Socializing

Breaking in to Boston Those who know me know I am a consummate...

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:14:00 -0600

Breaking in to Boston

Those who know me know I am a consummate networker. I believe in the pay-it-forward mentality that if you do good things for others with no expectation for recompense, good things will happen to you over time. Being new to Boston, I asked my friends for introductions to the people they thought I should meet here. You can see the breakdown of about 100 introductions that I’ve received, with founders and VCs being the lion’s share. After tomorrow, I will have met with over half of those people, at least one time, and in some cases, more than once. The Boston startup community has been overwhelmingly welcoming and is incredibly active. I’ve only been here a month, but I wanted to share with my friends in other markets some of the things that I think make Boston special.

1) Entrepreneur Population Density. Brad Feld recently wrote a blog post about the EPD around Kendall Square. The things that make Kendall Square unique are the Cambridge Innovation Center which boasts 450 startups, Dogpatch Labs which has ~20 startups, and Techstars* which just ushered in a new class of 13. Between the CIC and the 6th floor of One Cambridge Center, there are over 500 startups. MIT is also located in Kendall, which leads me to #2 Universities.

2) Universities. MIT and Harvard get most of the spotlight deservedly, but other Boston area universities are also churning out innovation. This article lists 37 student startups funded in Boston last year. Harvard’s new iLab and NEA’s Experiment Fund will raise their profile even higher (if that’s possible), and new initiatives at MIT and U Mass will keep them top of mind as well.

3) Money. Boston is second only to the Bay Area when it comes to capital. There has been some talk about NY pulling ahead, but I’ll point people to this Atlantic infographic which has New England as the clear #2, with over $3 BILLION in invested dollars in 2011.

4) Big Businesses. This list of 100 Boston area public companies sorted by revenue, has Raytheon on top with $25 BILLION in 2011 sales, with the median being ~$400 million and the mean being significantly higher.

These are just a few of the factors that make this market great, and I will share more as I get better situated. I miss Austin and the Bay Area, but I absolutely love it in Boston.

*Special thanks to Katie Rae and Aaron O’Hearn at Techstars for being generous enough to let me co-work at the office!

The Friend Fund

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 13:16:09 -0600

As I gear up for my move to Boston, I’ve been thinking about how best to keep track of all of my friends and their startups. As a CRM freak, I made a spreadsheet and thought I’d share with you a sampling of the amazing companies my friends have started. If you haven’t heard of some of them, you should add them to your radar. Below I’ve broken it down by region. I’ve included 6 from Austin and SF and 2 from Seattle, NYC and Chicago.

Austin:

H.O. Maycotte Umbel

Eric Falcao/Brian Dainton Mass Relevance

Noah Kagan AppSumo

A.T. Fouty/Rene Pinnell Forecast

Dan Graham BuildASign

Chris Treadaway Polygraph Media

SF:

Dan Street Loku

Cyrus Radfar Kapuno

Anthony Goldbloom Kaggle

Joel Resnicow Rexly

Jeffrey Lu Daily Aisle

Diego May Junar

Seattle:

Jeff Khadavi Go Time

Adam Schoenfeld Simply Measured

NYC:

Michael Constantiner/Matthew Rosenberg Cameo

Andrew Montalenti Parsely

Chicago:

Nirav Batavia Owl Invest

Ethan Austin Give Forward

The Next Chapter

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 12:40:13 -0600

I recently stepped down as CEO of Infochimps. You can read my post on the Infochimps blog here. It has been an incredible experience and I look forward to my continued involvement, though I’m also excited about the next chapter.

My wife, Elizabeth, and I will be moving to Boston in January. Yes, it will be cold, but we will be close to family and the Boston startup scene is thriving with hundreds of startups and ~ 40 active VC funds. In the first week of Decmeber (which isnt even over), six area companies have received a total of $85 million in funding and three have been acquired.* I won’t compare Boston to Austin or the Bay Area because I’m not yet familiar enough with it, but also because as I’ve often said, each market is unique. I plan on diving in and making it my new home, as I did with Austin back in 2003.

