on 54th and 2nd for $115,000, putting $25,000 down.
With the other $25,000, I bought 4 stocks: Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon and Intel. When I decided to create Aucland in July 1998, I sold the 1 bedroom apartment for $185,000. I sold all the stock I owned. After taxes, I was left with around $300,000 in cash. I invested 100% of it in Aucland.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
Download the MP3.
There are not many entrepreneurs who have spent their entire 10-year careers starting new ventures in online media, but Jason Calacanis just can’t help himself. Jason rode the dot com wave in New York by starting Silicon Alley Reporter. His publishing company Rising Tide Media grew to $12 million in sales. Unfortunately Jason also rode that wave down after the bubble burst. He ended up selling his first business to Dow Jones for a lot less money than he could have gotten before the crash. Undeterred, Jason started Weblogs, Inc. to make money by selling ads in blogs they pay people to write. In only 18 months he grew the business to a point at which AOL (TWX) bought it for a reported $25 million. Now he’s re-launched Netscape as a news website where users vote for what’s important. Jason’s caused a lot of controversy by paying top users of competitive sites such as Digg (whose CEO Jay Adelson was on our
last show) to switch to use his service. Hear what’s been driving Jason’s entrepreneurial career.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
If there are three words an entrepreneur dreads hearing in the summer, perhaps it's "after Labor Day". People such as venture capitalists and customers who take things called vacations (what's that?) often say this to entrepreneurs trying to schedule meetings. In the startup world, a few weeks is a long time. On the other hand, maybe this is a sort of forced semi-vacation for entrepreneurs.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
While there’s no standard education to become an entrepreneur, almost every entrepreneur gets an early education in the lemonade business. The kids may be cute, but that doesn't mean they're not cut throat. In fact, Inc. Magazine just announced the Best Lemonade Stand in America Contest Winner.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
Download the MP3.
Digg, the news website that uses its own readers rather than editors to decide what stories are most important, has been growing with a fury. While founder Kevin Rose has gotten a lot of attention including a recent cover of BusinessWeek, CEO Jay Adelson has been guiding Digg toward business success. This isn’t Jay’s first time though the throes of entrepreneurship. He started Equinix, a company that now has a market capitalization of $1.5 billion. Despite its success, Jay didn’t make much money because he held his shares until after the dot com bust. In fact, he had just enough money to put his kids through college and live a more modest lifestyle himself. He was ready to go off and work at a coffee shop or become a teacher until Digg came along. Now he’s back in the game.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
Download the MP3.
If there are best practices in entrepreneurship, you’ll hear the secrets to them in this coverage of the first half of the recent Venture Voice Startup Workshop in New York City. If there are in fact no best practices for entrepreneurs, then you’ll at least enjoy the heated discussion about how entrepreneurs should navigate the startup seas. These passionate speakers fielded a day’s worth of questions and opinions from Venture Voice, each other and the spirited audience. The results are distilled ideas about what it takes to win in business, great war stories and even a few laughs.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
Jeff Cornwall, a professor of entrepreneurship, reminds us that "entrepreneur" is just a noun. A farmer can farm, but we can't simply say we're off to go entrepreneur.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
Green can mean a lot of things to an entrepreneur. You can have a "green thumb" which means any business you're involved in will grow and make money. You can be "be green" as in inexperienced. To a new crop of entrepreneurs, however, being green means creating a business that benefits the environment.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
“How can I top this?" was perhaps the only big question left on Bill Gates's mind after his tremendous success with Microsoft. Venture capitalist Bart Schachter wrote in a hilarious PE Week Wire column that his colleagues should thank God (or Gates for that matter) that Bill did not decide to become a VC as many successful entrepreneurs do.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
The first ever Venture Voice Startup Workshop was a huge success. We've already received unprompted thank you notes from half of the attendees. Thanks to the speakers and attendees for making it so meaningful — Entrepreneurship is a hard thing to communicate without getting a lot of fluff, but there is no fluff at our Workshop. Apologies to anyone we haven’t responded to yet, I’m already in Seattle for Gnomedex. We’ll post a podcast of the Workshop soon, but in the meantime you can view the photos on Flickr.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
Past guest, venture capitalist and former entrepreneur Brad Feld observes in his blog that "I’ve noticed a pattern in many of the VC and entrepreneur blogs I read – very few people ever talk about failure."
