Opportunity knocks but once

 Astronomy, Development, GoScale, Personal, Startup  4 Responses »
Jul 312012
 

Summary: Solving a hard problem in software can be fun and important. Doing that led to me working on the ISS, then the LHC and now this. But you also need to spot, grab and run with opportunities. Not many do. Don’t be that person.

Update: This post got some insightful comments on Hacker News

When an opportunity comes knocking, do you:

  • Even notice it?
  • Let it pass and later regret it?
  • Grab it and run with it?

Just out of school, I once passed up a great opportunity. I’ve regretted it ever since. That failure probably explains why I’ve not made this mistake too many times.

Most of the time I’ll grab an opportunity. Especially if it’s a real messy opportunity, that no one else can be bothered to tackle. I like getting my hands dirty, you see. It’s resulted in an interesting journey, as a few examples should demonstrate.

Professionally I’ve got to work on some amazing projects. One highlight was the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). A colleague and myself modelled, for CERN, the LHC beam dump. My extra bonus was a visit to the place: Yes, underground :)

Modelling the LHC beam dump, in software I’d been instrumental in developing, was a hard problem. Of course, sometimes what is a problem is really an opportunity: As my grandfather, a farmer, used to say: “Remember lad, where there’s muck there’s brass“.

There were many other hard problems I’ve worked on using and developing software. For instance predicting the effects of space debris impacts on satellites. That led to work helping to design the shielding system for the International Space Station (ISS). One extra bonus was to work inside the ISS. No, not up there :( but on the ground, in a full-scale replica inside NASA.

I’ve also got know some incredible people: Friends, colleagues, customers, brilliant engineers, awesome entrepreneurs, eminent scientists and yes, rocket scientists.

So many of these people are much smarter than me but, apart from the entrepreneurs, a large proportion get stuck in their professional life. Why is that? They are not risk takers obviously but there has to be more to it than that.

Then it struck me as another opportunity meteor slammed into my Inbox the other day.

A big reason has to be about people passing up opportunities. Let’s unpick that some more and do a rough quantification:

  • Many hidden opportunities come and are gone in seconds, as our mind moves on to the next input. Maybe I’m more reflective than most folks but I’m sure, from people I’ve worked with, that I spot opportunities many others would not. Are you like that? Let’s say that from a sample of 100 people, 20 people are opportunity spotters.
  • Now clearly you have to be motivated to want to respond to opportunities. I’ll wager that you too have plenty of wonderful and smart friends who are simply comfortable with what they have. Life is good to them and they are incredibly competent at what they do. But they just aren’t motivated to change, learn something new or rise to a new challenge. Let’s say that eliminates another 12 the 20 we have left.
  • Even then you have to decide. Decide whether to explore the opportunity. The easy option is to just let it go. Most likely you are crazily busy too. It might well turn out to be a false opportunity. Is it worth finding out? Clearly we’ll lose more folks at this stage. Let’s say that wipes out another 6 from the 8 left.

Does that leave just you and me as driven, opportunity exploring, spotters?

My journey isn’t over, I hope. I still think of myself as largely a failure. With incredible colleagues, it’s now about tackling some big problems in scaling.

 Posted by at 7:34 am

Scratching an Itch

 Blogging, Companies, Development, Personal, Startup  5 Responses »
Jul 152012
 

I’ve spent too much time bitching about this, but bear with me. After another bitch, I’ll scratch my itch. Perhaps your’s too.

It’s about data: Who should own and control it; where it lives; and what we and others can do with it. For context let’s look at some history. Please excuse that: I’m an old git so I’ve lived right through this.

Pre PC, we had applications on shared mainframes and mini computers. Data was held in a centralized store as it was mostly company data. Hello Digital. Hello Sun.

Pre web, we had applications running on an OS. You installed an application locally and got going. You put your data in that application and the data was locally held. In a Personal Computer. Hello Microsoft. Hello Apple.

Then web apps came along and we allowed your data to be held centrally again, this time by the platform provider. Hello Facebook. Hello Twitter.

The age of the “Personal Computer” has gone and we’ve allowed others to take your data and do what they like with it. In exchange for free usage of these apps.  Yes, we’ve got better services and backup hell is receding. But what the hell, we’ve become the product.

There have been huge benefits. We became more social, interacting in new ways and with new people. We shared content in more effective ways. We’ve learned faster. But above all else I, and perhaps you, learned a big thing:

Our personal data is not.

Not ours:

  • Platforms mine it and throw it back at us as adverts
  • It’s become fragmented across multiple services
  • You can’t find that piece of content you once shared
  • You might even have lost it when an app died or got bought

Plus you, me and everybody else, save the laggards, have ended up with connections (or “social graphs”) on several different services.

I’ve had enough of this and need to stop bitching about it. I’ve wanted for too long a service that’s about my relationships in one place that I own and control. We might call that place a PC; except this time it would stand for Personal Cloud. There has been many apps trying to do this sort of thing. But they seem to either wither and die, sell out, or turn into an advertising business.

So I scratched my own itch and decided finally to do something about it. About time too, not only because it’s proving to be useful. Writing a web app was a steep learning curve over two weeks. I last seriously cranked code in 1998; in Fortran.

The web app is called YourTact and it works across multiple social graphs; Facebook, Twitter and Google contacts for now.

