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June 29 My blog moved to TypePadMay 18 Next Generation Job Board RANKS candidates by MeritWe launched today, and here is our article on TechCrunch about our company TalentSpring.com.
TalentSpring ranks resumes within theirindustry. This allows employers to go directly to the strongestcandidates in an industry. The resumes are ranked by peers who are votingagainst others. April 29 Web 2.0 vs ApplicationsMy blog has moved to blog.BryanStarbuck.com.
InstaCalc.com is a very creative startup that contrasts how web sites can be much better then a legacy Software Application. InstaCalc chose to be better than Excel by doing less. They focus on the scenario of getting a quick calculation accomplished. This contrasts Excel that is a general purpose tool that scales to large spreadsheet.
InstaCalc.com's focus allows their user interface to be easier to use in these quick calculation scenarios that Excel. When I want a quick calculation accomplished, I'll go to InstaCalc. In the less frequent cases of creating an extensive spreadsheet, I'll go to Excel. Example: http://InstaCalc.com/ April 16 Beyond HTML: Microsoft Silverlight vs Adobe ApolloMy blog has moved to blog.BryanStarbuck.com. The internet is getting ready to advance to a better platform beyond traditional HTML. It is likely going to take 3 to 5 years to complete, however the technology is now getting ready. Microsoft Silverlight joins Adobe's Apollo among others to compete to become a new higher level platform beyond HTML. In the past, innovation to directly help consumers most often happened in software products written on top of an a platform like Windows Win32. This platform was important to allow applications to take advantage of the full capabilities of the computer, such as sound, video, networking, printing, etc. The mac and Linux had equivalent but incompatible platforms.
With the internet, the web used HTML as a new platform to provided many benefits beyond the legacy Win32 platform. It is no coincidence that almost all consumer facing innovation has happened on the web HTML platform over the last 4 years. Examples include Google Maps, Gmail, Zillow, FareCast, MySpace, Facebook, Linked-In, Wikipedia, Digg, YouTube, Flickr, etc. I'm a big believer that the playing field changes when an innovation provides an improvement 10-times better than the previous solution. The 10-times or 10x improvement with HTML was that users could use their data on any computer (any type windows/mac/linux and without installing software) since their data was always stored on the server. The second 10x improvement was that if the user had any problems, they could always close the web browser and all problems went away (crashes, security, etc.). As a programmer, the inclination is to said that "win32 could be a little faster" but the truth is that users have a much stronger preference for access anywhere and with no fuss. The internet is now getting ready for the next generation platform. The 10x improvement this time is in: a) better graphics, and b) faster user interface. A few innovations occurred over the last 4 years on legacy platforms (Win32 / DirectX / OpenGL) because they provided better graphics and faster user interfaces. Examples included SecondLife, World-of-Warcraft, and other games. Microsoft just released Silverlight to join the existing next generation platforms, such as Adobe Flash and Adobe Apollo. I believe it will take 3 to 5 years until most web sites can benefit from the next generation with amazing graphics and speed. The primary challenging being that users still demand that their information is available everywhere, so these platforms will only succeed if and when they because available on as many platforms as possible. They also must provide a level of openness so that niche platforms can also implement support. YouTube was the first mass market site to make this transition and depend upon flash. Flash gave them the advantage of starting movies before they finished downloading without requiring a movie player. YouTube greatly increased the percentage of computers with flash installed, which will make it easier for the next wave of sites. Microsoft Silverlight: http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2007/04/15/introducing-microsoft-silverlight.aspx Adobe Apollo: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/videos/apollo_demo07/index.html March 01 Kaneva = SecondLife + MySpaceMy blog has moved to blog.BryanStarbuck.com. Kaneva is one of the most amazing companies I've seen recently. Kaneva is like SecondLife combined with MySpace. It creates a social network like MySpace. It lets users go into a SecondLife like environment when they want to get more involved. It then allows the user's photo and video content inside of that 3-D environment. In hindsight it is an obvious idea. Congratulations to the Kaneva guys. This is a great video that explains Kaneva: http://www.kaneva.com/channel/crad30.people It will be very difficult for them to be as good as MySpace + Flickr + YouTube + SecondLife. However allowing users to