For delicious – phew, I’ll continue to use the service in the hopes that this means innovation will come back to delicious. I think Chad Hurley and Steve Chen are solid visionaries who can build and ship product in a meaningful way. I hope they’re going to do something meaningful with Delicious and give it a great second act.

As for Yahoo, all I can do is sigh. I was upset when I first heard of Yahoo’s plans with Delicious but it’s not new. It’s more of the same at Yahoo. More sitting and wasting assets, not only product but the people who came with those products.

I wish Yahoo had empowered Stuart Butterfield, Caterina Fake – founders of flickr – Joshua Schachter (Delicious) Eric Marcoullier (mybloglog), Andy Baio (Upcoming) and the founders of the other great consumer web services they had acquired. Instead of making ex-MSFT, ex-Aol, Ex-Autodesk and even ex-Google executives head of products and innovation and R&D what Yahoo should have done is empowered these visionaries to think across product and across segments for truly revolutionary innovations. I recognise it’s not an easy task, most of these people preferred building start ups, but it can be done, if you put the right structures in place and incentivise correctly.

I truly believe Facebook is kick ass because a number of it’s product executives came from Friendfeed or from VC funds where they were connected to innovation closely. Facebook also has a visionary at the helm. This is something that Amazon, Apple and Google also have. Bezos, Jobs, Page and even Zuckerburg have created things and value true engineering innovation. For Yahoo to compete it will need to find a real visionary, not more managers.

Unfortunately, the reaction by the entrepreneurial community has been quite negative. Lots of negative comments on the website that’s apparently at the centre of the campaign. Issues about links to US companies and the execution of the site miss the point.

The point is that entrepreneurship is seen by the government as important and there is an opportunity to harness support, change policies and build networks to help support and give entrepreneurs a better chance at succeeding.

Which is why the cynicism directed at the campaign and the calls for heads for partnering with a US company really annoyed me. I cheekily tweeted that:

“#startupbritain cynicism shows the difference between US/UK! In the US, the response would be cool, let’s get to work.”

To be fair, I don’t think that would be the exact reaction, I just think the US is better at celebrating success and at not paying much attention to failure. As well Americans seem to treat programs that they don’t believe would work with indifference. When the government fails the start up community in the US there’s a powerful movement to solve it. From VCs meeting with heads of state to blog posts that end up turned into op-ed pieces in powerful media outposts. When an entrepreneur does something for the community in the US it seems like the community either helps him make it better or moves on quickly to making their own company a success.

This may be naïve, but I have seen a lot of mud slinging and not a lot of productive feedback. Don’t get me wrong there are some pockets it the UK that are supporting this and are encouraging the movement and there are some really snarky responses to government initiatives in the US as well, I just think the ratio of support : snark / cynicism is reversed and we’re holding our own community here in the UK back as a result of it.

So put aside the cynicism for a second, if you don’t like #startupBritain just move on. If you have a way to improve it give the feedback to the team, and if you’re supportive of the movement carry on. Building great companies in the UK is difficult, we’re going to need all the help we can get and knocking down

Start-ups In general

Are you okay with failure? Most start-ups fail and yours is likely to be one of the failures. I particularly liked Marc Cenedella’s post on failure at entrepreneurial ventures. Most of the time you’re failing and you’ve got to push your way through it. Having failure on a CV can still be restrictive – especially more so here in the UK. If you can deal with that, it’s a start.

Are you a hustler? Working at a start up is a slog. It can be hard, filled with disappointments and at times it can really get you down. It’s not only founders that have to be relentlessly resourceful (hat tip to Paul Graham and this post on Y-Combinator talking about characteristics of YC founders), it’s everyone in the first 100 who have to hustle to get shit done.

Do you value short-term cash? More over one day at Yahoo! than I have in a year as a founder. But I’ve learnt a lot more so far. I’m an extreme case. Most start-ups pay in promise and a lot of the promise doesn’t pay out (see question one). If you need a higher salary think twice about joining a start up.

Are you patient? If you’re joining a start-up you need to make a commitment. To get the real value out of any equity you’re looking at 3, 5 or 7 years from the start. To get real experience you need to see through a couple of pivots, strategic shifts, partnerships and growth in customers. If you’re not willing to see it out why join?