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
We’ve added David S. Rose, the founder and chairman of the New York Angels, to the Venture Voice Startup Workshop speakers roster. He joins Dick Costolo of FeedBurner, Scott Heiferman of Meetup.com, David Hornik of August Capital, Jeanne Sullivan of StarVest Partners and Tom Szaky of TerraCycle.
We’ve got all angles of the entrepreneurial process covered now, from entrepreneurs to angels to venture capitalists. The speakers have great diversity of backgrounds, geography, age and industry. They'll be a lot of great insights to share.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
There’s only one more week before the Venture Voice Startup Workshop. We've arranged it so there will be lots of breakout sessions to let you interact with the speakers about issues facing your startup. Be sure to register before it's too late.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
AOL’s relaunching Netscape by using the format of the popular startup Digg, which allows users to decide what news is noteworthy though a voting system. According to a New York Times article, this effort to build the new Netscape was run like a startup by recently acquired entrepreneur Jason Calacanis who founded Weblogs, Inc. Perhaps for the first time in years, Netscape is startup-like again.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
Download the MP3.
While many restaurants offer dozens of wines, beers and mixed drinks, there are few non-alcoholic options on the menu. Former dot-com entrepreneur and self-described foodie Sharelle Klaus was fed up with her lack of beverage options during the time she was pregnant with her four children. She decided to create the first line of “culinary sodas,” which are less sweet and more sophisticated than sodas like Coke or Pepsi. Based in Seattle, Sharelle’s now peddling her soda all across the country and already has traction in several markets.
Show notes:
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
Advertising Age, a publication not known for being aimed at small businesses, published an article titled Why Small Marketers Need to Reach for the Stars.
While we're reminded all large businesses start small, the point of the article is that there are no special rules of small business that small businesses need to follow. In other words, think big. And what better examples than Bill Gates and Michael Dell?
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
We’ve extended the registration discount on the Venture Voice Startup Workshop. It's a unique opportunity to interact with top entrepreneurs in an intimate setting on June 26. Speakers include Dick Costolo of FeedBurner, Scott Heiferman of Meetup.com, David Hornik of August Capital, Jeanne Sullivan of StarVest Partners and Tom Szaky of TerraCycle.
All participants get to fill out a survey when they sign up about what they're looking to get out of the Workshop. The sooner you sign up, the more influence you'll have on the agenda. Look forward to seeing you there!
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
Paul Graham asks "Could you reproduce Silicon Valley elsewhere, or is there something unique about it?" in an essay titled How To Be Silicon Valley. It's a very insightful analysis of what's essential to a startup economy. He concludes that people matter most and the geographical challenge is to attract the people — which is not an insurmountable challenge.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
Download the MP3.
What do you do after building and selling a business for $1.5 billion in the course of only a few years? That’s the question David O. Sacks, one of the co-founders of PayPal, faced after eBay bought his company. It didn’t take him long to find the answer: Go to Hollywood and make movies. David didn’t waste much time. He recently produced Thank You For Smoking which won critical and audience acclaim. Now you can hear about his journey and get his unique perspective on the convergence of media and technology.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
Newsweek just posted an interview with Meetup founder and CEO Scott Heiferman titled See You Offline.
When we interviewed Scott exactly 11 months ago tomorrow, he had just started charging a fee to use Meetup. At the end of the interview I told Scott I'd be attending the Podcaster Meetup the next day. Scott said "maybe I'll pop in" and he did. Podcasters like to talk so much that Scott never got to identify who he was. Scott sat there listening intently as a couple people complained about the Meetup fees without knowing the Meetup CEO was in the room. Talk about direct customer feedback.
