Jason Devitt

For-side.com Stock

What remained of my first company, Vindigo, shut down yesterday. 30 people lost their jobs. It was a sad end for a company that built some of the first popular applications for PDAs and cell phones in the US.

I sold Vindigo to Japan’s For-side.com four years ago, and left a year later because I disagreed profoundly with them about what the company should do next. That year (2005) Vindigo was on track to do over $10 million in revenue and our sister company Zingy, which For-side had acquired at the same time, was heading towards $50 million. The plan was to combine the two US companies and take them public.

Six months after I left, most of my executive team had quit too. Vindigo and Zingy merged. The company went through four CEOs in three years, all of whom disagreed with For-side about what the company ought to do next.

It wasn’t just the CEOs. Of the 30 people who lost their jobs yesterday, only two were part of my original team.

And in three years, somehow $60 million in revenue fell to zero (or close enough to zero that the company had to shut down).

In June 2004, when For-side acquired both Vindigo and Zingy, the stock peaked at 231,000 Yen. Today the stock closed at around 1,400 Yen, down 99.5%.

My friend John Dennehy, another Irish entrepreneur, subscribes to the OED’s word-of-the-day email. Yesterday’s word was founder:
the other founder.

"The damoiseau Jason..began thenne to foundre in teeris right
habondantly."

I would link back to the source, but it is subscription only. Thanks John.

Mike Wells writes code in the parlor

Summer and I moved to San Francisco on February 3rd. Our friends Joan Hull and John Phillips own the Parsonage, a Bed & Breakfast Inn in a landmark Victorian building on Haight Street, and they offered to let us stay for a month while we searched for an apartment. My partner Mike Wells and I have been working in the parlor all this week and I am nominating the Parsonage as Most Elegant Place To Start A Company.

Uploaded by DogFromSPACE

Three months ago I wrote a post called "New York or the Valley?" about whether I should move to the west coast to start my next business.

I put it this way: given that my wife and I could live anywhere in the US right now (we have recently returned from a long trip and all our things are in storage), and that I am planning to start a new technology company, are there any advantages to starting it in New York?

Phrased a little differently each time, I put that question to dozens of friends and colleagues in the last few months. But apart from the obvious cases - businesses related to financial services, real estate, or marketing - no one could make a strong case for NY.

Yes, I heard many pleas in mitigation, many
examples of how you can succeed here, presuming that you have
already decided that this is where you want to live. But we haven’t. Though we love this city, we’re also attracted to the Bay Area - the climate, the scenery, being a little closer to my wife’s family in Oregon, TechShop. Call it a wash. My wife and I decided to make our decision on purely professional grounds; to go wherever we thought we could maximize our chances of success.

So Summer and I are moving to San Francisco at the beginning of February. To old friends, bye for now - my new business will bring me back to NY quite often. To new, we can’t wait to meet you.

And if you think I’ve missed some very important advantage of New York … sigh. Too late.

Photo by katiew.

I have an idea for a new company. No, I am not ready to publish it to the world. But I have been talking about it with several people, including former investors, colleagues, and friends, and their advice has been very valuable. (Thank you all.)

Which begs the question - whom do talk to about your ideas, and when?

Most entrepreneurs are paranoid. True, not everyone is out to get you, but a lot of capable well-funded people are, and it only takes one.

At the same time, unless you can name someone who has built a billion-dollar company literally all by themselves, you have to trust someone, sometime.

Recently a would-be entrepreneur asked me whether she should patent her invention, but refused to tell me anything about it. Another person would only tell me that "there is a human function that has never been automated … until now" and did I know anyone who could help him? Er … Toto?

When there is nothing but a raw idea, a sketch on a napkin or envelope, my rule is that feedback is free. If I know you or you are recommended by someone that I know, and you have an idea that you would like my opinion about, I am happy to give you some thoughts. I may or may not ask you to return the favor. (I almost certainly will.)

If once you start talking about your idea I realize that there is a conflict - that I am working on something related - I will stop you and say so. If we decide to go on, I may end up incorporating some of your ideas in my own project, and you some of mine.

There is a time and place for formal non-disclosure agreements, but not until there is something concrete to protect, or you are forced to talk to someone that you are not sure about. And if your idea is really patentable you should be even more careful, because disclosure could invalidate your claims. Otherwise:

1. Find someone that you trust.
2. Tell her that you value her opinion and would like her advice.
3. Make it clear that all you are offering is a thank you and a firm handshake.
4. Tell her your idea.
5. Listen to her opinion.
6. Repeat.

Ah, but what if you don’t know who to trust? Easy! That means you are not qualified to be an entrepreneur. You are destined to be ripped of by your partners, your investors, your employees, your vendors, your customers, your immediate family, your priest, pastor, and dog, so best to give up now.