Austin was a wonderful place for me and I’ll leave with fond memories. The University of Texas supported me when I was running my first startup while in law school, and the startup community adopted me when I chose to stay in Austin instead of going back to NYC to practice law.

In 2007, Bryan Jones, now at Collider Media, and I brought OpenCoffeeClub to Austin and Damon Clinkscales, the godfather of Austin on Rails, has revived it. Thanks Damon! I feel privileged to have helped Josh Dilworth when he spun out of Portner Novelli to start what’s now by far the best tech PR firm in Austin (not just because my wife heads up new business there), and he in turn introduced me to the guys who would recruit me as a cofounder at Infochimps. Thanks Josh! My transition from law back to a startup was made easier thanks to the support I got from my mentors Matt Lyons at Andrews Kurth, Paull Pellman at Adometry, Bill Boebel who recently left Rackspace, and Rick Wittenbraker and Andy Jenks at Stage 1 Capital. I made plenty of mistakes but would’ve made a lot more if not for these guys.

I’m also glad to have spent the better part of this past year in the Bay Area, where I made a lot of friends and met a lot of people who are building incredible things, as well as those that provide the capital to make that possible. There are really too many to list, but I’d like to give a special nod to Anthony Goldbloom at Kaggle, Semil Shah contributor at Techcrunch, Steve DeWald who founded datamarketplace.com and is now at Square, Mike Olson at Cloudera, Daniel Jacobson at Netflix, Adam d’Augelli at True, Ryan Spoon at Polaris, and Beezer Clarkson and Marta Buliach at DFJ.

I’m taking some time off to decide what to commit myself to next, but to keep myself busy I’m building simple CRM software I could’ve used during our wedding planning process. You can sign up to be notified when it launches at http://signup.weddingrm.com. Katie Rae at Techstars Boston graciously offered me some coworking space, which is where I’ll be hacking away beginning in January. See you in Cambridge and I’m sure I’ll be back to Austin and the Bay Area often!

*Data from VentureFizz

I came across this article in the WSJ yesterday which included a...

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 17:42:09 -0500

I came across this article in the WSJ yesterday which included a blurb about a company called Liquid Robotics Inc. They make unmanned water vehicles. They recently raised $22 million. This news is fairly interesting to a geek like me, but the thing that really caught my attention was their recent pivot. At Infochimps our data suppliers typically fall into one of two categories: 1) companies in the business of selling data, and 2) companies in the business of selling something else, but that want to monetize their data byproduct. Liquid Robotics is an example of the latter. In the course of making unmanned water vehicles, they recognized their data byproduct was more valuable than what they were selling. As more and more companies recognize the value of their data, they will want to unlock that value, and hopefully come to Infochimps to do so. I’ve added Liquid Robotics to our data supplier queue…

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries I just finished reading The Lean...

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 12:46:37 -0500

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

I just finished reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries and I highly recommend it. We’re an agile development shop but are adopting lean methodologies (continuous development, driven by a simple question: are the dogs eating the dog food?). A few points in the book really stuck with me, and I thought I’d share them here.

The key question in a startup is “Should this product be built?” not “Can this product be built?”. Even if you already have a product, you should continually be asking yourself this question. On a related note, you know when you have product/market fit. If you don’t know you do, then you don’t.
You should build your product for early adopters. Those folks will feel the need most acutely and will provide valuable feedback. If they don’t eat the dog food, then you know your product isn’t going to work.
MVP is not about building the smallest possible product, but getting through the build-measure-learn feedback loop the fastest with the minimum amount of effort.
Do not worry about your idea being stolen. It will be hard enough for you to get customers to use your product, let alone a competitor finding it and copying it before they do (and why would they copy it before you have proven product/market fit).
Do not measure your runway by the equation {cash/monthly burn}. The true measure is how many times you can get through the build-measure-learn feedback loop (eg pivot).
Do not throw everything out every time you pivot; repurpose what has been built and what you have learned to find a more positive direction.
If you plan to grow your business virally, your viral coefficient has to be greater than 1.
As Peter Drucker said, “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”

Washington Post

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 11:00:00 -0500

Washington Post:

My TechCrunch guest post was republished in the Washington Post!