Despite any past gripes, the Podcaster Meetup is still going strong and the last meeting was one of the largest yet. Newsweek asked Scott about his revenue transition:
LEVY: A year ago you changed from free service to one that charged your Meetup groups a fee. What was the impact?
HEIFERMAN: We almost instantly lost half our activity when we started the fee. That was pretty damn painful. Most of last year we sort of crawled up, but this year we've just exploded. Now there are more people than ever RSVP'ing for meetups. Also, after each meeting we religiously poll members and ask them to rate it on a scale from 1 to 5. Before there was a fee, the average rating was 3.8. After the fee, the average rating is a 4.2.
The difficulty of creating fee based services seems to be a common issue with many of the entrepreneurs we interview. We'll be sure to find out more when Scott speaks at the Venture Voice Startup Workshop.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
One of the common themes we notice in the people we interview is that they don't lead very well-balanced lives. We recently received an e-mail from a past guest saying "I am working 100+ hours a week again." Unfortunately this symptom isn't alien to us either. So we were excited to read Inc Magazine's proposed solution: hiring a life coach.
Think spending $400 to $1,200 per month on a coach (the amount Inc cites from the International Coach Federation) would decrease or increase your stress?
It’s an interesting topic. We're going to try to find a well-balanced entrepreneur (if such a thing exists) to interview, and hear how it's done.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
I never thought of Amazon as a friend of entrepreneurs. Several years ago I remember a friend of mine who self-published an entrepreneurial handbook for teens telling me that authors had to give up too many rights to list a book themselves on Amazon. They do have the Associates program that lets website operators make money by linking to Amazon products (which I use, more for tracking than for income), but that's old news and doesn't generate serious money for many anymore. Amazon enables entrepreneurs to sell over Amazon, but eBay clearly dominates that enterprise. Slashdot even posted an entry titled Google’s Love For Small Businesses that points to a Cringely article, but both don't even mention Amazon.
If you look closely at Amazon's portfolio of services, you'll see they now produce some extremely disruptive tools that they've opened up to any entrepreneur with the vision to use them. Here's your Amazon arsenal:
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
BusinessWeek ran an article asking if we're in a bubble, again. It starts by citing Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake's post It’s a bad time to start a company, which we weren't alone in writing about. The articles quotes some Venture Voice alumni who weigh in.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
Download the MP3.
Venture Voice has been illuminating entrepreneurship through the podcast for just short of a year. Now, at the Venture Voice Startup Workshop on June 26 in New York, you can interact with top entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to find out how to start and grow innovative businesses. Venture Voice, a podcast known for asking the hard questions about entrepreneurship, brings together highly successful speakers who’ve gotten their hands dirty growing businesses. This full-day event will be intense. Participants will leave with tactical knowledge about growing a business and with the inspiration to do so.
Tune in to this podcast to hear audio clips from some of the people who will be speaking at the workshop.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
I really enjoy hearing from listeners. The best comments are the ones that challenge us and make us think about how we run the show. Andrew Cheung recently sent one in using our nifty contact form and selected the "You may quote me on this" option, so I'm going to share his comment and respond to it here.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
For some reason we just can't help covering the blog search wars. Our first run in with the fledgeling industry was our interview with Scott Rafer, the then-CEO of the then-rocking Feedster. A couple months after that he left the company along with one of its co-founders, Scott Johnson. We interviewed Scott J. about his new company Ookles, but also got to hear his analysis of what happened in his battle for blog search domination: “Dave’s wicked smart.” Referring to Dave Sifry, the CEO of Technorati, who we just interviewed. Keep in mind Dave's also faced competition already from Google Blog Search and Mark Cuban's IceRocket.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
Download the MP3.