And that feedback is free.

Apparently there is a crisis in the world of venture capital. Those who write about it see two distinct problems, one on the way in and one on the way out. Technology has so lowered the cost of starting a business that traditional VCs are no longer needed; on the way out the number of IPOs and big-ticket acquisitions has obviously dwindled, MySpace and YouTube and maybe Facebook being the exceptions. Some entrepreneurs seem quite smug about VC troubles. I think that the ‘crisis’ is largely confined to consumer Internet services, and that it is more of a crisis for entrepreneurs than it is for VCs.

True, part of the problem on the IPO side has nothing to do with technology or VCs. It’s a piece of over-zealous legislation called Sarbanes-Oxley that has raised the cost of going public. Personally I think the way to prevent corporate crimes is not to make companies swear to their accountants that they are really really not lying about their EBITDA, but to make them disclose as much information as possible to investors. SarbOx didn’t reveal that dozens of corporate executives had back-dated options; it was Erik Lie, a finance professor from the University of Iowa who crunched numbers that were publicly available.

But mostly the problem is that while the technology and the concepts behind Web 2.0 are exciting and important, the companies that embody them just aren’t very valuable. Pioneering sites like Flickr and delicious sold for less than $50 million each, and even YouTube and MySpace didn’t think that they could survive as independent companies. In total it’s just not enough money to get venture investors excited.

No problem, we are told, since cheap Intel boxes and Amazon S3 and Ruby on Rails and the rest of it mean that you can launch a company with $6,000 and a bowl of ramen.

Wait a minute. All over this country, across every sector, small business owners use an average of $10,000 to start their businesses. Even for this year’s Inc 500, a list of the 500 fastest-growing companies in America over the last four years, the median amount of start-up capital was only $75,000.

The key word is small. Like their peers in construction and retail and transportation, most of the consumer-facing Web 2.0 businesses are small today and will stay small. What is different is that most of the founders of the Web 2.0 companies believe that they are destined to be big.

VCs are adjusting to the fact that just like railroads, automobiles, fast food, bowling alleys, wall-to-wall carpet, fabless semiconductors, and personal computers in days gone by, the consumer Internet market has begun to mature and no longer presents many interesting opportunities for venture returns. (Yes, there will be exceptions; but every so often there is still an opportunity for a venture-backed retail franchise.)

A lot of the entrepreneurs that I meet have not made that adjustment. That’s the crisis.

An old friend of mine had this to say about one of the points in my post Don’t Ask:

You don’t ask is the sector hot. Your do explain why of course, but I think there is more to it. An old trading maxim, when a piece of new economic data comes out what do you do first? Analyze what the data means for the economy or something like that? Wrong. The first thing you do is analyze how other people are going to view the data. This is far more time critical than what you think of the data … Take this into start-ups and you get, if other people think the sector is hot it will positively change how they perceive my business and make everything I do easier (funding and of course staff).

For highly liquid securities in public markets, he is absolutely right. But successful VCs don’t usually think this way (even though they are essentially prop. traders, managing a private equity book). Neither should entrepreneurs. The reason is liquidity; in trading terms, if it is going to take three years on average to work out of every position that you put on, you can’t afford to bet on sentiment.

In English, for the entrepreneur:

1. Sure, you are more likely to get capital if the sector is hot, because there are fools out there who will give it to you. Then what? Leaving aside the craziness of 1999-2000, there are very few opportunities to flip privately held companies to greater fools in a couple of months. You have two to five years to build something that is (or has clear potential) to be a big, profitable business. Jason Fried summed it up like this: "Building to flip is building to flop."

2. If what you are doing happens to be in a hot sector then you should probably play that up. But first impressions last.  Once you tag your company as, say, P2P in the minds of customers,
journalists, and investors, it is incredibly difficult to change that
once the market sours. If P2P is fundamental to your business and your
business still makes sense, you just ignore the noise and carry on. But
if it’s not and you now need to re-invent yourself, good luck. The staff who joined you for this reason will quit. The investors who backed you will complain about having to explain the change to their LPs. The best you can hope for from the press is to
be tagged as a company that is … trying to reinvent itself. You will change the company’s name to escape your past, and confuse all your customers in the process.

3. If it’s on the cover of BusinessWeek, it’s too late. Hot sectors are almost by definition over-competed; the best opportunities are usually in categories that look picked over and abandoned. When Google started search was supposed to be over, done, finished. (David Cowan ran away from the house where Google was built.) P2P was hot when Napster was but untouchable by the time that Skype launched. In the early 1990s VCs lost over a billion dollars investing in tablet computers and PDAs;  Palm computing started after that and had to sell themselves to 3Com to get the capital that they needed. The market for electric cars was supposed to be dead in the US before Toyota launched the hybrid Prius, etc. etc.