bridge between each is a powerful advantage. I think long-term, each of the individual services will either need to compete, integrate, or loose to a service like Kaneva. It is currently invite only to use Kaneva. You can email me or post your email address in the comments if you want to receive an invite. -Bryan February 17 PR for Internet StartupsPR is very important for the launch plan for internet startups. Every month, a group of founders of internet startups get together here in Seattle to discuss issues we all face at Seattle Tech Startups. I'm bringing together a speaker and a panel of PR experts that specialize in working with internet startups during their launch. The meeting will be on February 22nd. I will facilitate the panel discussion. Speakers: Paul Forecki Paul
Forecki is founder and president of VOXUS PR, a fast growing boutique
Panelists: Deanna Leung: Deanna
Leung has over 15 years of corporate marketing experience and is a Paul Forecki Paul
Forecki is founder and president of VOXUS PR, a fast growing boutique
January 06 Is Linked-In a new source of Nigerian Scams?Linked-In's new feature to ask questions can enable a new attack form for scams. Here is one question I just read: The classic Nigerian scam is to email someone saying that their rich relative died and has millions of dollars to be claimed. It requests the victim to send money to be used in the process to free the millions that the victim will receive. I can easily see the same scam happening in different on Linked-In with this question feature. The problem happens with "Super Connectors" that accept an invite from anyone who asked to connect in Linked-In. These Super Connectors often have 1 thousand to 20 thousand links in Linked-In. This allows a scammer to connect to a Super Connector and then scam everyone who is connected to the Super Connector. Linked-In has a way to rank answers. We need a way to tag questions that appear to be scams. You would hope that the people who use linked-in are sophisticated enough to identify these scams, but that may not happen. The feature I really want is to block questions that come from Super Connectors. Each account could set a threshold for the number of connections that constitute a Super Connector to block. There can also be thumbs-up and thumbs-down icons next to each question to vote away the spam-like questions. -Bryan December 20 NimbleBee in the Seattle PIMy blog has moved to blog.BryanStarbuck.com. John Cook wrote about NimbleBee today. For anyone who doesn't know about John Cook's Venture Blog, it is the closest we have to a Settle version of TechCrunch. John reviews many startups in Seattle. His blog is also a great place to find out about events going on in Seattle. NimbleBee is our code name until we launch with our branded site. You can sign-up if you want to be notified when we launch. -Bryan December 07 Zillow will Replace some Real Estate AgentsI think Zillow will try to replace the MLS and create an efficient market to sell houses (In my humble opinion). Zillow's CEO and leadership built Expedia and they replaced travel agents with Expedia. I think they may end up displacing some Real Estate agents. I think their first step is to make Zillow become the MLS replacement (by being a competitor first). Then create an efficient market place to bid and negotiate house sales. What remains will be a need for "advisers" or real estate agents to give tours of homes and giving advice. This is extremely exciting news. The MLS system has been about locking certain people out of using it and using it as leverage to increase fees. I think that has built up a lot of ill-will and pent up demand. If the MLS organizations want to exist in 10 years, I think they need to create a plan now on how to convert to open system. Otherwise they will be replaced. Zillow: The "eBay" for the real estate market. This post is based on the new news from Zillow: TechCrunch, GigaOM. -Bryan (My main blog is here) I think Zillow will try to replace the MLS and create an efficient market to sell houses (In my humble opinion). Zillow's CEO and leadership built Expedia and they replaced travel agents with Expedia. I think they may end up displacing some Real Estate agents. I think their first step is to make Zillow become the MLS replacement (by being a competitor first). Then create an efficient market place to bid and negotiate house sales. What remains will be a need for "advisers" or real estate agents for giving people tours of the houses and giving some advice. Zillow: The "eBay" for the real estate market. This post is based on the new news from Zillow: TechCrunch, GigaOM. -Bryan December 06 First Time CEO important stepsI gave a talk yesterday at the Seattle Tech Startups meeting. The talk includes the steps I believe are important for first time CEOs of internet companies. The meeting is mainly ex-Microsoft ex-Amazon developers who are founders of internet companies here in Seattle. Several people asked me to post my slide deck so here it is. Most of the content was verbal. I put some of the verbal content in the notes at the bottom of each slide.