Specifically

Do you believe in the team? If you’re joining a start-up you should think (at least a bit) about the opportunity like an investor. Chris Dixon has a great post on this when he talks about the Dropbox opportunity that he missed by looking at the competition in the market rather than the team. If you’re not sold on the team running the ship then you’re going to have trouble trusting decisions.
Do you like the space or the technology being used? Something has to keep you hooked to the company. If you’re not thinking about the product, the market, or the technology being used in the company you’re going to get bored and not be able to really make a difference.

How well are they funded? Are they likely to raise money? Joining a 2 person company as employee number 3 with a couple of million in the bank is a great ratio. Joining a 10-person company with only 100K in the bank is a tough sell. Even if you don’t know the exact amounts there are some great resources to be able to check the status of the team/company. Looking up the investors, looking up the team on Linkedin and seeing what they’ve invested in or what they’ve done in the past can be a decent indicator for future success or at least their ability to stick around.

I’m sure there’s lot’s more that I’ve forgotten but I hope this is a useful starting point for people considering working for a start-up, I’m sure there will be other points in the comments.

I’ve been critical of the companies selected in the past, so now I have a chance to show that an early stage company with potential can make a great Seedcamp company.

To be honest the terms scared me a bit. I believe the equity we’re giving up if we’re successful is significant, but it’s not about the financial value that we decided to go for it. Seedcamp, like Y Combinator and other projects like this are great for providing a hand up in terms of conversations with customers, partners and other investors.

I’ve met with a lot of potential investors over the past year, it’s been an insane whirlwind or a year. And while many investors take meeting after meeting after meeting without a firm answer and while other “investors” charge customers to pitch. Seedcamp may invest a smaller amount but being able to leverage the network and getting a firm decision quickly is something that you can’t put a price on, especially when you’re at the stage we’re at – really early!

There’s a line I like about a little of something is worth more than a lot of nothing so hopefully Seedcamp will help us turn Ad Avengers into something and that’s why we decided to go for it. Watch this space next week for more on how the process shakes out and wish us luck!

Here’s the corporate blog post as well.

I still buy the occasional physical book, usually ones that I want to keep for posterity on our bookshelf, but more and more I’m reading books on the iPad/iPod/Blackberry through the Amazon Kindle applications. But books are probably the only medium that hasn’t moved to a digital one-use service.

For Television shows I can catch up online, for movies there are services where I can send the movie back, but no such service exists for books. Why hasn’t anyone launched a digital library, where you can rent books and perhaps either pay a small fee for a short term download or pay a per use fee that’s a fraction of the cost of the book, similar to the rental option on iTunes?

Am I missing something or is this an opportunity that is waiting to be developed?

I’m all in favour of the efforts and the investment that the government is putting in; I’d just like to see more encouragement of private investment and of the banking sector to invest in individuals who have the next big idea. The whole idea that the next Facebook or Google can come out of the UK with this framework is not realistic today. There’s a substantial change that needs to happen in angel investment, banking and culture before a big consumer tech company will come out of the UK. The guardian article with comments from Joe White is the only article I’ve read that points this out well.

A company needs much less capital today to get started. While the government looks at raising funds for investment what they really should be doing is passing on tax relief for investors who are investing in truly early stage companies. As well as changing and encouraging the banking sector to lend to early stage companies with solid teams and markets and help take on some of the risk. The UK government has some of the levers in place with the Enterprise Investment Scheme and the Enterprise Finance Guarantee but they’ve made these schemes so convoluted and so complicated that it’s really difficult for anyone to really take advantage of these levers.

The UK culture towards entrepreneurship is changing, but failure is still seen as a bad thing rather than a badge of having the courage to try something new. The media, with it’s programs like Dragon’s Den, doesn’t help this by making 4 entrepreneurs seem like bumbling idiots compared to every 1 who has their head screwed on right.

That being said, I do believe London is one of the top three places in the world to start a company – with the Valley and New York being the other two – and while this is a great step towards ensuring that London continues to compete globally on the technology front, there’s still some work on the other side of the spectrum that the government needs to do to take a leadership position globally.

Founders can adapt, by committing to find a mentor, realise their weaknesses and bring in senior management who can plug their gaps and give them really good guidance. Think this has worked a fair bit for Mark Zuckerburg, Mark has a great board, including people like Marc Andreesen, he’s brought in some great leadership (eg. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, is a legend). It works for Facebook, Mark might be the face and he might be the subject of films, but I would bet that Sheryl and the other senior managers are able to secure the right partnerships and help the company scale effectively.

On the flip side founders can bring in people and then hand off responsibility when it grows beyond their capabilities. Regardless of how the handovers have happened at Twitter, Ev knows that Dick is a better front man for the company as it scales beyond Ev’s capabilities and putting Costolo in place is a great strategy as the company grows on to the next level.