4. Finally, if the company that you’ve been building for five years is getting a lot of attention because your sector has become hot, then you should seriously consider selling it. Be a seller, not a buyer, when the sector is hot.

***

One of my other points was on the limitations of market research. Michael Mace has an excellent post on this topic today, using mobile phones as an example.

As promised, three questions I never ask about a startup idea …

What does the market research say?

For a variety of reasons I am interested in developing brand new products and services, not minor variations on existing products. The problem is that market surveys about products that do not exist contain almost no information.

I don’t mean that they are always wrong; that would make them very helpful. I mean zero information content - no better than tossing a coin.

The main reason is that most people are terrible at visualizing what a completely new product might look like and how it might affect their lives. How would you have responded to a survey in 1994 about your level of interest in the Internet? What about mobile phones - in 1984?

Even people directly involved in the market that you are targeting are bad at this - or else they’d have had the same idea that you have. This is why they’re going to call you a visionary, right?

A more general problem is that many surveys are poorly designed. Here’s one list of potential errors. If all you have is the outline of an idea for a new product, you are guaranteed to commit most of them. Garbage in, garbage out.

Once there’s a working prototype, market research starts to get useful. If it’s hardware you can build a fully-functioning prototype and still face significant costs before going into production; proper market testing is essential. But on the web, if you have a working prototype then slap the word beta on and ship it. Make it an invitation-only trial if you think there is still a lot of work to do.

Research the market as it stands. Research your competitors. And definitely talk to potential customers; but if the concept is new, you have to be very careful about how you interpret their answers.

Is this technology cool?

Who cares? Does the product work, does it meet a need (or create its own), is it cheaper than the alternatives?

Getting excited about a cool technology is probably the most common mistake made by brilliant engineers when they start companies.

YouTube used someone else’s technology - Macromedia’s Flash player - to create a brand new service - syndicated video. Network effects from syndicated video grew their traffic to 100 million video streams per day. And that traffic was valued by Google at $1.65 billion. To say that YouTube has no interesting technology of its own is both correct and irrelevant.

But YouTube’s success points to another question which does matter: does the technology scale? As the New York Times explained earlier this week, Friendster could not scale; MySpace did. Again, there is nothing cool about MySpace’s technology. It just worked.

Is this category hot?

If simply adding ‘Web 2.0′ to the first page of your business plan makes an investor more excited than they were before, think very carefully before taking their money. They do not know what they are doing. And if this is the only way that you can get anyone interested in backing your idea, start over.

Panning for Gold by Jon Kneller

Last time I wrote about the questions you should ask yourself before starting a business. Any business. They apply no matter who you are and no matter what business you have in mind, be it cafe, shipyard, or gunsforkillingnanobots.com.

How you decide whether a given business is right for you is much more personal; it depends on your skills, your interests, your ambitions, and the kind of people and resources that you can call upon to help you. I want to grow a very small business into a very large one; I really enjoy the challenges that brings. You may not want to employ more than five people provided you’re generating the income you want. Our criteria for sizing up potential businesses will be very different.

First-time entrepreneurs often don’t think about this at all. They have a great idea and dive right in. Second-time entrepreneurs like me have bad memories about doing that, and we also get offered more choices - which forces us to develop some sort of process for sorting through them.

Here are the questions that I ask myself about each new idea. Thoughts and comments welcome; your process may be very different and/or much better.

Am I going to enjoy this?

I am going to spend 60 to 100 hours a week working on this for, say, 5 years without a guaranteed return. It had better be fun, or worthwhile, or intellectually challenging. Ideally all three.

Do I know a lot about the market, or does no one know anything about the market?

If I enter a market that I know nothing about, I’ll waste time and money learning how it works and making avoidable errors while more experienced competitors watch me suffer. I’d rather be on the other side, or else enter a market that’s entirely new. I’ll still waste time but so will everyone else.

How large will the market be?

If the market will never be larger than $10 million, neither will my revenues. The challenge is the gap between "is" and "will be." The mobile advertising market may be worth $10 billion one day, but not yet. CD sales are headed in the opposite direction.

Is there a concentration of suppliers or vendors in the market today?

Then there are powerful people who can stop me from succeeding in ways that I may not be able to anticipate. I wrote about this in a previous post. 

How many potential revenue streams are there?

There’s no way of knowing what direction the business may take. The more potential revenue streams I can see, the more degrees of freedom I will have.

Advertising can be a great business model. But it’s seasonal, it’s the first budget cut in a recession and the last one raised in a recovery, most of your revenue is non-recurring, and even your best customers often pay you 90 days late.

Is this idea genuinely disruptive? How? To whom?

