BiggerPockets is a real estate investing network with a story that demonstrates the power of a strong community in the face of crisis and roadblocks.  BiggerPockets is a site for all things real estate.  You can find the latest advice from their blog posts or solicit advice on an active group of forums.  If you’re looking for something a bit more hands on, you can review their listings for your next real estate investment or their events  for classes, webinars, and group meetups.

Joshua Dorkin, the founder and one of three employees at BiggerPockets, was kind enough to share the story of how it all came to be.

Building organically

Getting to where BiggerPockets is now was no straight or intended path.  Much like craigslist.org, the site grew out of a personal hobby that grew beyond the person. The site began while Josh was learning real estate investing.  He used the site to collect resources, share experiences, and obtain feedback.  It was, however, a mere side project to his full-time job teaching web design and journalism, and pursuing (not just writing about) his budding real estate investment career.

As he continued to contribute, though, the site began to grow.  He plowed revenues back into the business and, very quickly, it developed into something larger than his own resource.  Along the way, the site also became a central resource for other real estate investors, and with this new audience, Josh sought ways to build something that could fully support these other investors.  It was also around this time that MySpace began to take off.  Josh, witnessing the rise and potential of social networking, realized he had an opportunity to create his own niche, real estate community around BiggerPockets and sought out an outsourcing firm to do just that.

Navigating bumps in the road

The team he hired, though, would get in the way of those plans.  He spent months and thousands of dollars on an outsourcing firm, but what he received was a broken, disjointed site in return.  The code was trash, and he could do nothing but toss it aside and go back to the drawing board, back to growing organically.

Using regenerated revenues from the site, he hired another vendor, this time using oDesk. oDesk and this new vendor offered a greater level of transparency, video snapshots, reports, etc.  It helped him manage the project and ensure it was going in the right direction.  When there was a mistake or miscommunication, it was quickly recognized and resolved.  The project was now going in the right direction, the site would launch its new features, and eventually, BiggerPockets would find its first dedicated developer.

On top of development bumps, though, BiggerPockets had to contend with plummeting ad rates, much like the rest of the web.  To counteract this, the site focuses on consistent content creation, further cementing its status as a resource and helping fuel steady user growth.  What started as Josh’s resource now features 22 volunteers and 40,000 passionate members.

Enforcing community

Growing BiggerPockets from a hobby to a business required Josh to learn new skills in everything from online advertising and vendor selection to project management.  None of these skills, Josh says, was more important than learning how to manage a community.  How exactly do you run a forum?  How do you monitor content to ensure a level of trust amongst your members?

At BiggerPockets, the answer to those questions is a strict, even hardcore, adherence to a set of rules.  It’s sometimes controversial.  It rejects, and sometimes expels, power users looking to bend those rules, and it’s not always easy.  Controversial or not, though, the site avoids a far worse outcome — a site overcrowded by solicitations and sales pitches.   Take a quick browse through their forums and you’ll see an active, supportive (and sometimes salty) dialog.

That same trusting community now helps ensure its members’ own success.  People use the forums to save themselves from bad decisions or find investment mentors.  The site facilitates profitable business partnerships and helps those on the wrong side of bad deals.  In one case, the community even helped bring down a Ponzi scheme by offering authorities access investors who may have been caught up in it.

Without that sense of community and dedicated group of volunteers, BiggerPockets wouldn’t be what it is today — a place where tough love establishes a sense of trust.  It’s something other networks might want to try out for themselves. (You hear that, Craig?)

Portfolio Rant

Around last fall, I started trading with an E*trade account to better understand other investors using Wikinvest.  Prior to that, I had spent some time positioning a 457 account, but nothing more than that. Just a few months into my time at Wikinvest, though, it was hard to not want to invest.  I’m constantly reading investment reports, finance blogs, news, and generally talking about the markets and investment ideas.  It was a perfect fit and, lucky for me, I decided to start my investment portfolio right around the time of one of the greatest stock market crashes ever.

Investing since Wall Street’s collapse in October (and then Geithner’s bobble in March) has its benefits.  With valuations seemingly at the lowest they’ve been in decades, it felt like a good time to be greedy (or as greedy one can be when purchasing 10-50 stocks at a time).

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Investing has since fascinated me.  I’m in awe of the thought that, for $9.82, I can own part of American Express (it certainly helps that their dividends offset some of my credit card interest too) or Tata Motors for $4.42.  Ownership can be addictive, and I certainly throughout some of the markets lows.

Since this is an entirely new portfolio of mine, I have a long horizon.  Unless we go into a 1990s Japan-like slide, I’m assuming that a monkey could make money with a long-term investment just after the Oct 08 to March 09 fall.  That said, I’m certainly not willing to count on that, and after markets rose this spring and summer, I’m now looking for quality companies.

I like a good, low debt-to-equity / high ROA / low P/E combo if it’s to make it into my portfolio.  From all the opportunities out there, I start with sectors and regions and work my way down to companies.  I stay away from retail in the U.S., but I embrace it in India and China.  I like companies that build things, or build things that are used to build things, or transport things, or dispose of the wreckage from buildings things.  I like financial institutions — a few of them at least, the ones I haven’t heard much about on television.  Before I invest in a company, I look at recent earnings reports, annual reports, investment reports, and read news associated with the company.

The Investment Portfolio as Venture Capital

It’s not long into this process that I realize what it must take for a VC to part ways with several million dollars of their and their client’s money for an unproven idea and company, all the while knowing they can only, maybe, get the initial investment back in three to five years.  If they’re incredibly good and lucky, they’ll get that investment back with interest.  It’s no wonder it’s hard to get money from a VC.