If I want to find and connect with someone I know, or follow, I can do that after one click :)

Let’s take an example problem solved. Now perhaps I’m geting senile but I couldn’t remember the surname of that chap who does wonderful cartoons. Hugh ? Aarrr…gh, what’s his name?

OK, type Hugh into the app and click. Problem solved. Hi, Hugh MacLeod.

Might you find this useful too? For your own contacts. Running on a server owned and controlled by you, of course.

If you are interested in learning more, and even an early invite, click on through.

Feedback, questions and discussion is, as ever, most welcome.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 4:58 am  Tagged with: , , , , ,

Getting a good domain name isn’t that hard

 Advice, Funding, IP, StackBlaze, Startup  11 Responses »
Jun 062012
 

flickr.com/photos/alancleaver/

…….but that’s not enough, as you will see later. Hint: Beware trademarks.

Default thinking seems to be that getting a good domain name, at anything less than a sizeable ransom, is very tough. Bollocks.

Sometimes it’s an excuse for laziness. I’ve been saying this in private for several years. But this time I’ve had to prove it. More about that later.

I really don’t think it’s as hard as perceived wisdom suggests. After five years of helping startups and dealing with a good number of naming cases, I know it can be tough. But then it’s almost guaranteed to be tough if you don’t try hard. However if you get creative, learn how to do it and persist, you’ll most likely get a good domain at a decent price. Most likely you’ll get an acceptable one for next to nothing or perhaps a very good one for a small investment.

I know what you are thinking: I’m talking about .co, .io, some other latest fad TLD or a domain hack. No, I’m not. So then, I must be talking about the now popular usage of getdomain.com or domainapp.com, as a precursor to paying a big chunk for domain.com. Nope, not that either. I’m talking about getting a very good .com.

Domain Name Tips

Trust me, you can most likely find one. But you need some help. So here is some starting with with what, are for me, the three most useful tools:

But be careful now, you might be swearing in to somebody. This can help with that:

Here are some others domain checkers and word tools. Not very useful for us, this time, but might be in other contexts. Plus you brain is wired different to mine, so they might work for you:

Now sometimes you want a simple instant check of availability. You need to be wary of these services. I’ve found domains before and then seen them bought the next day. However I’ve good reasons to trust these two services, so they are the only ones I use:

Finally three here are some other blog posts on the topic:

Now I’m not advocating you spend a huge amount of timing doing this. Almost every time I’ve done this before it’s taken less than one day and usually about four hours maximum to come up with a good domain name. Good can be good enough; it’s what you do with it that matters. Google isn’t that great. In the early days, I bet most of us would have misspelt it on first try after hearing about it verbally (Gugull, Googul, etc).

OK, so you think you’ve got your .com now, right? Sorted. Phew. Break out the champagne.

Hold on a minute, you are not home and dry yet. What about trademarks?

Trademark Gotchas

At some stage you need to think about getting a professional to help you with this. However there is a lot you can do as a scrappy startup. First up you’ll need to be familiar with trademark classifications. Trademarks can be the same word as long as they are in distinct classifications. For example, as far as I can see Apple have trademarked “MAC” in no less than 25 classes. But not in cosmetics, class 3, which is owned by MAC cosmetics: iLipstick would be an entertaining case! Indeed MAC cosmetics beat Apple for SEO on “Mac”! Cadbury own it for cough sweets, class 5. I could go on with others, but you get the picture.  Note that in fact sub-classifications of those classes are separately protectable.

Now I used to check trademarks on the individuals services in UK, EU and USA using these links:

But now you can do a combined check on Trademarkia. Mind you, I would only use that for a first pass: Digging down is better done on the UK and EU sites; the US site sucks but you’ll have to use that too. Remember IANAL and you should take professional advice, when appropriate: There are a lot of nuances, strategies and tactics around trademarks.

How I messed up

Previously we went through this process when choosing StackBlaze.com. We checked out the trademarks and no apparent problem there. Of course, being a self-funded startup meant we were mean (not lean) about spending cash, so we didn’t file the trademark or get a professional search done thinking we could save that for later.

By SnapshotsofthePast.com

So it was a few weeks ago that we realised we had a big problem. Somebody on Hacker News pointed out that we were a bit too close to BackBlaze.com, who do Backup-as-a-Service. Not only that but when I did a check on trademarks, I found BackBlaze was a registered US trademark. My layman search hadn’t shown that when I searched on StackBlaze.

Oh well, we thought, not to worry.  We’ll change names. Despite the fact that StackBlaze is two syllables, describes what we do and implies fast, we were never ultra keen on it. It was the best we had at the time. Frankly, and in hindsight, we hadn’t tried hard enough to find another name.

Anyway we used the tools above and brainstormed. That’s an activity best done with more than one brain. And more than one beer! One each is probably an optimum. I’m talking about beers but do use both your left and right brains for effectiveness.

We came up with a good number of .coms that are not being used: Even some of six letters and two syllables. Quite a few were more than adequate. But there was one we really liked. We liked it a lot more than StackBlaze, partly because it fitted in with our bigger vision; more about that in a future post. So we slept on it, tested it on a few people and bought a shiny new domain Boxiv.com. Five letters! Yay. Trademarkable.  Yay.