Clayton Christensen’s ideas on innovation inform a lot of my thinking about strategy. Unfortunately, like most interesting concepts in management theory, they’ve been diluted. Almost every tech entrepreneur describes his or her business as disruptive (and viral and web 2.0 and industry-leading), although if you ask them whether they are competing against non-consumption or providing a low-cost alternative to over-served customers their faces go blank.

Read the books if you haven’t, and check out the cover story of this month’s Business 2.0. (I don’t agree with all of their picks, but Zopa is a standout.)

A disruptive business model offers me the best chance of growing a very small business into a very large one with the least amount of capital and the least threat of competition from big established companies.

WIll this scale?

Put simply, will revenues grow faster than costs? This rules out service businesses completely. eBay is better than Amazon; Amazon is better than WalMart.

How will I reach customers?

I love businesses where customers have a good reason to recruit
other customers, beyond merely liking the product. Nothing beats
messaging in this regard: ICQ, Skype, now Jajah. MMOGs are a lot more
fun for you if you can persuade your friends to play. [1] 

How far can I get without Other People’s Money?

I am not obsessed with ownership or control. Outside investors can help a business grow much more quickly by bringing knowledge and relationships to bear as well as capital. And owning 50% of a successful business is much better than 100% of a failed one. But the further I can get without OPM, the less of my business I will have to sell when I do decide to take it.

Ideally, can I get to cashflow-positive without taking a dime from anyone except friends and family? [2]

Forget accounting profits; cash is king. A business that throws off more cash than it takes to keep the doors open is not only more valuable to outside investors, it has far more exit options. And thinking about how to get there from day one helps me to ensure that I am building a real company, not a science project.

How do I create barriers to entry?

For the kind of businesses
that interest me, the only barriers to entry anymore are network
effects, plus good old-fashioned brand loyalty and out-innovating the
competition. I am skeptical about the value of patents to a tech
startup because of the cost of acquiring and enforcing them. Smart
customers hate getting locked into proprietary technologies, and my
first customers are likely to be very smart. And exclusive partnerships
are rare in fast-moving industries; nobody wants to commit.

But sometimes with a little thought a business idea that has no
network effects can be reworked so that it does. For example, if SixApart did more to bring me
readers from other Typepad blogs, by leveraging the data that only they
have, then I would have a great reason to keep my blog here. [Update: I have since left Typepad.]

Next: questions I never ask myself about a business idea.

[1] It’s not to late to save ‘disruptive’, but I can’t say ‘viral’ with a straight face.

[2] I recommending letting friends and family in at the beginning, even if you don’t need the money. It gives the people closest to you a stake in your success, and not wanting to let them down is a great motivator. If you are successful, they probably won’t be able to afford to invest later on. But never take money from anyone who can’t afford to lose it.

Earlier this week a friend asked me how I screen ideas for new businesses; how do I decide what to do next. Do I ask people I trust for their opinions? Do I look at revenue projections? The buzz on Techcrunch? What Google paid for YouTube?

I was about to write a post about this, but then I remembered something more important.

Back up. Start with what makes you happy. Carried away with ideas for new widgets, a lot of entrepreneurs never stop to think about this.

Do you hate working for someone else? If so, why? Is it just because you have a lousy boss? Changing your job or even your career may seem hard, but both are a lot easier than starting your own business. Or is it because you would rather bear all the responsibility for being wrong than be overruled and later proven right?

Do you hate having other people report to you? Unless you can find a partner who will do that while you make all the important decisions - and good luck with that search - you will be working with a handful of partners or all by yourself.

You have an idea for a product or service that doesn’t exist. Great. Have you considered licensing the idea to someone else? Or, since a raw idea is worth approximately zero, just giving it away? Or do you have good reason to believe that no one else could do it better than you can?

Do you value your free time? Do you "work to live, not live to work"? Or does the thought of bringing your idea to market make you happier than almost anything else in the world? (Don’t be ashamed.)

Do you enjoy spending all of your time designing new products or writing code or talking to customers? If you start your own business you will be lucky to spend 10% of your time doing what you most enjoy.

Does asking people for help or for money make you feel uncomfortable? Or do you think that when you ask someone to invest or work with you, you are doing them a favor?

Do you have a routine that make you very comfortable, or do you prefer frequent change? You had better like change. A lot.

What about your spouse and kids? Can they stand the upheaval? Or can they not imagine you doing anything else? Could you cancel a family vacation for the sake of a customer? An anniversary dinner? Miss your daughter’s holiday concert? This may not happen often, but I promise you that it will happen.

Can you deal with failure?

Finally, do you just want to be rich? Then become a corporate lawyer. The odds are better.

If you answered all these questions the right way and you are not running your own business, then you ought to be.

Tomorrow I will write about how I screen business ideas.