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I’ve found I have certain tendencies with my portfolio similar to a VC.  For my stable investment — the IRA — I’m less willing to risk an entire company’s collapse.  I focus on ETFs like ADRE or QQQQ that follow big emerging market and major technology companies, respectively.  On the other hand, I’ve come to think of my trading account as my “extra” savings where I can take chances.  It’s where I’m going to prove my investor worth.  I’m OK with it disappearing over night.  I’m willing to be risky with multiple small cap companies, looking for one explosive stock.  I spread those investments around; some work while others don’t.  I do what I can to be good and hope to get lucky.  Sometimes, it’s no wonder it’s so easy to get money from a VC.

Portfolios for Founders

The other part about running your own portfolio is — you learn to understand the levers for building your own business.  Create more value than you require.  Give away equity for cash; take on debt for cash.  Purchase people / space / machines.  Convince someone to give you more cash and continue the loop  It’s all there within your portfolio.  You expect management of your portfolio companies to control costs, increase their cash, and demonstrate health by increasing earnings, milestones, dividends, etc.  Management has to preach to employees and investors, alike, with probably a slightly different story for each.  It all sounds like start-up world to me (except those dividends, of course).

As an early founder, you’ll be stuck in the details of your business at all times.  Your investors won’t.  They’ll expect you to step back from the conversation about the misalignment of that button by 5px and figure out whether your market strategy is going to withstand this economy given your cash on hand.  They’ll want it in digestible figures and metrics.  Further, they’ll want you to put your thousands of hours a year into a half hour phone call and presentation.  They just want the basics — are you creating more value than you require?

It makes you understand both the weight of the founder and the risk a venture capital takes investing in a start-up.  Both parties are flying blind in this arrangement.  There’s no easily accessible “Sell” button like there is on my E*trade account, and a bankrupt start-up is worth even less than GM.  Investments are designed for a three to five year exit (at least) with only a hope and a prototype to go on.

Founders, it’s up to you to figure out the rest.  You should understand what your investors are going through (employees are investors too — but that requires another post).  Just remember to create more than you require.  Start from nothing and be willing to lose everything.  Create ownership.

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Beyond that, you can go deeper into your expertise.  Learn how to effectively target your ad campaigns, reduce your CPCs for your online ads, or find free ways of advertising your site.  Measure what your users use most, build human-friendly URLs, write keyword rich content.  Start your Twitter campaign, Friendfeed account, and Facebook account — then, link them all.  Now, take all of the various ways I’ve just described, throw in all of the techniques I’m missing, mix and match, and, well, you’ve got innumerable ways to build traffic.

Please, please, just don’t use the automated email request for a link exchange with other sites as a way of building traffic.  Anyone that’s ever run a barely popular website has seen one of these things:

Hi

My name is NAME. I’ve just visited your website
enterventure.com and I was wondering if you’d be interested in
exchanging links with my website. I can offer you a HOME PAGE link back
from my Business and Marketing website which is WEBSITE URL HERE
with page rank #.

As mentioned, your link would be placed on the site HOME PAGE, not on
any “links” pages which may be buried in the site somewhere. I’m sure
this exchange would be benefitial for both of our sites, helping
towards increasing our visibility in search engines.

If you are interested, please add the following information to your
website and kindly let me know when it’s ready. I’ll do the same for
you in less than 24 hours, otherwise you can delete my link from your
site.

I’ve only recently begun receiving these emails at EnterVenture.com, but I’ve seen an almost bi-weekly message like this one while working at Wikinvest.  (Remember what that feedback email breakdown looked like.)  Quite honestly, I don’t know for sure that these messages don’t work (some people must buy into them or else they’d have died out by now); however, I’m fairly certain that any site worth it’s page rank isn’t going to respond to this message.  More importantly, if you’re relying on this stategy, or are relying on a “web consultant” employing this strategy, it’s very clear you’re fishing for an easy path to success where one simply doesn’t exist.  By virtue of using this strategy, you’ve already predicted your site’s future demise. 

There’s only one free lunch you’ll find at a startup — the one given to employees to keep them in the office working longer.

Where’s the feedback?

How hard is it to get meaningful feedback online?  I recently took a look through all of the feedback emails sent to Wikinvest

since I joined.  Without actually counting them, here’s the rough breakdown of emails in order of email “market share”:

1. Classes and Conference invitations
2. Complain letters to company executives (i.e., someone goes to the Honeywell page and writes a nasty feedback letter “to Honeywell” — only, Honeywell doesn’t get it, we do.)
3. Requests for link exchanges
4. Advertising / Partnership inquiries
5. Feedback of the Useless Variety (everything looks great!)
6. Feedback of the Useful Variety (complaints)

There’s no better feedback than complaints.  Of course, we all love the pat-on-the-back feedback email, but its’ the “what the hell’s wrong with you?  No one can read that font!” email that really gets us moving.  At Wikinvest, total feedback — both useless and useful — probably only equates to 5% of all emails to our feedback address.  To take a great example, today Wikinvest released a whole slew of new features, including a bit of press to go with it.  What sort of volume did we see in our feedback inbox?  We had five emails — despite the fact that traffic today was multiples higher than a typical day.

Despite the huge Get Satisfaction Feedback buttons that have been popping up all over the web, it seems like most often, feedback emails are anything but.  That first time you put up the feedback button, you think, “Hey, someone’s going to email us and tell us they love that widget 13 pixels above the comment box.  It’s much better than the 5 pixels we argued about for half an hour.”  Surprisingly enough, it doesn’t work that way.