Starting a service aimed at the blogging community is like jumping into a pressure cooker – all of the users are critics and have bullhorns. Good thing David Sifry, the founder of Technorati, has a thick skin he’s built after founding four businesses. He’s not one to go on the defensive. Dave, a first time CEO after serving as CTO at his prior ventures, simply wants to “be of service.” Technorati is now of service to many people. It tracks 2.3 billion links and is, in its own words, “the authority on what's going on in the world of weblogs.”
Show notes:
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
Fortune Magazine's Patricia B. Gray wrote an article, Business Class, asking the age old question: Can you teach entrepreneurship?
I’ve been asked that question ad nauseum since I've led an entrepreneur workshop aimed at high school and college students for the past five summers.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
Forget dodgeball, entrepreneurship is now the thing to do in camp according to BusinessWeek.
Within a two-week period recently, I had the opportunity to speak at class day to a group of 4th graders and to two MBA classes at one of the top three U.S. business schools. I asked the 4th graders if they knew what an entrepreneur was. None of them did. They all liked the concept when I told them, but I truly won them over when I showed off my iPod. Unfortunately I was then upstaged by the two prison guards who presented after me who had their guns and nightsticks as props.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
The Wall Street Journal just ran an article by Emily Meehan titled Young Entrepreneurs Aim To Skip Corporate Ladder. It cites a woman who launched a business venture about ten years ago that didn't succeed.
Ms. Baker was so absorbed in building her business that she lost track of many friends. "It was a very lonely time because nobody my age was really going through that."
While Jenny Baker's experience sounds quite painful overall, that feeling of loneliness seems to stick out in her mind. Rightfully so. Even as more young people start businesses, they'll still be overshadowed by the army of recent grads going into corporate training programs and law school.
I wonder if it would be just slightly different today, now that so many young entrepreneurs from all over the world are blogging, social networking on-line and appearing on podcasts. Perhaps we're forming a virtual Club of Terror.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
When I read Steve Hindy’s excellent book Beer School 
in preparation for my interview with him about how he started the Brooklyn Brewery, one small section jumped out at me. Steve remembered his experience reading an editorial in 1987 by Wilson Harrell, the then publisher of Inc. magazine, titled “Entrepreneurial Terror.” Though Steve and I discussed this on the show, I think this topic deserves more exploration.
Here’s an excerpt of Steve’s summary in his book of Wilson’s article:
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
When: April 22, 2006
Where: Tisch Hall, New York University, New York, NY
What: Venture Voice is a media sponsor of the NYU Entrepreneurship Conference. Venture Voice staff will be on the prowl for entrepreneurs with interesting stories as always.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
This is the first of a new series on Venture Voice where we ask a bunch of past show guests a simple question and post their answers.
How’d you raise your very first round of financing?
Scott Rafer: The first money I raised was for Fotonation in 1996. We just had a cashflow issue, so borrowed $25k off a friend of mine in NY, paying him back the principal plus interest and warrants. It was the right thing for the situation. My mistakes were later.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
Download the MP3.
Whether working with market trends or against them, Frank Addante has found entrepreneurial success. Before he was 29 years old, one of Frank's companies went public and two were acquired. At his worse, he returned capital to investors. Suffering from serial entrepreneurship, Frank left the Illinois Institute of Technology just four classes shy of his degree. His companies range from an early search engine to a Sequoia Capital-backed enterprise email solution. Now Frank aspires to be a web publisher’s best friend with his new ad network optimization service that he says is boosting their clients' revenues by 30-300%. Listen in as Frank details his ongoing entrepreneurial journey.
[Link]
Posted 9 months ago
Over at Silicon Alley Insider, Hank Williams is arguing that VCs are supporting free services that ought to be paid for on the hope advertisers will foot the bill down the road — thereby eliminating the opportunity for noble paid services to make a couple honest bucks by charging users. It's a dubious argument, as pointed our by the site’s own editor (ouch).