-Bryan Tags: Seattle Tech Startups, Keiretsu, Keiretsu Forum, Seattle Keiretsu Forum, Alliance of Angels, AoA, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich Rosati, Funding, startups, internet startups. November 30 Seattle Tech Startups MeetingThis coming Tuesday (12/5/2006) is the Seattle Tech Startups meeting (link here). This is a meeting for founders and other people interested in internet start-ups.
Most of the people who come are ex-Amazon, ex-Microsoft, ex-RealNetworks developers. The talks include everything from funding to technical issues with growing your internet start-up.
In this Tuesday's meeting, I'll give a talk on growing a company from the founding stage through launch and post-launch.
Where: Seattle Public Library, Capitol Hill branch, upstairs meeting room.
When: 6pm - 7:45pm
Last month Dennis Lee (VP of Technical Operations at MarchEx) gave a talk on the operations side of running a company. Gaurav Oberoi from BillMonk.com started the Seattle Tech Startups meetings. Another good blog for the Seattle Startup environment are Bill Monk's blog and Andy Sack's blog A Sack of Seattle. Another up coming event is Seattle Ignite. -Bryan November 29 Windows Live Spaces vs TypePadI previously used Windows Live Spaces for my blog. I've decided to switch to TypePad. Windows Live Spaces is a great turn-key blog. I'm switching to TypePad because it's a bit more advanced and gives a much more professional blog. My new TypePad blog is: blog.BryanStarbuck.com. Windows Live Spaces Advantages:
TypePad Advantages:
I will make all new posts on both blogs. There is one KILLER feature that Windows Live Spaces has that prevents me from only using TypePad -- and that is the gleams that appear in Windows Live Messenger and on other Spaces pages that light up when changes happen. This tells your friends when to visit your site. In the end, I've decided to pay to receive the features I needed. -Bryan Tags: [TypePad, Windows Live Spaces, Blogging, Windows Live Messenger] November 28 Boot Camp for Internet Startup CEOs"Entrepreneur University" is effectively a boot camp for first time CEOs of startups. It is held once a year in Seattle and was on November 2nd of this year. It started at 7:30am and ended at 8:30pm. It was fun to meet many early stage founders and CEOs as they were shaping their companies. I felt like it was an entrepreneur class of 2007 and it will be interesting to see the companies that come from this set of people in the next 5 years. This was a 13 hour long day with class after class. There were two tracks, one called "Start your Engines" for early founders. The second track was "Petal to the Medal" and focused on established companies that looked for the next stage of growth. Each person who attended could pick which classes to attend during the day. During lunch, they had CEOs or area experts host each table. This let early founders pick a table by expertise (marketing, sales, fund raising, etc.) and then bring up their issues and have a table discussion. I met several other Microsoft alumni who were starting their own companies. Many of the VCs and CEO speakers also previously worked for Microsoft. Speakers included CostCo CEO (Jim Sinegal), QPass founder (Chase Franklin), aQuantive co-founder (Nick Hanauer), and many other current CEOs. It also included the opportunity to speak to VCs from several VC firms: Madrona Venture Partners, Ignition Partners, OVP Venture Partners, among many others*. The evening ended with food in the evening and a chat to network with other founders and members of the start-up community (lawyers, etc.). This was a great event because it brought some of the most influential members of the Puget Sound startup community and they were very accessible by early founders. This include Craig Sherman, Joe Whitford, Dan Rosen, and the other VCs and successful CEOs. * Frazier Venture Partners, Fluke Venture Partners, Second Avenue Partners, SeaPoint Ventures, Cascadia Capital, Buerk Dale Victor, Maveron LLC, Dan Rosen & Associates, and WRF Capital. -Bryan Tags: [Entrepreneur University, NWEN, Internet Startups, Seattle Startups, Startups, Dan Rosen, Craig Sherman, Joe Whitford, Madrona Venture Partners, Ignition Partners, OVP Venture Partners, Frazier Venture Partners, Fluke Venture Partners, Second Avenue Partners, SeaPoint Ventures, Cascadia Capital, Buerk Dale Victor, Maveron LLC, and WRF Capital] November 07 Hated Pre-Launch sign-up PagesOur start-up will launch in a few months and we have a signup screen.