So, how do sites actually get meaningful feedback from their users?

Analytics

There’s no better way to understand what your users do and don’t like data and analytics.  You can get an unlimited amount of information about your users if you know how to pimp out your Google Analytics the right now.  If you’re not going to tell us what you like and don’t like with your words, well, we’re just going to figure it out with your clicks.  The only problem with analytics, though, is that it only tells you what people like and don’t like.  The “why” people like and don’t like your service is up to you to figure out.  Maybe some of these other methods help…

Social Media

Like I said, after today’s Wikinvest launch, we saw four meaningful feedback emails; however, the TechCrunch article had 19 comments.  The Giga Om and Wall Street Journal articles had a few more.  On Twitter, the flood of Wikinvest references certainly helped too.  Users are talking about your site, they’re just not talking to you so you have to go out and find them.

Group Protest

This one’s exclusive to sites that allow it’s users to form groups around certain passions.  That’s right, I’m talking to you Facebook.  Who knew you were so lucky to have groups you could go to like, “The New New NEW Facebook Redesign Sucks — Boycott Facebook! — Oh wait, no, we actually like it now.”

Power Users

At Wikinvest, we’ve discovered a novel way of getting feedback from our users — talking to them!  On the phone even!  A group of power users helps propel Wikinvest’s content, but, almost more importantly, they’re invaluable to feedback about new products and features.  They tell us what we should and shouldn’t be doing, help fill in gaps in our team’s knowledge base, and often, they just know what they want better than we do.  You might call them consiglieres; oh wait, we do call them consiglieres.  Thanks guys!

For me, anything new starts with a brainstorm.  Almost everything I’ve ever written started as a brainstormed list and was later constructed into a complete thought.  As much as I’ve mentioned enjoying this in the past, in a way, I envy those people that can turn a blank page directly into to something well crafted and polished.  It certainly saves a few steps.

In college, my freshman year writing teacher once told me I was one of the most step-by-step writers she’d ever read.  I could apparently write (surprise to me), I wasn’t lacking things to say (less of a surprise), but I was just really, really sequential she told me.  (This woman had the dark, artsy grad student thing down pat.  I’m sure she didn’t know what to make of my engineering ass.)  My creativity simply comes at a different part in the process — the brainstorm’s where the fun is.  It’s putting together the puzzle from that brainstorm that’s logical sequential.

Anyways, here it is.  We’ll see how I put it all together.

Community

• Sustainability in your Community
• Eyeballs to Fingertips Ratio

Build systems, not products.

Feedback – get it every where you can

• Emails
• Webinar
• Power Users
• Coworkers

Revenue

• You need more
• Who has the pockets
• Traditional vs. Non Traditional

Operations

• Always getting better
• Document!
• Know when to fudge it.

Wikinvest – Working for a startup, analyzing conglomerates.

Changing Landscape

• Falling (failing) newspapers.
• Large institutions are out.  Little is in.
• Paying platforms – Mahalo, Facebook, iPhone
• Manager your own money

ADRE and QQQQ

Ownership

• Company Options
• Personal Investing

What’s Failure?  What’s success?

Your Network

• Casually
• Personally
• Network-ily

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m obsessed with finding ways to work faster and smarter.  I’ve talked about designing and brainstorming faster with my whiteboard and Balsamiq’s mock up tool.  I spent over 600 words describing how I organize my email inbox, and I can’t wait for Ativiti to launch so I can share even more ideas about process.

Given all that, it’s no wonder I enjoy working for a startup.  From my experience, it’s the ultimate test in your ability to get a lot done in very little time.  There are always a million things you have to do.  There’s absolutely no way you can accomplish everything.  How do you figure out what gets done and what doesn’t?  When no one is telling you what to do, what’s the most important thing you should be doing?

From my experience with this and previous jobs, there’s the things you have to get done, no matter what, and then there’s everything else.

Things that have to get done, no matter what.

In most normal jobs, “the things that have to get done, no matter what” take up most of your time.  In a startup, though, these things are the least of your worries.  At a startup, the things that have to get done, no matter what, are the things that you’ve figured out already.  You know your payroll process.  You know your QA process.  Make them as fast as possible.  Make them take up 10% of your time.  You have to spend the rest of your days figuring out your new marketing strategy, the next product launch, the bug fix, and …

Everything else.

If 90% of your time is spent on everything else, what does that time look like?  How do you figure out the next most important thing for you to work on?  Your work has to constantly move a process forward, a contract forward, a task forward, the company forward.

Are you creating something new?

Working at a startup means you have the potential to create something new just about every day.  You can’t actually create something every day, but that’s the potential.  It takes a lot of prep work to create something new, especially to do so correctly.  Creating requires a process — brainstorm, refine, plan, build, refine — and with each step you’ll have to ask yourself the same question, what’s the most important thing I should be doing?

Are you doing something that will bring attention to your organization?

No news is bad news for a startup.  Find a way to get people talking about you.  There’s many ways to bring attention to your organization — create something new, improve your page rank, generate buzz on the blogosphere.  If you’re doing this, you’re always doing something important.

Are you creating something that’s lasting and replicable?

You’re creating something new.  We’ve established that.  You’re also creating something that may have to last.  You need to assess whether what you’re creating is a one-time activity or not.  Pulling a report is never a one-time activity.  Writing a feedback email isn’t either.  Obviously, this has to be balanced with a startup’s short-term need for speed and agility, but a little planning up front helps ensure longer term success.

Are you improving an existing process?