Then we put it out to a vote, of our peers, expecting a positive response. Votes were 50 to 1. Wow…………in favour of StackBlaze. People were most helpful with feedback. Some we’re quite upset at the suggestion of a change:

  • “Stackblaze is an amazing brand, please do not change it”
  • “….such a great name, have thought so ever since i first heard it. feels established”

OK, we hear you! But we still wanted, indeed needed, to change. So we started to think again. Then shortly afterwards I had an email from the Gleb Budman, CEO of BackBlaze. He very politely pointed out that there was an issue with us using StackBlaze. I wrote straight back and said: “We actually agree with everything you say” and explained we were already committed to changing brands.

So we went back to the drawing board, had another brainstorming session, a  few more beers (any excuse!) and came up with a load of new domains. We ended up with a good slew of unused six to eight letter .coms (hmmm…..perhaps we should buy them). Some of them not at all bad, some very good even. But only one really excellent for our business, we thought.

So we checked out trademarks, Googled the phrase, grabbed the Twitter handle and other placeholders and slept on it. The domain grew on us, but there was one snag: The domain was owned by a squatter and parked on GoDaddy.

This could get expensive

So do we go directly to the squatter and negotiate? Or use the GoDaddy buy domain service? A middleman to negotiate is a good thing but, cripes GoDaddy? Last year we went through a horrendous experience where GoDaddy staff allowed somebody, from outside the company, to grab StackBlaze.com off us, for a few days.

However we decided to go ahead and gave GoDaddy a price range to negotiate in. The maximum price we set was 40% of what we were comfortable paying. A few days later after we heard we could have the domain for 25% of our maximum price (so 10% of what we would have paid). GoDaddy: All is forgiven ,we love you! Well, just for a few hours anyway ;) . That domain is now ours and we’ll be moving it  elsewhere, as soon as we can.

In the meanwhile we have been getting professional conformation of the trademark position and started filing.

What’s that? I didn’t tell you the name of our shiny new .com? That will be revealed in the near future. All we wil say for now is that it’s seven letters and two syllables. I know some of you, and some of our users, won’t like it, but we do, and we very confident it will grow on you and them.

Oh yes, in case you don’t know, we cannot tell you too much but we moved to Silicon Valley. Some of you will figure what’s up. What are we up to? More about that next time, too.

Finally, thanks for reading this far. If you found it useful, please consider helping others by sharing your experiences too, in the comments or elsewhere. Have you ever struggled to get a domain name or trademark? Any horror stories? What tips and resources might you have?

 Posted by at 10:32 pm

Loans, learning, universities and getting started

 Funding, Government, Startup, Young Entrepreneurs  No Responses »
Mar 202012
 

 This article first appeared on PostDesk.

What do Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerburg and Richard Branson have in common? Quite a few things spring to mind but a notable fact is that none of them completed a university course.

So, not just for that reason, let’s hope the 2012 budget includes real backing for the proposed Youth Investment Fund. Not heard about that? Well the proposal is that the government should back young entrepreneurs with business loans just like students are provided with loans to pay for further education. Indeed the idea was, appropriately enough, proposed in a Virgin report “Control-Shift” and is being promoted by Branson himself. David Cameron has stated that it’s a brilliant idea and hinted that it might be coming.

If students can get a loan for University (of £9,000 for tuition for each year from 2012) why shouldn’t loans on similar terms be offered to young wannabe entrepreneurs, to launch and build a business?

The report makes the case in detail, including this extract:

 ”We offer potential students low interest loans that only need to be paid back when earnings reach a similar level, because we believe that our investment will be paid back to society over the course of their resulting careers. But what if we took the same risk on the potential of aspiring entrepreneurs?”

I think this is a great idea, as do 81% of voters in a poll of business people. Also having spoken to a few young people there seems to be similar support from them. Although I’ve also heard justifiable concern that young people may be sucked into debt naively: The point being that most people understand the risks of going to university but most have little exposure to, or education in, the risks of setting up a business. A recent graduate and entrepreneur Liam Gooding, makes a great case for it, pointing out that he would have taken up the option had it been available to him.

The Youth Investment Fund could be a great catalyst for increasing social mobility and giving a leg up to the disadvantaged in particular. I can’t help having noticed, over the last five years of helping startups, that there is a distinct advantage for some young entrepreneurs: Specifically those who have relatively wealthy parents or friends, who often help them through their early years. Not that I begrudge them of that.

Another point of note is that such a scheme would not necessarily decrease learning.  I know from speaking with other entrepreneurs that many people learn much more in a startup than at university or in business school: Personally, having done all three, there is no doubt in my mind about this.

The only reasonable objection I can see to this proposal is the potential cost. That’s an understandable and legitimate concern. But does it have to be extra money? Cut something else, I say, and get something started.

Naturally the big challenge lies in the execution. Governments have a bad track record on execution, particularly when it comes to startups, for reasons that I have ranted about before.

There is a real danger that this Fund, if implemented, will be delivered with a surfeit of procedures. Naturally and understandably the banks will be asked to get involved. It is to be hoped that they don’t have a monopoly on approving these loans. When did a bank ever understand and take risks on a really ambitious startup led by a young person?

Also one would hope that the government acts as initiator that then gets out of the way. Even if the fund vetting, management and processes are handled by other, hopefully private led organisations, there is a real danger of too much:

  • Policy on the types of business ideas that will be supported and the sector they will operate in. Let’s have ideas from the young people seeking support rather than from the top down.
  • Constraint on what the money is spent on. Beyond the obvious constraints of illegitimate, illegal or inappropriate usage of the funds.
  • Structure about when the money is spent. There will be a natural inclination to have businesses spend specific proportions of the overall funding in each government tax year. That’s a recipe for unwise spending.