People often hate these sign-up screens, but they are necessary part of launch. Don't "hate on" us too much.
Our Sign-up Page: www.nimblebee.com
Pitching your Start-up to VCs & Angel InvestorsThere is an art to creating the pitch and presenting it to VCs and Angels.
Most CEO of a start-ups have a slide deck to "pitch" or explain their company. This is used when raising money from VCs or Angel investors. It is also often used when hiring people, because people won't join the company unless they truly believe in your business model.
The rule of thumb is that you need to communiate your company completely in 10 minutes. Here is a common flow for pitching to Angels or VCs. 
Recently I reviewed my company and my deck with Dan Rosen to get his feedback. Dan is the chariman of the Alliance of Angels and was a VC at Frazier. People in Seattle know Dan because he is a hub in the Seattle start-up scene and has amazing advice for new companies. Dan's feedback gave me and my co-founder the confidence that we are on the right track. We also receive a lot of good input.
The Alliance of Angels has a web site walking through the steps to refine a pitch slide deck. This is critical for any entrepreneur, even when they aren't raising money. This process will force the CEO to flush out their business model in-depth.
The Alliance of Angels web site has a sample slide deck available for download. A secret is that the notes in the sample deck have great tips that are important for the financial planning when generating the deck or topics that are important to to include in the verbal walk through of the deck.
I've attended Alliance of Angels and Keiretsu events where I watched other CEOs pitch their companies. Here is what I learned from their pitches and having to write the pitch myself.
1. Audience has No Context: The audience will have no context for your business. The entrepreneur will often only have 2 1/2 minutes to describe the problem/solution/product. The audience must have a clean understanding on how to partition the market between your solution (fix to the problem) and the other products in the market. Asking yourself, "Will they see a clean partitioning of the market" will help point out areas of the deck to improve. The audience will project their background knowledge onto the framing you present. You will succeed if it clearly partitions the market across existing solutions, the core problem, and your fix.
2. One Point each Slide: The audience is only able to digest one idea per slide. The time constraints will only allow them to process that much. It is often best have the entire problem and solution (including product) be communicated on 3 to 5 slides. Each slide only makes one point. This lets the text and an graphics clearly communicate the one main idea. If the slide has a few sub-bullets, expect the audience to only catch a few of them.
2. One or Two verbal sentances per slide: If there is more talking on one slide, then smaller audiences will often interupt. Show one slide with one or two verbal sentenances, and then move on before they loose their attention span. This has the added benefit of keeping the communication balanced between text/graphics/verbal. The CEO needs to frame the problem across slides to communicate clearly. Each slide should scope in on the market's optimal fix for the problem which turns into the business model for the company.
October 07 Pitching to VCs and AngelsI recently attended a Keiretsu deal screening meeting. This is where entrepreneurs pitch their company to a group angel investors to receive funding.
Many entrepreneurs wonder what kind of information VCs or Angel groups need in order to fund a company. The entrepreneur often needs to keep their pitch to 20 minutes for VCs and 10 minutes for angels. For that reason, it is vital that the pitch be focused and include all vital information.
Here is a slide deck that covers the data entrepreneurs need to include in their VC or Angel pitches.