You’re taking a process from the person who first created it.  The problem is, you’re not someone who just takes a process as-is.  You want to question and improve it.  With enough people thinking like this you can quickly go from a guy writing a payroll check to an electronic, efficient direct deposit payroll system.  Be sure the time spent fixing your process justifies the effort, though.  If it takes several hours to reduce a back office process from three clicks to two, it might not be worth undertaking right now.  It might still be worth fixing, but not until a million other things are taken care of.

Are you developing something you can pass to another team?

You not only have to create things that can be passed to your own internal teams, you may need to make your work presentable to another team in your company or another company altogether.   You can’t simply give the administrative assistant a payroll task without re-explaining your process, highlighting any exceptions.  Your specification has to be written unambiguously in order for development to pick up where you leave off. What’s acceptable for internal team distribution often requires a new draft entirely for other teams.  Factor this extra effort into your planning.

Are you learning something new, something that you can re-use?

You know what you’re doing right now.  But do you know what you’re doing a year from now?  You should have an idea.  What will you need to know then that you don’t know now?  A few pilot programs now will make it easier for you to answer that question later.

Are you fixing something that’s broken?

Fixing something that’s broken helps make sure you’re not wasting time on things that don’t fit these criteria.  Remember what I said above, though, the effort mustn’t exceed the reward.

Finally, in this economy, there’s the most obvious question you should be asking yourself whenever you prioritize your work –

Is this going to make us any money?

Forget everything else.  If all else fails, focus on generating revenue.  In this economy, there’s nothing more important that you could be doing right now.

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So I was talking to my mother yesterday and…  (No, not that personal.)

Rather, this blog has been desperately lacking in the About page department since its inception.  Only recently did I even have an About page (which was an obvious mistake).  When I reworked the Enter Venture theme, one of the last things I did was to write the About page — it’s no easy task putting your life down into a few paragraphs.  In fact, it’s something I’ve tweaked up until the writing of this post.   So that begs the question, what do you think?

I’m Patrick Cushing, the lead (read: only) editor for Enter Venture.  I’m originally from Boston but now hang my hat in San Francisco because I’ve realized its much nicer to be able to visit the cold / snow rather than live in the cold / snow.

For an overly costly education (read: I’m still paying for it), I went to Columbia’s Engineering school and picked out the most interesting major I could find in Biomedical Imaging Engineering.  It was certainly interesting — how could brain images not be?  Four years later though, I realized I had little interest in things bio or medical and asked my then employer, D. E. Shaw, to send me to India to work with their software office.

In India, I began my education in all things web as a member of their Creative Services team. It was here that I found CSS / HTML to be much more enjoyable than brain image smoothing algorithms in Matlab.  I came to manage all things wiki at the India office and developed an affinity for trying to organize chaos.

After India, I sought something entirely different and found it with NYC Government as part of their Strategic Operations team working on their NYC Business Express project.  Working for NYC Government made me appreciate what it takes to build software in the enterprise — especially one where green screens still exist.  It was also the first time I felt like an adult, but I suspect wearing a suit every day will do that to anyone.

I’m currently working for Wikinvest on their Product and Marketing team where my days include everything from reaching out to bloggers, testing new products, writing & editing content, writing scripts to parse XML files, and helping to expand coverage internationally.

Then, I found Balsamiq Markups. Balsamiq Markups is like my whiteboard on steroids — yet, still much, much better than that.  Balsamiq is an Adobe AIR application that allows you to quickly prototype a site using common elements found on a web page like buttons, tabs, search, etc.  You can quickly and easily re-size elements, group them together, or lock them on the page.  (My whiteboard never did that.)

Balsamiq Mockups deftly combines a rough, hand-drawn sketch look with a smooth, Visio-like ability to arrange elements on a page.  For designers, this will save them from getting into Photoshop right away.  These mock-ups allow you to get a feel for space and alignment without needing to commit to color, design, or typography.  For everyone else, Balsamiq provides one of the easiest ways for you to get into the web design game too.  Developers can test out what they’re trying to build, product managers can test out new ideas — heck, even corporate executives can figure this thing out.

Because Balsamiq’s so easy to use, it’s a great tool for soliciting group UI discussion.  You can quickly iterate on an idea using multiple versions of a mock or by simply changing your design on the fly.  On top of all that, it’s actually fun to use.  When was the last time you picked up a new software product and said that?

To see for yourself, try out Balsamiq’s online demo.  You’ll quickly get sick of being told you’re using a demo, but you’ll also quickly find yourself feeling like you have the design skills of Steve Jobs.  For $79, you can have that feeling all you want with their full version.

As a blogger, I was granted a free license in exchange for an honest review (it meets my advertising tolerance level), so in that vein, here are a few things I think could be better:

1. The toolbar could use some improvement.  It takes up a substantial portion of the screen yet it seems like I’m always trying to find an element.  Sections labelled “Big” aren’t that helpful.  The issue’s alleviated by placing elements in multiple sections, but better labeling and smaller icons would certainly help.  Maybe a scrolling list with a single preview of the image?  I have ideas about this
2. The fade away toolbar that rests on the editing screen is also a bit tricky.  I often didn’t know what was hidden behind this section.  When it appears, it always seems to be in the way.  When I need something, I can’t always figure out where it is.  For example, clicking on the down arrow to bring up all icon options was not entirely intuitive.  I think there’s room for this to be in the top bar to save space on the editing screen and make it more visible.
3. Last, I’d say ditch the notebook look.  You don’t need to reinforce the fact that Balsamiq mirrors a sketch, and the notebook-on-a-web-page look feels very first generation blog to me.  Balsamiq couldn’t be further from first generation web and the rest of the editor should reflect that!