 

What other objections might there be? Here are a few concerns that have likely arisen and points I would counter with:

  • The funding would be spent unwisely
    • Who says the universities spend similar money wisely?
  • The young person will collect the money and work part-time on the business, not taking it seriously whilst spending time on other things
    • Now a student would never do that, would they?
  • Money would be taken by youngsters not really willing to take the risk of going into business and simply collecting the money
    • Good point but measures can be taken such as validating that the would-be entrepreneur is willing to take risk. For instance, don’t distribute any substantial money until an initial six months has been spent working on the business.
  • £27,000 is not enough to start a serious business
    • It’s a considerable amount and enough to start many businesses. Furthermore any money will likely go further with a young person than with an older wannabee entrepreneur who is more likely to have other major financial commitments.
  • Would be entrepreneurs are being favoured over those not interested in setting up a business
    • One could also say that the academically inclined are being similarly favoured, in being supported to go to university
  • The administration of the scheme would be a large expense
    • Yes, but that’s true of the student loan scheme.

As with all government policy it pays to look at what other countries have done. Canada have a scheme that has many of the elements of the proposed idea. I don’t know how successful that programme is but there must be plenty to learn from it.

Clearly I’m strongly in favour of this proposal but concerned about the implementation. What do you think about it? Let’s hear your views and thoughts. It would be particularly interesting to hear from young people.

 Posted by at 8:05 pm

StackBlaze is go for launch

 Customers, Development, StackBlaze, Startup  2 Responses »
Mar 062012
 

After nine months of preparation we have just soft launched the product for our new startup StackBlaze. It’s an exciting time for us (James Cunningham and me) but not because we expect to set the word alight yet (pun intended!) but because we are eager to get feedback from initial users. No big launch or us, no TechCrunch post sought: We would rather have honest detailed feedback from users and others like yourself for the present. We’ve had around 10% of people, who had signed-up for information about StackBlaze in the past, actually register and try out out the service so we are off to a good start.

So what is StackBlaze? In short StackBlaze is all about web hosting without hassle. To be more specific StackBlaze let’s you host your web-site without worrying about the high traffic you aim to have, or hope for:

  • No worries about large bills: Our prices are very competitive and clear
  • No worries about your site grinding to a halt: Our service is truly elastic (scales automatically)
  • No worries if you have no system admin skills: Easy to set-up and use

One of the main challenges we now face is being able to clearly explain why StackBlaze is actually  quite revolutionary: It is not obvious unless explained why it really is radically different to that from other web-hosting providers. We’ve made a start in this blog post on the StackBlaze web-site, a short extract of which is given here:

………StackBlaze is designed to incorporate the best elements of both shared and dedicated hosting, but using a cloud hosting approach which makes it truly elastic. When you use StackBlaze you install your site/app not on a single computer but on a grid network of multiple servers, so that:

  • As the load on sites/apps changes, StackBlaze will automatically allocate and load balance resources, across the servers, to give a good performance.
  • Because you are sharing this grid network of servers with others, we can provide high performance like dedicated hosting but with a much lower cost
  • You don’t have to think about how many instances you might need or really worry about the nature or number of servers, as this is all taken care for you automatically

You can just think of StackBlaze as one big computer.

I would love to know from you if you think that is a clear enough explanation of what we can offer in terms of true elasticity.

This different approach means we can also offer, what we believe is a more cost effective service. Currently we have two plans, with a monthly rental cost:

  • Developer plan at $5 per “app” (apps are defined as unique domain name) and $3 per database
  • Startup plan at $15 per “app” and $9″ per database
  • Each plan has limits of usage as defined here, but essentially, you pay no more than this per month until you reach these limits
For those wishing to try out the service, we offer:
  • First month for any app or database is free
  • First app and database on the Developer plan is always free
  • You pay monthly, for as long as you wish: No need to commit to one year, for instance
As for usability, the proof is in the eating but to give you a taste, here are screenshots of the dashboard and control panel:
 

 

It’s early days, so you can expect the control panels to change. We have had some good feedback already and would appreciate more of it. We want to make set-up, monitoring and reporting as intuitive as we can. One example of a first step is automated install of WordPress sites. For now, for other applications, you can use ftp. Git to deploy code will follow.

Right now StackBlaze is hosting for applications and web-sites that are PHP and MySQL based.

If you have any feedback email me here or don’t be shy to make comments below. If you want to go as far as giving it a spin, obviously we would be delighted: You can sign-up here and get going immediately.

If you have read this far, thanks for the interest and whilst I don’t know want to stretch your patience. However I know that some of you have been wondering what I’ve been up to since finishing my job last year, as a Portfolio Director for the now defunct Innovation & Growth Teams. So, at the risk of boring you and those who already know, here is a short history of that time and the evolution of StackBlaze:

  • August 2010: James and myself met at the Young Rewired State event, orchestrated by the wonderful Emma Mulquenny.
  • February 2011: We discussed in detail some ideas for a startup. In very short time I agreed to put in, and help raise, some funding and set-up a company.
  • May 2011: Having successfully raised a small amount of TSB funding, we set to work, after James finished college in April and moved from Dundee to Brighton. Work started work on the StackBlaze technology and a demonstrator web application to be tested on StackBlaze.
  • July 2011: Lawrence Job joined us during his summer break between school and university to help.
  • August 2011: We made an alpha release of StackBlaze available to a small number of users and Young Rewired State 2011.
  • September 2011: With the freedom coming from finishing my previous job, I decided to focus on StackBlaze.
  • October 2011: We started a private beta programme for StackBlaze.
  • December 2011: We focussed on the commercialisation of StackBlaze.