Austin Emigration

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 12:37:00 -0500

As the top city for young people, Austin seems to be losing a number of them to San Francisco. Have you recently moved or are considered moving? I’d like to maintain a list, so please send me more startups or individuals that you know have recently left Austin for San Francisco.

Here are some startups that have recently moved or are considering moving:

GameSalad (added by @codypo)

HireWired (added by @jacquelineslife)

JobSpice (added 8/10)

Here are some individuals that have recently moved or are considering moving:

Elben Shira (Square)

Cesar Torres (Milk)

As for me, I will go wherever Infochimps needs me to, but Infochimps is still an Austin company.

Capital --> Startups --> Talent

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 14:28:00 -0500

In my 10 or so years in the startup community there have been a number of cities trying to make a name for themselves as startup hubs, most notably (in alphabetical order): Austin, Boise, Boston, Boulder, Chicago, NYC and Seattle. So how do these rank, and how do you make a city that wants to be a startup hub successful as one?

Austin has had a number of recent IPOs, including: Bazaarvoice (about to file), Convio ($200M mkt cap), Demand Media ($1B mkt cap), Freescale Semiconductor ($4B mkt cap), Homeaway ($3.25B mkt cap), Netspend ($800M mkt cap), Newgistics (on file), Solarwinds ($1.65B mkt cap), and Whiteglove (on file). With recent IPOs having a combined mkt cap north of $10B, I think it’s fair to say Austin is the biggest startup hub between the coasts.

Boise isn’t even on the map.

Boston has long been #2 to the Bay Area, anchored by Harvard and MIT and the many VC funds based there. Known for hardware and enterprise software, and more recently clean tech, Boston also has a growing web startup scene anchored by HubSpot. NYC, only 3 hours away, is now challenging Boston as the East Coast’s biggest startup hub.

Techstars and Brad Feld have put Boulder on the map, but you have to squint your eyes to see it. After some lightweight Google searches, I couldn’t find a single IPO (has there ever been one?), and only one recent startup exit north of $100 million, and it was a company based in Douglas County.

Chicago (in which I was a panelist at this week’s Techweek) has been riding Groupon’s coattails and is quickly making a name for itself as a startup hub. Chicago has a short but growing list of VC funds, and the wealth created by Groupon’s up coming IPO will certainly expand this list. Groupon’s mkt cap is anticipated to be north of $20B, double all of Austin’s IPOs combined.

NYC has seen an incredible influx of capital and growth in the number of startups over the last few years as capital and talent moved out of Wall St. and in to the startup scene. It is now neck and neck with Boston as #2 behind the Bay Area.

Seattle has had huge successes with Microsoft and Amazon which have long supported a healthy startup ecosystem.

So what makes a great startup hub? There is a chicken and the egg problem for sure, but I think capital is what drives it. Capital doesn’t really get on planes. Startups do when necessary. And talent will go wherever it has the most potential upside. There is an old joke that Sequoia only invests in companies it can drive to board meetings to within 30 minutes. This driving range doesn’t even extend to San Francisco. Silicon Valley reigns supreme, and will so long as Sand Hill Road is lined with VCs. The other startup hubs need to create and redistribute wealth, and fight tooth and nail to get more capital on the plane.

"One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and..."

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 08:51:13 -0500

“One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o’clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they’re looking for a job and have an interview; the other is that they are an asshole. This was the latter case.”

- Larry Summers, former president of Harvard University (source: Techcrunch)

The fallacy of the long tail, and the super six According to...

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 18:18:00 -0500

The fallacy of the long tail, and the super six

According to sources referenced by Mashable, there are over 350 million registered domains and over 1 trillion pages indexed by Google. A search term we optimize for at Infochimps “twitter data” yields over 1 billion hits. That’s a looooong tail.

I keep 6 tabs open in my browser: Gmail (Infochimps and personal), Gcal, Greader, Facebook, and as of recently, Turntable.fm. I monitor my Twitter feed using their native Mac app. I pull up Google or Quora when I need an answer to a question. In a generic sense, these tabs represent what I call the super six: email, calendar, RSS, social, music and search.