Thanks Balsamiq!

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There are also wayyyy more ads on this blog.

Online ads really bother some people.  They ruin the user experience and drive some people to using ad blockers.  I don’t think it has to be that way. I think don’t think of ads as a necessary necessary evil.  They’re a challenge.  We can create great ads that fill the side of a building, a page of a magazine, a bottlecap, a stamp.  Why not try to make online ads interesting? Where’s the next great 125×125 designer?

How can we make ads more useful for our users?  I’m not sure, but I’m playing around with ads on Enter Venture.  It has nothing to do with money because, well, there’s not yet enough to support my monthly coffee bill.  Instead, I’m adding ads to Enter Venture to figure ads out.  Here’s what I mean:

1. Designing with constraints

When you mock up a site, it’s easy to think about where you’ll place all of the top comment, category, and media goodies.  With ads, though, you have to figure out what you’re willing to sacrifice and where.  To make ads work, you certainly can’t hide them.  Ads teach you to organize with constraints.

2. Learn the lingo

CPC, CPM, and CPA are just the start of it.  You’ll want to get an idea for what a leader board is, why and when to use an ad network, and how to measure your success.  When you become big enough to sell your own ads, you’ll be glad to have made your mistakes early.

3. Understand your options

Ads are a bit like tattoos (or so I hear).  Once you’ve got one, you want another one.  Once you’ve got a single ad on your site, you’re going to start thinking about how to extract more revenue for less space.  You learn the difference between getting search ads from Chitika, affiliate revenue from Amazon, and direct ads from AdSense.  Your feed is all of a sudden ripe for the picking.  It’s not all banner ads and pop ups — know your options.

4.  A business or hobby?

Putting ads on your site will quickly tell you if you’re running a business or not.  Are you getting any closer to exceeding your blog’s expenses with your ad revenue?  How about paying yourself a salary?  No?  Yes? If not, blogging is your hobby.  (It’s my hobby).

5. Level of Tolerance

I feel similarly about learning advertising as a I do about learning to invest.  With just a little bit of real money, you change your mindset and learn things you just can’t simulate otherwise.  What’re you willing to do for ad revenue?  Are you going to write paid reviews?  Are there products you will not refer?  During the Prop 8 campaign, I saw a lot of “Yes on Prop 8″ ads online.  I definitely would have blocked that — just doesn’t meet my tolerance level.

6. Make it useful

There’s nothing advertised on Enter Venture that isn’t related to Enter Venture readers.  In fact, there’s nothing advertised that I don’t use myself.  I use both Highrise and InMotion hosting, and well, if Google wants to send people to GoBigNetwork, Business.com, and somewhere else to “Find Venture Capital”, I think that supports this blog too.

There it is.  Six reasons to add ads to your blog that have nothing to do with money.  The SEVENTH reason, though, that has everything to do with money.  It’s a recession, after all.  How else am I going to take care of that monthly coffee bill?

I’m obsessed with process.  It’s impossible for me to work without thinking about how to turn 10 steps into 3, without figuring out how to do things faster, simpler.

Recently, I found something that made my process-obsessed self feel well documented, reproducible, and, well, whole.  Recently, I discovered Tasks for Gmail.  Tasks is an amazing but simple little feature you can find by digging into the Labs portion of your Gmail account.  It allows you to easily add a task, schedule it, and check it off with a fulfilling strike-through.  It rests in the bottom right portion of your Gmail window, and when you’re not using it, you can simply keep it minimized.  Tasks are also what finally brought my work stream full circle, and, Tasks have almost single-handedly rid me of my paper “habit”.

Before Tasks, I wrote all of my major To-Dos for the day in my notebook.  Each day, I would start from the top and work down the notebook completing tasks.  In the course of this, I would scratch things out, write notes in the margins, and generally make a mess out of each and every page.  Each night, I would list out what I hadn’t accomplished and include any additional tasks for the next day, prioritizing as I went.  The problem is, it was just a little too messy.  I was never a huge fan of the hand offs between my paper process and my email / work stream management.  I was wasting paper and ink with pages of scratched out, messy lists.

Along comes Tasks, and all of a sudden, I have a fully integrated process for managing both my micro tasks — email — and my macro tasks — things bigger than emails.  Check it out:

1. As emails come in, I have filters that organize and tag my emails based on either a work stream or specific project.
2. When I come in each morning, I review every piece of email until each ones has been read — I continue this throughout the day too by monitoring a FireFox tab with Gmail to see when it throws up a (1).
3. Emails that I can respond to immediately, I do.  If not, the item is starred and finds its way onto my task list.
4. Once the inbox is clear, I review my task list, add anything that’s missing, and prioritize.
5. Next, I work on tasks in my task list from top to bottom — stopping only to keep my inbox clear.
6. As I come to an item that is associated with a starred email, I address that email and remove the star.

Voila!  When my emails are done, my tasks are done.  When my tasks are done, my emails are done too.

There are all kinds of task management tools I could have chosen — just ask my friends at Ativiti about all of them.  What’s great about Tasks, though, is that I never had to think about it. It simply arrived and became a part of my day-to-day, all without requiring a single additional username and password, without another website to keep open, and, really, without much more functionality than a basic checklist.

It’s now a part of something bigger than itself.  It’s now a part of a process.