This all goes back to self-awareness. Are you a Jack Dorsey, an ideas guy who can establish a product? An Ev Williams, who can help scale and grow a company? A Dick Costolo who can take a really big company and really grow it into a potential 9-figure exit or even an IPO? Or are you a Mark (or for that matter a Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and a few other special leaders), who can take the company from idea to real scale at a point where the world is coming into contact with your company everywhere? Knowing if you can and want to adapt as the company grows is really important and ultimately will help dictate the level of success the company will have.

That said both of them are missing key points when it comes to social media.

Seth,In Lynchpin, thinks social media is a giant time suck and people would be better served spending their time making stuff happen. Gladwell thinks social media’s reach is limited and that we won’t we see a revolution through a medium like Twitter. They’re both right but they’re wrong as well.

They’re right in that social media CAN be a time suck and that a giant movement needs a lot more channels than twitter, but what their both missing is that social media connects and makes people far more aware than ever before. Being connected and being aware helps inform and create in a way that was not possible a while ago. Gladwell and Godin are not active on twitter or any other social media channel (I’d link to their twitter feeds but their both useless on twitter).

Personally, I think Steven Johnson’s research and thinking on connectedness is bang on, when Steven says “Chance favours the connected mind” that totally resonates with me and my experiences. Do yourself a favour and watch this four-minute video from Steven Johnson about “good ideas”.

The key with social media is to know what you’re using different mediums and channels for. For me personally, Twitter is for building connections and information (reception and distribution), facebook is for interesting personal and social matters, Linkedin is professional contact building and maintaining and so on and so fourth. I don’t look at any of these channels as a time suck or as a revolutionary device, I look at them as channels within a new marketing mix and I think Gladwell and Godin would do well to try and understand the mediums better before waving them off as irrelevant.

I had a conversation with a friend a couple of months ago about how the term “Lifestyle business” get’s such a bad knock in business schools and in the investor/tech entrepreneur communities. The truth is lifestyle businesses should be admired not dissed. If someone can create enough wealth for him or herself and in the process create a few jobs, in this economy especially, we should celebrate their success rather than dismiss them for creating a lifestyle business.

I didn’t question it that much when I was in business school. I took entrepreneurship classes that focused on building big businesses, looking at scalability, looking at exits, and investment classes that looked at bottom lines and quickly showed which investments would have a trajectory that would land them into public markets or in a valuable trade sale, I can’t remember once ever looking at the amount of jobs created or the amount of wealth for an individual in a simple but effective business. Although my guess is that a significant portion of successful businesses are in fact lifestyle businesses.

I used to work for a lifestyle business and one of the reasons I left was that the business wasn’t scaling and wasn’t trying to be a really big business. In hindsight, so what? The company had created jobs for over 20 people and the founder was making a significant income for himself. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. In fact in this economy we need more people creating companies like this.

As the economy contracts, as getting listed on public markets is getting more difficult, maybe it’s the right time for business schools, investors, people and banks (I’m leaving the investment for smaller businesses rant for another day) to take another more favourable look at “lifestyle” businesses.

Here’s the thing, all websites either sell something or match up parties. Dating websites sell their audiences but they differ in how wide or deep they want those audiences to be engaged. I think the spectrum goes from a site like plentyoffish.com at the low end, dead easy, low bells and whistles really simple and you get what the tin tells you plenty of fish. On the other end you have a site like okcupid which markets itself as a matchmaker asking deeper questions to help you find your match. I’m not in the market for dating websites (thankfully being married to the greatest wife ever means I don’t have to visit sites like these) but even I was interested in OK Cupid’s blog post on the real stuff white people like. I had come across this post just before my conversation with Josh so it helped me see the common line between dating websites and the rest of the web. The question is; are you a plenty of fish or an Ok Cupid? Or rather are you a for the masses or a for the value site.

Let’s look at social networks, Facebook is a for the masses, everyone’s on it and it’s connections are madness, Linkedin is a value where there’s deeper engagement. Question and answer sites, Yahoo! Answers is a for the masses, Quora is a value rich model. Other social networks like Twitter, and Q&A sites like Mahalo, fall inbetween.

Knowing which end of the spectrum you want to be can help you dictate content and marketing strategy. Questions like should you invest more in SEO or in Buzz and PR can be answered by know what kind of dating site you are.
It’s an interesting concept and I wonder what others think.