Which brings us to today and the commercial release of StackBlaze. Between the beta programme and now we have been hard at work, improving the product, particularly with the front end and putting in place the commercial elements of the service.

Actually James has been the really busy one, building the whole platform from the ground up. It’s been a privilege to witness and work with one so talented. Not only has he developed the back-end architecture but he has also implemented the front-end too. Now I was for many years a full-time developer myself, and worked on core back-end technology and front-end (GUIs as they were called then) so I can empathise with what he has done. Nevertheless he’s streets ahead of me as a developer so I won’t be getting deeply involved in the coding side of the business. In any case, my technical talent was really in designing and implementing difficult algorithms in high performance computing and later in managing four product development teams: A good number of those developers were also better than I ever was, but none of them had the breadth of talent and skill that James has.

I would love to hear from you what you think about StackBlaze. Perhaps you can share your experiences, and in particular your frustations and pains, in web hosting? Do you like the idea of hosting without hassle? Who do you think should be aware of StackBlaze and who should be talking to?

Finally, thanks for reading this far and if you want to kept up-to-date on StackBlaze in particular you can sign-up to our email list on the home page.

 

 

 Posted by at 11:13 am

This blog moved to eat it’s own dogfood

 Blogging, StackBlaze  No Responses »
Nov 042011
 

from here: http://colinhayhurst.wordpress.com

I’ve moved from wordpress.com to wordpress.org.

Plus the blog is hosted on the web hosting platform developed by my new startup StackBlaze

 Posted by at 3:53 pm

To YC or not to YC

 Advice, Events, Funding, Startup  No Responses »
Nov 012011
 

I woke up at 03:35 this morning to read an email starting “We’re sorry to say we couldn’t accept your proposal for funding.”

Like an estimated 4,000 others we (James and myself at StackBlaze) got an email from Y Combinator (YC) saying that we had been rejected for the Winter 2012 programme. The email continues:

“Please don’t take it personally.” We haven’t and many other won’t. After all the email continues in very polite startupspeak:

“The applications we receive get better every funding cycle, and since there’s a limit on the number of startups we can interview in person, we had to turn away a lot of genuinely promising groups. Another reason you shouldn’t take this personally is that we know we make lots of mistakes……..We’re trying to get better at this, but the hard limit on the number of interviews means it’s practically certain that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups.”

Yes, YC considers itself a lean startup too.

“If you do, we’d appreciate it if you’d send us an email telling us about it; we want to learn from our mistakes.”

Don’t worry YC. We’ll be delighted to tell you.

Our Application

StackBlaze started in earnest in May this year so this was our first chance to apply. That makes our journey short compared to some. Indeed yesterday I contacted a startup I’ve been helping a little and was delighted to hear they had been invited to interview. But this is their third application with no previous invite. I understand this is not unusual.

We decided in August that we would apply having reached our goal of launching our private alpha of StackBlaze. We then aimed to have at least some private beta users by the application/interview stage. Clearly that was important whether our application progressed or not. In a perfect world we would have applied with some traction but that was simply not possible for us. At least we could demonstrate an ability to ship.

Around that time we saw the announcement for the YC event in New York. Some entrepreneurs laudably lobbied for a similar event in London. That was never going to happen, if you read what Paul Graham had to say. But to the credit of Matthew Stafford, one the partners Harj (Harjeet Taggar) came over to talk at Hacker News in London.

In the meanwhile we decided that it was no use lamenting the lack of a YC event in London. We decided to do something positive and risked the time and cost of a trip to New York, for just myself.

I have to say that event was fantastic and I was very taken aback about the largely negative blogs about it. As a way of finding out about YC it was great, so I was very happy. But too many folks there and bloggers afterwards seemed to zero in on New York versus Silicon Valley issues.

There was also a boatload of moaning about the networking, which yes, may have been daunting with perhaps 1,000 people there. But hey, guys & gals: You just had to be proactive! I must have spoken to 20 odd alumni who were easily accessible, interesting and helpful without exception. I came away with all my key questions answered. That was despite suffering from food poisoning all of that day and evening.

In London, Harj did an interesting talk about his journey through YC and patiently answered a huge amount of questions from a very large audience. Having been in New York I was able to get his commitment to talk to James and myself whilst he was in London. After giving him our mini-pitch, he encouraged us to apply and even contacted us after our application had gone in, to check it out: That made us quite optimistic about our chances.

A lot has already been written about the application form and process before, what you should do and examples of how to do it well, so I won’t add to that.

We are grateful to several alumni who reviewed our application and provided insightful and useful feedback. For instance one of the application questions was: “What’s new about what you’re making?”. We were able to better answer that based on their feedback to:

  • It seems crazy to us that automated scalability is not available for hosted PHP applications. We have set out to provide this with StackBlaze: Why worry about your application grinding to a halt or having to pay at a high level to cover for temporary peak demands?