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Recently, I’ve gotten away from that.  I’d gotten away from writing about tools and entrepreneurial ideas, and I became focused on writing the international startup series.  Now, I’ve really enjoyed the international startup series, but it’s become much larger and takes up much more time than I originally intended. (And in these dire/crisis/trying times, )  I think the size of the series is a great measure of the sophistication of the international startup scene, but it was eating up precious time and keeping me from focusing on what Enter Venture is all about. (And in this time of economic crisis, we need to prioritize)

Now, a post about feedback, that’s what Enter Venture’s all about.

Image via Wikipedia

It’s been said before that being an entrepreneur is all about soliciting and applying feedback. Refining an idea into a business is a constant struggle between trying something new, assessing the outcome, and trying it again.

Whatever you’re doing, no one’s done it before — not the exact thing, in the exact space, at the exact time.  Every entrepreneurial experience is different.  Take some of my recent entrepreneur interview series posts — ZDONK is working to leverage their industry connections in a way most outsiders couldn’t, Ativiti is working by moonlighting, and Baveo is working off of equity, without funding.  All three of these companies approaches the business creation process differently.

At best, someone can relate to your experience.  Someone can relate to your startup and offer ideas for how you can improve.  Some will even criticize your idea and startup.  You might not like the ideas; you might not like the opinions.  The key to being an entrepreneur, though, is your ability to consider all of these opinions and create an advantage out of their feedback.

When I was recently discussing this and Enter Venture with Dennis of ZDONK, he said:

“To be honest, I’ve really enjoyed all your posts but never really got into the international startup series. It seemed like you were kind of investigating and making a list as opposed to really getting into a particular startup or particular software/tools you thought would be useful for a startup. They were definitely interesting but personally I just wasn’t as engaged as I’d been with your previous posts.”

There it was.  I had created the series to try something new, but after a while, it was all that I was doing and alienated at least one of my regular readers.  After Dennis’ feedback and a recent Quick Sprout post about improving your blog by creating that helps people, rather than reports the news. I realized I was writing my own form of news.

You can expect that to change with Enter Venture because I’m mindful of your feedback.  (Feel free to leave it in my newly-updated, Disqus comment system).  I want to get a bit more into the entrepreneurial process and talk about the tools I use and the processes I go through to manage this blog.  I’ve re-organized Enter Venture a bit so there’s even a preliminary Resources section with everything from the blogs I read to WordPress plugins I use, tools, etc.

The entrepreneur interviews will continue — but as a way to illuminate the entrepreneurial process, not as a way of reporting the news.  We’ll save the news for TechCrunch, and the entrepreneur-relevant, feedback-incorporating blog evolution for Enter Venture.

What do you think?

Making a movie is an extremely risky affair.  What better way to combat those risks than by measuring a movie’s financial success by crowd-sourcing it from both angles — investment and creation.

ZDONK will start out with a collection of existing Hollywood scripts that have yet to make it to the big screen.  If you’re to believe Entourage, that means there are a lot of great, hidden scripts simply sitting in studio drawers, waiting to be made.  ZDONK wants to let you, the users and investors, weed through that pile and determine which of them are fit to be the next blockbuster hit.

Want to own a part of a movie and invest in hits?  You’ll be able to invest in movies much like you can invest in shares of a company.  Want to be sure a particular movie makes it to the big screen?  Be a part of a group of investors that invest enough money to be sure it happens.  Want to turn your idea into a movie?  Start writing a script and have it ready for this spring, and, if enough investors believe in it, watch your idea become a reality.

The ZDONK founders

I’ve been following ZDONK and their founders since the idea was a mere glimmer in their collective eyes.  Before leaving New York this past September, Zack and Dennis — two of the company’s three founders — sat with me for lunch to share their experience building a company and navigating both the financial and film worlds.

Dennis is a former Bank of New York analyst who’s handling the financial side of the business, setting up the market for their scripts, and providing energy enough for the entire team.  Zack, a child of the Hollywood scene, has been helping the company make connections, find scripts, and create partnerships.  Roy, the third founder, is focused on project management and works with the company’s two other team members, their engineer and graphic designer.

Right now, the team of five is working to set up the core infrastructure for the site, making partnerships, and creating an online presence with their blog.  At the time that we spoke, they were learning to brand their idea and went through several logo iterations.  Since speaking with them, it looks like they’ve started to hit their stride with a collection of fun and informative blogs posts and a great tag line — Hollywood’s not just for asses anymore.

In December, they were in the process of raising funding to both build the site and start acquiring scripts, and they’ve since successfully raised a $1 million first round of funding.  Their next task, assembling their board of directors, also looks to be moving along with top-level experience from Fox, Walt Disney and Revolution Studios.

Image via Wikipedia

Since they’re essentially creating a stock market for scripts, a lot of their costs are spent on legal fees. Their business type — a market for movies — carries with it unique complications and intellectual property issues.

What they’re up against

Movies compete against a host of other media for our attention.  Once created, they’re likely to be pirated everywhere from college student dorms in Boston to marketplaces in Bangalore.  The financial crisis certainly hasn’t helped the industry’s outlook.

Heck, even ZDONK acknowledges what they’re up against in this environment — just check out recent ZDONK blog posts on startups in a crappy economy and the film industry during the financial crisis.

One of the ways they’re trying to combat this is by focusing on what can make money with less risk — comedies. (With a name like ZDONK, what else would they be focused on?) Comedies can be created on lower budgets and have the potential to earn significant long term revenue after distribution.  Also, during these hard times, board member Joe Roth points out, “It’s already bad enough, movie-goers need an escape.”

As things seem to be moving along, it seems now that one of their biggest challenges is powering through the low points and building a community to get behind them.  Working with the film industry requires a lot of connections, and at this point, their idea has been picked at from every angle.  Just ask Chris Albrecht of NewTeeVee, who takes a look at the hard economics of actually funding a movie online — 6,000 investors with $500 each.