This post was inspired by an AdWeek article (full article in print) I read today at Farley’s. The gist of the article is that appx $20 billion is currently being spent on display ads, and industry execs expect that market to grow 10X over the next 5 years to $200 billion. That’s a lot of growth and a lot of ads. While there are over a trillion pages those ads could be displayed on, the best real estate is on the super six.

With Google+, Google now has leading offerings in five of the super six, the only hole being in music. Google quietly launched Google Music, which is in beta, earlier this Spring to little fanfare. Pandora, Turntable.fm and Spotify should keep “tabs” on this project, because I anticipate it will become core to Google’s offering. If Google Music becomes a mainstay in my browser, Google will own all of the ad impressions served to me. That’s a good thing if the ad market indeed becomes $200 billion.

What other tabs do you keep open? I am particularly interested in what tabs people keep open outside of Google properties.

A few things I've learned...

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 13:39:09 -0500

*Reading startup blogs is not equivalent to having startup experience.

*You’re not ready to leave your cushy job until you actually do it.

*Start something small before you start something big.

*Don’t scale your team until you can affect your KPIs.

*Trust your informed intuition until you have data that indicates that its wrong. “When the facts change, I change my mind.”

*Outsource as much of your stack as makes sense, but be wary of startups that aren’t well capitalized and open source software that isn’t well documented or actively supported.

*Always build the stuff that’s core.

*The two truest idioms: you pay for what you get, and less is more.

#Winning on the Web We started Infochimps because finding data...

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 09:26:00 -0500

#Winning on the Web

We started Infochimps because finding data on the web is hard. The pain of “find” is not unique to data: there is a lot of stuff on the web which makes finding what you’re looking for hard. Quora estimates Google has as many as 100 billion web pages indexed. That’s a pretty big hay stack. A lot of time is spent finding needles.

The flip side of this, is that its really hard to find customers on the web. In order to be found, a site needs to rank highly on the first page of a Google search result, or be so ubiquitous that people type it directly into their URL bar. A lot of money is spent finding customers.

The winners on the web are sites that can bridge this gap: that help customers find what they are looking for, and help sellers find those customers. These sites are commonly called marketplaces. Infochimps is a marketplace.

If it were easy to build a marketplace, everyone would do it. It isn’t. The best post I’ve seen on marketplaces is this one. Good luck finding it on Google.

Meta search engines like DuckDuckGo let you search myriad sites through a single search box, though you need to learn a lot of shortcuts (!data for Infochimps). Google might support choice, but they have a strong preference that you start your search there. The Google killer isn’t going to be a search engine in the traditional sense, but a marketplace of marketplaces.

"Make decisions with intuition but validate them with analytics."

Sun, 29 May 2011 13:19:34 -0500

“Make decisions with intuition but validate them with analytics.”

- This quote by the CEO of chip-maker Nvidia is one of many gems in The Corner Office by Adam Bryan. The book is a must read for any first-time CEO, and I would venture to say for anyone at a startup. My friend Ben Pieratt’s honest blog post inspired me to read it. Below are some of the takeaways I found most meaningful:

*Have debates about what the questions should be, not the solutions.

*Be clear about whether something you say is a light bulb or a gun. A lightbulb means this is just an idea, so think about it, see if you think it’s a good one. Either follow up or don’t, but it’s just an idea. A gun is, I want you to do this.

*Thanks to the Internet, there is a greater premium on the ability to synthesize, to connect dots in new ways, and to ask the simple, smart question that leads to an untapped opportunity.

*Bringing in a new team member provides a new set of eyes on a corporate culture. Use them to get a fresh perspective.

*When your team asks how you are, answer “I’m great and here’s why…”

*You have to be able to say that the strategy didn’t work, that the technology didn’t work, that the product didn’t work, but we’re still going to be great and be able to tell the team why.

*As it turns out, the most fun parts of the game are when you’re losing. When you finally beat it there’s a moment of euphoria, but then it’s over.