What did we get wrong?

I really don’t know. It’s hard to know without feedback. We had a pretty solid application, I think. No doubt many others, who did not make it through, feel the same way. We are optimists after all.

Perhaps there were more than 100 better than ours: Obviously the YC team thought so.

Perhaps we have to apply twice or more to prove our determination.

Perhaps I’m too old: Nobody in their 50′s has yet made it, apparently. James is definitely not too young at 18: Daniel Gross of Greplin made it at 18 but he has since been trumped by a younger founder. Greplin is awesome, by the way, check it out. None of the alumni I spoke with in New York saw age as an issue.

Now we learned lots from successful applications and helpful posts on Hacker News and the main YC website. But we learned little from previous unsuccessful applicants. We are considering publishing our application form. Perhaps others can learn from it. Should we? Would you?

What now?

Should we apply again? We might. That decision can wait for five months.

Right now we are focussed on making StackBlaze easier to use, following beta user feedback. The underlying architecture is working well, as far as we can tell from our own testing and that of our early stage testers.

If you are interested in an invite to our beta programme or hearing about our progress you can sign-up here on the home page .

We’ll continue to develop the StackBlaze product and business, of course. YC or not YC does not change that.

 Posted by at 2:52 pm

Will governments ever get startups?

 Advice, Companies, Funding, Government, Startup  20 Responses »
Sep 062011
 

In two words: Not likely. I could end the post there but this is a blog, not Twitter.

Now there two reasons for this post right now:

  • Flickr image courtsey of johnsnape

    My employment on a government entrepreneurship programme finished on August 31, so only now can I blog about my experience: My contract of employment effectively disabled me from blogging about it in depth and honestly. I could have taken the risk of “mouthing off” but that would have helped neither me, my colleagues or more importantly clients. So I copped out of saying what I think online although I did take the risk of using Twitter where the only civil servant types you will find engaging on there are similar mavericks and forward thinkers.

  • Steve Blank, an extremely influential entrepreneurial thinker and teacher, made this post on September 1st: Why Governments Don’t Get Startups.
Steve has made some interesting points, detailed below, but I think he has missed some other crucial ones, as follows:
  • Government programmes are policy driven and furthermore policies change every five years, or more often
  • Few civil servants, or people in quangos running government programmes, have ever run a business, let alone a scalable startup
  • Governments think locally, regionally and nationally. A scalable startup has too think globally and at some stage connect sell globally.
  • Governments make little effort to speak with businesses about their real challenges: Sure, politicians visit businesses in their local area but that’s almost invariably a PR exercise for both parties. So there is a disconnect between policy makers and those who deliver the interpreted policies and interact directly with businesses
  • Government bodies and programmes tend to attract individuals and organisations that fit several of the following characteristics:
    1. They are risk averse
    2. They are very keen on procedures
    3. They have political aspirations
    4. They like talking more than doing
    5. They are experts in doing funding bids and spending money on overheads
Why should I have an opinion on this? Well for the last 4 years I have been working in three different government funded business growth and startup roles:
  • As a business development manager in a University (mentoring, pre-seed funding programmes, commercialisation, spin-outs). A large part of this role was working with ten other universities
  • As a Portfolio Manager in a scalable startup programme funded by a UK regional development agency
  • As a Portfolio Director in a business innovation and growth programme funded by the same UK regional development agency (for the South East of England)
Before that I sold a software company, in wihich I was a co-founder, to a NASDAQ listed company.  This was very much a scalable (albeit bootstrapped) startup. More details are, of course, on my LinkedIn profile.

So in total I’ve spent 22 years in business (small and large) and 4 years in the public sector or a private contractor that was publicly funded. Also as of 1st September 2011, I’m focussed on my new startup, StackBlaze whilst continuing to help a few other select startups.

So what about Steve Blank’s post? He concludes that:

Unless the people who actually make policy understand the difference between the types of startups and the ecosystem necessary to support their growth, the chance that any government policies will have a substantive effect on innovation, jobs or the gross domestic product is low.

Flickr image courtsey of northdevonfarmerHowever my experience is that the people making policy did understand something of the difference between different types of businesses and even startups. The primary problem is actually in the execution of their programmes. Indeed it seems to me there has been to much government money spent on analysis and policy making, which is all well and good for consultants, but little use to the rest of us.

But I do agree that there is a lack of understanding of how to develop an ecosystem. I’m talking here about the UK, of course. Don’t get me started on Europe! It’s no joke that the vast millions spent on cross-country innovation networking got coined as “Euro-jollies”.

Steve talks about the (only) success of the Israeli incubator programme and there is an emerging trend for incubators here and elsewhere. A UK government funded incubator may well come about. But I shudder to think about how much hands will be tied for the managers of that through inappropriate reporting requirements, audits, changes in policy and any other top down suffocation.

Steve states six lessons that need to be learnt:
  1. Each of these six very different startups requires very different ecosystems, unique educational tools, economic incentives (tax breaks, paperwork/regulation reduction, incentives), incubators and risk capital.
  2. Regions building a cluster around scalable startups fail to understand that a government agency simply giving money to entrepreneurs who want it is an exercise in failure. It is not a “jobs program” for the local populace. Any attempt to make it so dooms it to failure.
  3. A scalable startup ecosystem is the ultimate capitalist exercise. It is not an exercise in “fairness” or patronage. While it’s a meritocracy, it takes equal parts of risk, greed, vision and obscene financial returns. And those can only thrive in a regional or national culture that supports an equal mix of all those.
  4. Building a scalable startup innovation cluster requires an ecosystem of private not government-run incubators and venture capital firms, outward-facing universities, and a rigorous startup selection process.
  5. Any government that starts publicly financing entrepreneurship better have a plan to get out of it by building a private VC industry. If they’re still publicly funding startups after five to ten years they’ve failed.