At the end of the day, creating a website that could potentially help create movies is a great thing to be able to call “work”, the ZDONK’s founders told me.  This is the movie business, after all.  Everyone has a chance to become the next big blockbuster.

Update (1/4/2009): Since it had been awhile between when I met with ZDONK and when this post went live, it appears some of the post requires clarification.  I asked Dennis if I could re-post his response because it’s a much better representation of the company than I could make alone:

“create a market for new comedy movie scripts – For the most part, we will be working with agencies, development executives and riding the traditional industry channels to acquire properties (eg – talking with people who already have some level of vetting). We definitely plan on engaging writers on the site, but we’ll be doing that more through having “log-line” competitions where the winners develop comedy shorts to be distributed on zdonk.com and then syndicated across the web. Ideally, if a writer was very good, we’d eventually want them to write features for us but we are not comfortable rolling that out just yet.

We will definitely be encouraging writers to use their profile on our site to post their feature films and potentially receive feedback or find representation, but we will make it clear that we will not be scouring the web looking for feature scripts (too many IP issues). That is not to say, however, that a producer wouldn’t see a script they really liked on our site and pick it up and finance it themselves.

- Their next task, assembling their board of directors, also looks to be moving along with top-level experience from Fox, Walt Disney and Revolution Studios This was no biggy but we’ve had our Board of 5 people set for a while now. Lastly (and also unimportant), we raised about $1.4m and are done for now…raising money became too “expensive”.”

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Recently, Boris over at TheNextWeb.com wrote a bit about the things he hates about the web. After reviewing the new group socializing startup, MIXTT, recently, I was thinking about one of my favorite things about the web. It’s those rare moments, when ideas, computer code, and virtual screens somehow turn into fresh air and real conversation. I love when the web helps me get outside and talk to real people.

These days, no matter what your profession, it’s hard to avoid constantly being on the web. You write emails, text messages, and 140 character status updates. You talk to people on Skype, your cell phone, and your iPhone (which isn’t really a phone — especially given it’s lackluster reception). You have all of these ways of trying to recreate real, flesh and blood conversation. Every once in awhile, why not use some of the web’s tools as a way to experience the real thing? Go meet some real people. Go visit some real places.

Go to an event

Back in the days before the web, finding out about an event was a bit of a crap shoot. You might see a flyer for the event somewhere or an ad in a magazine or newspaper. With the web, you can find just about any type of event you can imagine. You can find business and tech events on sites like Garysguide or get a list of events by your location with Eventful. You can even find tickets to professional events (i.e., you have an overpriced ticket with a bar code) resold for extra high prices on StubHub, Ebay, or craigslist.

Create your own event

Services like MeetUp and MIXTT help you form both online and real life groups to help both your business and social life. You can create an ad hoc gathering focused on learning something new with a BarCamp event. If that doesn’t work, there are all kinds of other “unconferences” you can create — you can even create your own overpriced tickets with tools like EventBrite.

Find a date

It’s hard to watch TV these days without seeing the dueling ads between Match.com and eHarmony. Real people are using these services, and you can use not-so-real compatibility tests to find them. If that doesn’t work for you, try finding dates based on religion with sites like JDate, MuslimFriends, or, Christian Cafe.

Go to china (or somewhere similar)

Ernst-Jan of TheNextWeb.com has recently been traveled around China for with other bloggers. What a great idea! You can find great travel deals on sites like Kayak, Orbitz, or Travelocity. Read about about whatever the places you choose to visit with Lonely Planet (or get paid to write about them) or crash on a couch with CouchSurfer.

Go outside

When all else fails, fire up one of your favorite directions services and walk or drive to somewhere new. You can look up a nice park using one of your local park websites, or find a team to play sports using site’s like New York’s ZogSports.

The goal with these update posts is to capture the evolutionary entrepreneurial process.  Enter Venture is about learning to become an entrepreneur, which, as I’ve imagined it, means learning how to do a little bit of just about everything.  It’s a whiteboard for trying out new ideas and new experiences — whether those include attending events, interviewing other entrepreneurs, learning new things, or making your own mistakes.

In this vein, I’ve been working a bit on an update to the Enter Venture theme that will give the site its first real large scale update since its inception.  Over the past few months, I’ve made a few token changes to the site — a picture here, a  widget there.  I ended my affair with my tiny green RSS button — it just wasn’t a good usability choice.  After the Crazy Egg post, it’s relative invisibility was hard for me to ignore.  The honkin’ large, orange RSS button that Neil Patel let me steal from the old QuickSprout theme does a much better job of attracting user attention.  (Neil also happens to be the founder of Crazy Egg — go figure.  Thanks Neil!)

I’ve unfortunately not been the heaviest commenter on other blogs, which is a shame.  Before my move, I had begun to get a taste for what it really means to “develop relationships in the blogosphere”.  I’ve found other ways to make use of social networking services to grow Enter Venture, but nothing quite as lasting or reciprocating.  This is something I need to address.

I’ve taken a Jules Verne-like tour around the world of web startup blogs in search of a better picture of the global startup scene.  It’s not over yet, but so far I’ve covered:

• Asia
• Middle East
• Europe
• Australia
• Africa

As part of that series, I was fortunate enough to have a few of the blogs in the international startup series invite me to guest post on their sites.  Check out StartupsNigeria and TheNextWeb.com for the same great Enter Venture content on whole new sites.  After that, check out the rest of these sites as they’re both excellent.