Recruiting

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 11:17:40 -0500

Fred Wilson says a CEO does 3 things: 1) sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholders, 2) recruits, hires, and retains the very best talent for the company, and 3) makes sure there is always enough cash in the bank. These 3 things have varying relative difficulty depending on the economic climate. During the financial crisis recruiting was a lot easier, but raising capital was very challenging. Fast forward to today, and you’ve got the opposite problem. Emory classmate Peter Corbett called it as he saw it at Summit at Sea: “You know its a bubble when its easier to get money than an engineer.” I can attest this is true in the bay area, as well as in Austin. It still isn’t easy to raise money, but it is easier to find VCs looking for good deals to invest in than engineers looking for awesome startups to work at. We are fortunate to have an incredible talent pipeline, largely thanks to our relationship with UT and our magnetic founder and CTO, Flip Kromer. That being said, we’re hiring! Please email me at nickinfochimpscom, if you’re interested in being part of an amazing team with awesome perks such as daily catered lunches, 100% paid healthcare premiums, and all the bananas you can eat!

Maybe we’re in the middle of a bubble… I moved...

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 16:25:00 -0500

Maybe we’re in the middle of a bubble… I moved downtown in 2006 and have been shopping at Whole Foods (stock chart above) 3-4 times a week since then. When I first started shopping there in ‘06 it was packed at all times. Even though it was called “whole paycheck” the crowd was always very diverse. When the bottom fell out of the market in 2008, it was totally empty. The other shoppers in ‘08 tended to look seemingly well-to-do. As the market came back it got a lot busier and during the holidays last year it was a mad house. I’ve recently noticed the crowd thinning out. The patrons seem to be local to the neighborhood; people who actually live downtown. What I think is happening is that the people who had frugality fatigue and upgraded to Whole Foods from their neighborhood market, are now eating out instead of shopping for groceries, and the well-to-doers are going back to their highfalutin ways. Since I didn’t see this part of the cycle last time, I am guessing we’re only in the middle, but it is hard to tell. Happenings at Whole Foods and news that Flipboard raised $50 million on a $200 million valuation have made me question my “we’re not in a bubble” mentality.

OH: Data

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 18:44:00 -0500

I recently had the opportunity at SXSW to hear LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman speak about Data 3.0. Today I went back to the future at Data 2.0 Conference, at which I was a panelist and on the Program Committee. There were over 500 in attendance and many familiar faces, such as Mike Driscoll, Hjalmar Gislason, Gil Elbaz, and OrenMichels. It is becoming very clear to me about where we are and we’re were going with respect to the data web. Call it what you want, but here it is as I see it:

Provenance. Where does your data come from? How accurate is it? My response: who cares! Well, of course you should care, but only to the extent you have a baseline to measure against. I can tell you all day long my data is better, but if I can’t prove it against the competition, then it is simply marketing speak. I believe provenance will become less important and user reviews will become more important.

Structure v Semantics. What does normal even mean? Your normal is probably different than my normal so why should I force my normal on you? Structure is enough. As long as the data is structured and in machine readable format, it can become easily usable. On the Data Ecosystem panel, Oren put it plainly, “it is so much bigger an issue to have the data in the first place”.

APIs. Gil Elbaz says Data 3.0 is “millions of APIs”. I agree. We have the construct that each dataset is a single API, with one or more different ways to query it. As we go from tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands, and ultimately to millions of datasets, we will indeed have millions of APIs!

T’s & C’s. Will creative commons or open database license win? The more important question is who is going to enforce these licenses and how. Are we going to see hackers being taken to court for violation of these licenses? My first job in law school was in the rights and permissions group atZiff Davis Media. I was in charge of finding and enforcing infringing uses of our trademarks and copyrights. The vast majority of the infringing users didn’t care and didn’t change their behavior. Ziff Davis did nothing about it. The reality is that bits are just that, bits, and its what you do with them that matters.

I will leave you with this: it is not the size of the bit, but the relevance of the data.

Hiring the right people is critically important in a quickly...