Im my view the regional  programmes, that I have worked with recently, had taken on the lessons of 1, 2, 3 above but not 4 and 5. Will the UK learn these two lessons next time? I doubt it. In fact the signs are that lessons 1, 2 and 3 will end up having to be relearned. This might be funny, if it were not so serious.

Having said all this I don’t think the main problem with government is them knowing and learning these lessons: The main element in success lies in the execution of any programmes that are set-up. Sadly, I’m not optimistic.

When a start-up executes badly it goes to the deadpool. Those startups that execute well flourish. When the government executes badly we get another one in five years. When the civil service, and many others dependent upon them execute badly, too many just hang around for the next programme to work on or a nice pension plan. I am sorry of you feel this is rather insensitive at this time of cutbacks and please don’t think that the majority of these folks don’t have good intentions.

Plus don’t get me wrong, I loved my recent jobs:  When I was working with the entrepreneurs, that is. It’s been a honour, a privilege and great experience working with so many fantastic entrepreneurs. But you can see why I’m happy to be back, properly, in start-up land!

What is your experience of government business startup support? Do you think these programmes spend money effectively? Should government leave it to the private sector? And, if not, what types and stages of companies should they support?
 Posted by at 10:01 am  Tagged with: , , ,

Beware mentors who aren’t

 Advice, Mentor, Recruitment  No Responses »
Jul 232011
 
Have you ever sought a mentor to help you with your business? If so, you will have asked yourself how you find a good one.

Mentors can provide a lot of help but some can do a lot of damage. Just as there is a lot of damage that can be done if you get involved with the wrong investors.

Now it’s relatively easy to tell an angel by just asking questions about what investments they have made. But how do you verify a mentor? After all we can all claim to be mentors. Far fewer can claim and prove to be angel investors. An angel investment is not one unless it involves a concrete monetary transaction.

Anyway what defines a mentor-mentee transaction?

  • A conversation in a corridor?
  • An in-depth frank conversation between you and a critical friend?
  • A constructive exchange between a junior executive and experienced senior colleague?

It’s not so clear is it?  Mentoring is a fuzzy topic.

So how do you tell if somebody is going to be a good business mentor for you?

Here are some things you can do:

  1. Ask who they have mentored before? When was that? For how long did the relationship last?
  2. Ask for references and even better ask to speak with previous mentees
  3. You might also ask other mentors what they think your prospective mentor.

Now you can do that yourself but I am glad to say that a new organisation has recently been set-up that does that for you. The Association of Business Mentors does that for members before they join. Quite astonishingly no such organisation like this existed, in the UK, until now. So I am delighted that is no longer the case and I am flattered to have been asked to be an inaugural member.

More importantly the aim of this not-for-profit Association is to link you with credible, successful mentors so that business owners can feel confident when seeking a business mentor. All members of the association have been carefully screened, ensuring that you will receive a professional service and that your chosen mentor has a proven record of successful mentoring. All members are required to sign up to a code of ethics, are encouraged to undertake regular training and share best practice. The entire emphasis for members is on their client’s success.

This is a great service to our business community but it should not stop you from doing your own due diligence too. Nowadays it’s easy using LinkedIn and other online profiles. Remember too that gaps and non-disclosure on a LinkedIn profile can be as bad a sign as they are on a CV.

If the mentor is not on LinkedIn, or their profile is thin, then you have to question how much they can help you anyway. Embracing social media is nowadays, or soon wil be, vital for every business. Do you really want a mentor who does not get it?

Good mentors won’t feel you are bothering them if you ask them questions. Indeed they will be impressed with your professionalism.

So ask yourself questions like:

  • Does he listen? Or does he/she interrupt or talk over you? How much of the time does he/she spend talking and how much do you?
  • At what stage do they start asking about money?
  • Ask yourself if this person feels more like a consultant than a mentor.
  • Do you really think this person cares about you?
  • Do you trust this person?

Last but not least: Trust your gut instincts.

Do you have experiences of mentors you are willing to share here, for the benefit of other readers?

 Posted by at 1:45 pm  Tagged with: , , , , ,

Are you made of the right stuff?

 Companies, Customers, Funding, Investors, Startup  8 Responses »
May 312011
 

Endless Forms Most Beautiful

An ambitious and interesting project aimed at discovering the patterns at successful internet startups was announced on Saturday and is called Startup Genome. Over 650 businesses have been surveyed in quite some detail, so the results should be telling. The concluding reports will, I predict, turn out to be some of most influential pieces of research ever done on internet startups.

If you are a passionate internet entrepreneur you will have either already read the report or will do so soon. So, I’m not going to summarise the whole piece of work; not only is it substantial, but it is also a work in progress. Rather I’ll focus on parts that are of particular interest and make some interpretations of my own.