If we accept the argument that free is a bad thing, then wouldn't Google be to blame? It's acquired several companies such as Urchin and VC-backed Feedburner (our first guest) that offered paid services and made them free. Google also acquired VC-backed Jot (their CEO talked about plans to charge users on Venture Voice) and GrandCentral, then accelerated their development into free services.
Google understands there's at least two ways to make money from "free" services. Ads, which are time tested and Wall Street approved. And data. Data has tremendous value, especially to Google (as opposed to VCs), as Google can use it to decide on new services to launch and to choose acquisition targets. (Who even needs to do due diligence on an acquisition target if you already are running its analytics?)
What’s next? Look to the past. When Google acquired Urchin, Google was working on its own analytics product that it dumped in favor of Urchin's battle-tested service. Urchin had a hosted stats product that was turned into the free Google Analytics service, and a downloadable product with a license fee. Now, Google has its own ad server in development but just closed an acquisition of DoubleClick (their founder interview here) that charges for its industry standard hosted ad serving service and downloadable ad server. Why not dump the Google's beta free ad serving product and just make DoubleClick's hosted ad server free?
To most companies, it'd be a fine strategy to have different product lines for different market segments (e.g. Microsoft Works vs. Office, Toyota vs. Lexus), but not to Google. The beauty of Google has been allowing the same service to scale to companies of any size, most famously in the case of AdSense/AdWords. Will it break this tradition to preserve DoubleClick's hosted ad serving revenue, which is already under attack from many competitors and from an open source solution (OpenX)?
Disclosure: This blog entry is free.
[Link]
Posted 13 months ago
Download the MP3.
 |
The name Tom Perkins is now almost synonymous with venture capital, but it's clear that he cut his teeth as an entrepreneur. Educated at MIT and Harvard, Perkins first made his mark by managing the initial growth of Hewlett-Packard’s computer business while simultaneously inventing the first cheap and reliable laser. The company he built around the laser, University Laboratories, made him independently wealthy and allowed for the creation of Kleiner Perkins, one of the most successful venture capital firms in existence. Kleiner Perkins (now Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers) has funded a wide range of well known and wildly successful companies including Google, AOL, Genentech, Sun Microsystems, Compaq, and Tandem Computers. Though Tom's wowed the business press for much of his career, later in life he's gained national attention for having a key role in 2006 Hewlett-Packard board controversy, briefly marrying Danielle Steel, and building the world's largest privately owned sailing yacht. Tom has recently stepped back into the media spotlight by publishing a memoir called
Valley Boy: The Education of Tom Perkins 
. Listen in as he discusses his journey from New York to Boston to Silicon Valley, the creation of Kleiner Perkins, and his advice for the entrepreneurs of the future.
[Link]
Posted 13 months ago
We just received this e-mail from Sydney Mfuniselwa who gave us permission to post it:
My name is Sydney from South Africa, I am really moved by the interviews on show. I wish we had something like this here in South Africa because I think my country needs stuff like Venture Voice as it still developing.
My point is I am 25 young black man as software developer, trying to go on entrepreneurship but its hard in this part of the world because most of the people cannot even use a computers and I already made my mistake by planning and planning for a long time in developing a database for the company I work for which i did developed and presented to my senior manager but just heard the company has already sign up for a new system to be implemented because of this I felt so down for a while up until i manage to put my hands on one of venture voice interviews. Two things I have highlighted from the entrepreneurs you interviewed are:
1. Do not waste time trying to plan a perfect product execution is the key.
2. And do not let million rejections wear you off.
Now I am trying again because i believe I should be an entrepreneur and i just open internet cafe on one of historical known building in Carlton in the Johannesburg CBD.
I truly appreciate Venture Voice.
[Link]
Posted 15 months ago
Silicon Alley Insider asked me to write about my trip to the West Coast (DEMO in San Diego, Podcast Expo in LA, meetings in Silicon Valley). Enjoy!