Ron Wiener is the CEO of DocumentCommand. He has created a series of internet start-ups, many of which were eventually acquired. He has given a talk and has a slide deck on how being a CEO is very similar to flying. The slide deck below points out the critical tasks for an CEO to successfully grow this company.
-Bryan
October 06 NWEN -- Northwest Entrepreneur NetworkNorthwest Entrepreneur Network (NWEN) is an amazing resource for the entrepreneurs in the Seattle and Puget Sound area.
Breakfasts:
NWEN is a non-profit organization for Angel investors and entrepreneurs. The main event is the monthly breakfast in Bellevue which starts with time for entrepreneurs and others to network. Breakfast is then served while one entrepreneur pitches their business idea to raise angel money.
After that, a successful CEO, VC, or similarly person gives a talk on a subject. This coming friday (10/13/2006) Mike O'Donnell will give a talk on strategies for starting and building successful companies. He has raised over $50 million for new ventures. He founded several companies, including iCopyright which he later sold.
Previous breakfasts included Redfin CEO and Zillow CEO (who previously was the CEO of Expedia).
Each breakfast is $25 for members and $40 for non-members. More information is available here.
Pub Night:
NWEN also hosts "Pub Night". This includes more opportunities for entrepreneurs to talk to each other. It's also a great chance to talk to other smart people. Examples of really smart people who I had a chance to talk to included Joe Whitford of Davis Wright Tramaine and Alan Mattamana of Polaris Ventures.
Classes:
NWEN also hosts classes for entrepreneurs to learn topics that will impact them. Entrepreneurs who don't have an MBA can use these classes to learn the topics that will impact them.
-Bryan
September 29 Seattle Start-up Party at RedfinLast night Redfin held a Startupalooza networking event for Start-ups at their offices. Redfin, FareCast, GridNetworks, Mpire, Blue Dot, and several other companies where there.
Redfin looks like a great company and it's great to see that they are hiring and growing. Aimee Cook is their main recruiting contact.
This event reminded me of the Seattle TechCrunch party last May. Everyone came from VCs, start-up employees, to other interesting people in the industry. The attendance included: Zillow, FareCast, Redfin, WetPaint, Ontela, Pluggd, TripHub, Newsvine, Business 2.0, MarchEx, Vulcan Capital, Perkins Coie, Waggener Edstrom, KING5, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Full List...
These events are great ways for people to share ideas and to maximize innovation.
Seattle is really a great place for start-ups and Seattle has quite a few (Full List). The number of VCs in Seattle is also quite extensive (List).
-Bryan
September 27 Microsoftie joining the Start-up WorldI worked for Microsoft for a little over ten years. I left last week to create an internet company.
Microsoft is an amazing company. It has evolved quite a bit since I’ve been there, but it still has the strong pull for engineers interested in some of the hardest problems in computer science.
Google has had strong growth over the last several years, which has caused many Microsoft employees have asked “Is Microsoft still the best company?” This is a natural question for a bunch of Type A employees that strive to be the best.
I’ve seen only a small number of my MSFT friends jump ship to Google (Jon Perlow, Oliver Fisher, Bob Day, Joe Beda, Wyvern, etc.); which is a very low rate for a 60,000 person company.
What keeps the best and brightest at Microsoft is that this company is still a place that is doing some of the most exciting and challenging engineering work in the computer industry.
These are the teams I would have loved to work on:
Microsoft is also one of the few places taking on many large scale engineering projects. These are the kinds of challenging products that have 100+ programmer teams:
For engineers looking to focus 100% on the biggest engineering problems, it’s hard to beat Microsoft.
I’ve reached a stage in my life where I want to become heavily involved in the entrepreneurial side of business. This is what has led me to leave and try my hand at creating my own company.
I’ll blog more on the Seattle Start-up scene in my future blog posts.
-Bryan
September 23 Guy Kawasaki on DistributionGuy Kawasaki hosted the Startups 2006 Panel which discussed important issues to creating innovative internet companies.
I found distribution to be an especially interesting topic. See details in my blog post below. Guy just blogged giving his thoughts on the subject.