It’s important to state that this study is about internet startups specifically. There are lessons that other businesses can take from the report but one needs to be careful not to generalise. Also it’s important to remember that, as far as I know, the results are largely based on startups in Silicon Valley. As we all know, things don’t happen the same elsewhere: Availability of risk capital is much scarcer, for one thing. Also much of the initial report relates to companies that raised investment funding in seed and VC rounds. We can learn as much, if not more, from failures, of course. Some interesting findings, about that, have now been published here.

Six stages of company evolution are proposed as follows (personally I like this model), which I’ve paired with my personal take as shown in italics  :

1) Discovery: Create something useful and listen or die

2) Validation: Find ways to get customers to part with cash

3) Efficiency: Get more customers whilst burning cash effectively

4) Scale: Growing pains of every type

5) Profit Maximization: Milk your customers, oops sorry: Reward your shareholders

6) Renewal: Start your next venture

The authors propose four classes of startups, as follows, with some well known examples:

These classes are provided without a clear explanation of what they constitute, although helpfully, they have provided a list of example companies and typical characteristics. So, what the hell, let’s have a go at trying to clarify this thinking.

OK, I contend that all the classes of startups are aiming to provide:

  • More efficient & effective ways….
  • to do stuff….
  • for different classes of users

I would then propose to define the four classes as being focussed, on different users, as follows:

  • Automizer: Individuals and small groups
  • Social Transformer: Individuals, in a network, who interact and transact
  • Integrator: SMEs
  • Challenger: Enterprises in complex & rigid markets

OK, I’ve over simplified. But I think their classification of startups is interesting and insightful. I find it helps when thinking about my past experience and current activities.

At Century Dynamics (sold to NASDAQ: ANSS) where I was a co-founding technical director then managing director, we were definitely a “Challenger”. OK, we were largely pre-interweb but we were a software company selling globally, so the model still works. Also we were never funded by anybody outside the company. That’s one of the reasons it was a long road of bootstrapping and 14 years from startup to exit. It did not seem much of an achievement at the time but reading this post makes me question whether we actually did extremely well, particularly since we were selling to some glacially slow engineering sectors.

With the current startups that I am closely involved in, we are an “Automizer” (Pitchie) and a “Social transformer” (Tripbod).

Actually with Pitchie we are in our first month, at the Discovery stage, so it’s quite possible we will end up positioning differently: But to talk about that further would be revealing our plans for world domination, which we are keeping quiet about for now ;)

Tripbod is very much a social transformer. We are driven by our desire to cut out economic leakage in the tourism industry, where much of the money is taken by middlemen. We are all about connecting travellers directly with local travel providers making us a bona fide network business.

Part of the report findings were that Automizers and Social transformers have as their primary motivation a desire to change the world. Similarly the desire to build a great product was found to be the main drive for Integrators and Challengers. Tellingly only 8% of entrepreneurs surveyed said they care more about money than impact (68%) or experience (27%).

One of the main hypotheses, that the authors set out to test, is that success correlates with founders who are open to learning. Their initial findings are, they say, strongly suggestive of that and cite the following evidence, which is interesting but hardly conclusive:

  • Companies that track metrics effectively, and thus learn, achieved 3 to 4 times better growth rates of users
  • They considered that following thought leaders was a proxy for willingness to learn. Those companies that did so were 80% more likely the raise funding
  • Companies with helpful mentors were significantly more successful and raised around 7 times as much investment capital

The average funding received by company stage is shown below:

  • Discovery = $150,000
  • Validation = $600,000
  • Efficiency = $900,000
  • Scale = $3,000,000

The authors recommendations on what they think should be raised are $10,000 to $50,000 at Discovery and $100,000 to $1,500,000 at Validation. They further propose that nothing more is raised at the Efficiency stage. They suggest that the stark differences in the funding raised and what the authors recommend is due to angels over investing in startups. But remember this is in Silicon Valley: I don’t see that problem in the UK and neither does Scott Allison of Teamly.

Surely a difference today is that it costs a lot less to build an internet business than it did even two years ago. Many of the companies surveyed must have started out before that time.

Apparently there was no difference in whether investors were helpful or not on a daily basis. They conclude “We think this may be because investors’ main value add is their ability to increase the valuation in future rounds, and get larger exit sizes. Their help on a daily basis, which consists mostly of introductions and help with recruiting is not that significant because great entrepreneurs will find a way to get introduced to the people they want to hire and build a great team even if their investors don’t help.”

The most telling finding, in my opinion, is buried in the Miscellaneous section. They found a dramatic difference in the market size estimates made by the companies for their target markets, as shown here.

For companies that did not raise funding:

  • Discovery: $200Bn
  • Validation: $120Bn
  • Efficiency: $50Bn
  • Scale: $8Bn

For companies that did raise funding:

  • Discovery: $0.16Bn
  • Validation: $1.3Bn
  • Efficiency: $20Bn
  • Scale: $9Bn

Enormous differences you will agree at the first two stages! One is tempted to conclude that if you have failed to raise early funding then it’s very likely you are deluded.

Finally here is an interesting statistic that is reported without explanation or context: 81% of entrepreneurs don’t care about rules.

What do you think, fellow troublemakers?

  • How would you classify your startup? Do you like the classification used? Is it helpful?
  • Are mentors important for your learning? Or are they just good for contacts, so raising funding becomes easier?
  • What are you going to do differently having read this blog post or the report?
 Posted by at 12:24 pm  Tagged with: , , , ,
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