[Link]
Posted 16 months ago
We took off for the summer from Venture Voice. E-mails like these from loyal fans made it a painful experence:
Great show, have you taken the summer of? I hope to hear you back on the pods soon.
Cheers!
pb
Penticton, BC
—-
I talked with Joel Spolsky recently and he said that you are no longer doing Venture Voice! I have learned so much from your podcasts and was disheartened to hear this news. I do hope that you continue VV. I wish you the best in what you are now doing. Diwant
I can explain!
I was busy launching a new business called News Groper, a network of parody first-person blogs. For example, if you want your fix of business news, you can read blogs "by" Tom Perkins, Ben Bernanke, Stephen Schwarzman and Jeff Skilling.
But fall's upon us. Venture capitalists are back from vacation, customers are ready to do deals again and entrepreneurs are more than ready to pounce. As such, we're ready to give you the content you need.
I’m very excited to announce that Eddie LeBreton<
regular business, and get paid for it. But it is important that you are not just getting paid to shop. When you choose mystery shopping as your work from home job, you need to take it seriously. While you can take your kids with you on some trips, others may not be appropriate for children. Companies often have specific guidelines for things they want to know about your shopping experience. Additionally, you often have a specific time frame that you will have to shop in (usually within two or three days at a specific time of day, like morning or evening). You may be directed to do certain things. And you will have to fill out a report. In order to get more gigs, you will need to have thorough reports that cover all of the requested bases. And you need to be efficient to make it worth your while. Make sure that you do other errands while on your way to your mystery shopping gig.See Also Mystery ShoppingMore work from home ideas [Link]
way to meet valuable contacts and find new opportunities. The same is true for people who work from home. In fact, it may even be more true for a person who has a work at home business. It is important to reach out and get to know people. You can your business networking both online and offline. It is best to do a little of both. That way you find more opportunities. There are plenty of online networking Web sites, and there are also plenty of offline opportunities — from the local small business association to the Chamber of Commerce — for you to take advantage of.See Also Work at Home BusinessIdeas for the person who works from home [Link]
A good way to make a little money from home, and have a good time, can be through affiliate programs. I have a friend, D.J., who has been doing an affiliate program for Close to My Heart, a scrapbooking company. She offers workshops on making scrapbooking pages and homemade cards. This not only helps her cover the costs of some of her supplies, but it also builds a loyal group of ladies who, when they want additional ideas and supplies, will visit her Web site and get ideas. And, of course, she gets a cut of whatever is ordered through her Web site. An excellent way to do something you love, and get a little money for it! There are several other types of affiliate programs, from selling educational books to Mary Kay products.See Also Make Money From HomeHome business ideas [Link]
Stuffing envelopes. It sounds like the perfect work from home job. You sit in front of the TV after the kids are in bed and stuff envelopes. Or you do it in the car while on a family vacation. Unfortunately, the whole working at home stuffing envelopes thing is actually a scam. What you are stuffing into envolopes is information on how others can perpetuate the scam. After you send in a fee for "marketing materials" and "information training," you find that you are simply going to be making copies of the information and placing ads asking others to send you money for the information. You won't make too much money, and most honest people will feel bad about participating in such a rip-off.See Also Working From HomeLegitimate ideas for a home business [Link]
While any home business requires more than 10 minutes a day to maintain, you can get started by setting aside 10 minutes a day to get your work at home idea off the ground. One of the most daunting and overwhelming things about a home business is the setting up. There is so much to do. Chunking it down so that you just get moving can have a good effect. Set aside 10 minutes each day that you can devote to working from home. Set yourself a task, and then accomplish it, whether it is finding the paperwork you need to set up your business or arranging a work area, the key is to keep moving and keep working on your at home business. You will find that pretty soon you are spending more than 10 minutes a day, and that you do not feel overwhelmed at all.See Also Starting a Home BusinessWork at home and make money [Link]