-Bryan
September 02 Start-up School (With Fixed Links)Startup School is an interesting source of data. The links on this site are broken so here are a version with fixed links.
Presentations:
-Bryan
Tags: [Start-up School, Startup School] August 26 Distribution, Distribution, DistributionGuy Kawasaki posted a video from the Churchill Club's annual look at startups. It's a good look at the issues start-ups need to handle as they try to turn their idea and turn it into a product and a company.
Reid Hoffman made an important point that Distribution is a critical factor to success. The distribution channel of wholesalers and retailers is well known for traditional businesses.
For internet companies, the methods of distribution become more challenging.
I'd love to see a definitive list of distribution channels for internet companies.
Here is my starter list:
1. Partnering with companies that can provide high traffic
2. Partnering with companies with adjacent business models. (eBay & PayPal, Linked-In & Simply Hired, etc.) 2. PR3. Company or Product Blog. This was worked very well for us in Windows Live. Each team has a blog for their product which allows us to have a conversation directly with our customers. We have links between the products so customers can learn about other products from Microsoft. (Examples: Windows Live Mail Desktop, Windows Live Messenger). 3. Community (Discussion boards & other people's blogs) 4. Invites: This works when users inviting other users will increase the value provided by the site. (Social Networks, Photo Sharing, etc.)
5. Brand: MySpace has become a brand with their controversy. The passionate users of social networks may migrate to other versions as they come out (Bebo?). However the brand will bring in people unfamiliar with the pros/cons of the different sites. Brand can bring more companies to MySpace than their competitors when they want to create promotional pages. Zillow.com is becoming a powerful brand resulting in few people realizing that they have competitors.
6. Advertising on Social Networking sites: Companies are creating MySpaces promotional pages in place of advertising. I wonder if this will die soon after being rejected by the community. 7. Buying Ads in Search Engines: This is a traditional way of acquiring customers.
The goal is to avoid a linear correlation between acquiring customers and costs. #7 is an example of linear costs, which is the downside of traditional marketing. #1 through #6 are leveraged ways to acquire customers compared to the costs.
I know there are more ideas out there. I'd love to hear other people's ideas of what I'm missing. -Bryan
July 18 Channel 9 Video on Active Search for Windows Live Mail DesktopWe released a Channel 9 video on the Active Search for Windows Live Mail Desktop feature. See video...
Here is the link to the blog post giving the details about the feature.
-Bryan
Bryan Starbuck
July 03 Unifying Address BooksAt Gnomedex, Marc Canter explained his work on PeopleAggregator, which is a platform to enable interop between social networks.
The problem today is that very few people reply on a computer based address book because no one address book includes all of their contacts. The lesson is that an address book won’t be replied upon until it includes your entire address book, which will require interop between various address books. Social Networks have a similar problem in that their value is limited when they can’t connect to each other.
PeopleAggregator is working on server side interop and focusing on social networks. My team is working on Windows Vista and has been focusing on interop between address books on the user’s OS.
Coincidentally, Marc and I had a long conversation on this topic at PDC 2003 when we were each early in our work.
Marc with PeopleAggregator is taking an aggressive approach to accomplish server side interop with his company by using open standards. Some companies view network effect or controlled content as needed for their business model. It will likely take time and be a challenge to build critical mass on this technology because of these business model concerns. It can easily start with companies that don’t need this control. Companies that start with locking in their content and don’t hit critical mass are likely to change models and see if growth increases when they interop with a wider community.
Marc has the details about PeopleAggregator on http://peopleaggregator.org/. Here are good pointers in this area:
My team at Microsoft is passionate about the narrower issue of unifying address books on the client. Below I’ll go into details for anyone working in this area.
The “WAB” (Windows AddressBook) shows its age in Windows XP and some of the code dates back to 1989. In Windows Vista we replaced it – and it can be used by external software, such as Marc’s PeopleAggregator.
The goals for “Windows Contacts” are:
-Bryan
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