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 12:24:00 -0600

Hiring the right people is critically important in a quickly growing startup. Each new hire can significantly change the company in a good or bad way. There is a saying that A players hire A players and B players hire C players and I am a big believer in only hiring leaders, future leaders and key contributors. B players hire grinders and losers. The difference between a grinder and a loser is work ethic, grinders have it, losers don’t, but neither have ambition. That being said, anyone can change, but don’t hire them until they do. See below for who we’ve hired.

Leaders and future leaders are those that have positive energy, coachability and proven ability to execute. All leaders and future leaders need to have positive energy. They need to be optimistic, enthusiastic and passionate. There are a lot of people with these characteristics: they are called A-type personalities; however, this list is reduced dramatically when you filter out those that are not coachable. A good leader not only knows his/her strengths and can identify strengths in others, but knows his/her weaknesses and manages to others’ strengths and helps them improve their weaknesses. If you think you know it all, don’t apply for a job here, if you already know a lot and want to know more ∞, please send me your resume. With respect to execution, it is important not to confuse someone with lots of ideas with someone who has a proven ability to execute. Ideas are dime a dozen and can be paralyzing in a startup without the ability to identify and execute on the best ones. Leaders have had success in executing on great ideas in absolute terms and future leaders have had relative success in doing so, or absolute success on a smaller scale.

Key contributors are team members that have positive energy and coachability but have only proven their ability to execute at a small scale, with or without relative success. For engineers, we look at their git repositories and for business folks, we look at whether they have tried to start a business, build a community or otherwise have clearly articulated they have the get shit done gene. Leaders and future leaders will develop key contributors into future leaders.

Would love to hear your thoughts on hiring, and what has worked for you to recruit top talent. It is very hard to find, especially when you’re committed to not hiring anyone who isn’t at least going to be a key contributor.

Open Letter to Twitter Using Others' Tweets

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 14:44:14 -0600

Dear twitter, FIX YO SELF. We need to talk, I need some clarity. Seems that many cool third party twitter tools and services are being shut down due to Twitter Terms of Service enforcement notices. Sad :-( Let’s make Twitter a gr8 platform for us to connect, build & inspire!! =D Unfortunately we’re limited by Twitter’s terms of service which is quite restrictive. We’ll continue to experiment though. :) Twitter search has said “Older tweets are temporarily unavailable” since I started here in Jan ‘09. Stretching the meaning of “temporarily”. I want to go back to my first 1000 tweets to see what was happening in my life… #justsaying seems kinda cool.. Please provide more clarity so I may study and ask the Holy Spirited for understanding. I still love you even with your lack of tweets.

Biz book review in haiku: The Mesh by Lisa Gansky

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 13:48:28 -0600

Sharing is ripe for
High cost frequently used goods
Such as Car2Go

TEDxAustin 2011 I had the pleasure of attending my second TEDx...

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 15:15:24 -0600

TEDxAustin 2011

I had the pleasure of attending my second TEDx conference yesterday. It was well attended and a first rate production. I took down what I considered the key take away from each presentation, and will share the best of the best with you.

Sunny Vanderbeck, Satori Capital: We’re suffering “short-term-itis”.

David Cameron, Prime Minister UK (video): How can we make things better without spending more money?

Gilbert Tuhabonye, Marathoner, Genocide Surviver: Run with passion.

Flint Sparks, Zen Psychotherapist: May your greatest longing be met by your greatest gift.

Gregory Kallenberg, Documentary Filmmaker: There is no perfect solution, the solution is compromise.

Osama Bedier, Googler: Online payments is going to profoundly change commerce.

Sylvia Acevedo, US Chamber of Commerce Hispanic Woman of the Year: 10,000 people in the US will turn 65 every day for the next 10 years.

Peter Hall, UT Professor: Always make maps, always question maps.

Brene Brown, UH Professor: Believe that you’re worthy.

Dr. Lionel Tiger, Rutgers Professor, Coiner of the Term “Male Bonding”: Alpha males and companies like Infochimps (mentioned in his speech) will beat out wimpier competition.