If you’re really watchful (and read to the end of my posts) you’ll notice that advertising’s been added to the site.  This has been a simple test to judge Google’s topic match and fit with Enter Venture, rather than a sincere effort to make money.  Though, that said, some kind soul was dear enough to click on the links a few times so I’ve earned enough to purchase an iTunes song or two.  In the future, expect to see more advertising on Enter Venture.  For one, I don’t think you can really claim to understand the internet if you’ve never worked with online advertising.  For two, I’ve started to change the way I feel about advertising while working at my current job.  Nothing is really free, no matter how much we’d like to think so and certainly not in this economic climate.

Two of my Blue Venture Community (formely known as Columbia Venture Community) colleagues — Ari Greenberg of Baveo and Dave Whittemore of Ativiti — were featured in Enter Venture’s early entrepreneur / startup posts.   Enter Venture’s 10 startup job websites post blew up and alone accounts for 35% of this blog’s traffic.  And last, but not least, Enter Venture crossed the 50th post mark recently!

The idea behind Ativiti is to identify and then expose all of the steps required to do pretty much anything. What are the five steps that you must take to learn the guitar? The hundred you must take to start a business? The experts out there have already figured out these steps and simply need a way to capture and ‘widgetize’ these steps into someone else’s project plan. Ativiti makes it reproducible — viral, even.

For anyone out there that learns through practice problems and example code, Ativiti is for you. Rather than just describe how to do something, you want to see the steps. Get rid of the project friction and those moments where you state “wouldn’t it be great to”… Instead of “wouldn’t it be great”, Ativiti plans to offer, “this is how you can”. Sign up for the beta now.

A few months back, I had the chance to sit and chat with one of Ativiti’s co-founders, Dave Whittemore. Dave is also a product manager at On Deck Capital, a financial services startup that provides small business loans, and an assistant organizer for the Blue Venture Community (formerly the Columbia Venture Community).

Dave talked a bit about some of the challenges of starting a business. Ativiti is being created by a team of moonlighters who find time to work on it outside of their day jobs on nights and weekends. This schedule makes getting their project off the ground that much more difficult, as it’s no easy task getting your idea vetted when you can only talk about it at night.

What the Ativiti team does have to their favor is familiarity. The Ativiti team has now worked together, in some form, for several projects dating back to Varsity Flicks and their Facebook application, MyOffice / Study Groups. Dave has settled into his role of working on marketing, blogging, and strategy with a product manager focus. Larry has been the developer throughout. Brandon takes care of external partnerships and analysis, and their newest team member, Nick, takes care of design. They’ve worked together for a while and know what to expect from each other. They’ve survived life shifts and now want to get something off the ground and popular.

Right now, the team is wholly focused on the product by taking a few mock ups and moving towards a working, private demo product. They’re using the blog to define their problem (and even list out their competitors) and following their three core principles:

1. Templating helps solve the problem of how to do something
2. I/O everywhere — meaning, tools need to move with you
3. Don’t reinvent the social network wheel

After that, they want to get their product out to the public and see what works and doesn’t. Only after this proof of concept stage, do they think they’ll focus on the business model with premium account.

Dave’s advice for any other moonlighting entrepreneurs out there — keep plugging away with consistency. Throughout the financial crisis (and as a New York-based team, this has been even more of a distraction), the team has continued to meet. Creating something new requires an evolutionary approach. At times, moonlighting helps — your day job influences your night job. Your night job influences your day job. It’s incredibly important to learn from both sides.

From where I stand in the U.S., I must admit I rarely hear about African startups. From the looks of things, that is / will be changing soon!  Check out some of these great sites:

Startup Africa

Startup Africa covers the African technology and startup scene, with a particular focus on startup events. From a glance at the tag cloud, Ismail Dorat’s blog tends to focus largely on events and startups coming out of South Africa. If you’re ever doing an Enter Venture-like startup review, the site’s sidebar is extremely useful with a breakdown of startup news by African countries — there aren’t too many posts outside of South Africa, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

StartupsNigeria

Loy Okezie’s blog reviews web startups and web trends specific to Nigeria.  This includes everything from Google maps’ Nigeria coverage to Nigerian entrepreneur interviews, Nigerian startup reviews, and even an assessment of the Nigerian VC environment. If you’re looking to brush up on Nigerian web trends, this is the place.

Appfrica

Appfrica is an African developer / entrepreneur’s heaven. The blog covers a wide breadth of African IT news and culture topics. Their Afridex is a Crunchbase-like African startup index. They feature African tech interviews. Web trends. Mobile trends. Conference coverage. A forum. A wiki. Mix in a great, clean design and this site is nearly homepage worthy.

Bandwidth Blog

Bandwidth blog is the South African and global internet startup news blog, which means, they cover just about everything and some of their posts happen to be about South Africa. You’re just as likely to find a critique of FriendFeed as you are the latest news about Afrigator. They also have one of the coolest sections on any blog that I’ve seen with their series of office photos from startups all over South Africa..

TechMASAI

TechMASAI looks like the most low tech of the African startup blogs with a basic, hosted WordPress theme, but what it lacks in design aesthetic, it makes up for in a devotion to startup profiles. TechMASAI has the most singular focus on startup reviews with roughly 4 of 5 posts focused on profiling new startups.

Also worth checking out are ITNewsAfrica, Startup Kenya, and Timbuktu Chronicles.

Now, it’s time to double back to Australia. It breaks up the westward path we were charting, but for some reason, with Australia, that feels fitting.

TechNation Australia

TechNation Australia is something. They cover everything related to startups in Australia from interviews, events, new startups, top Australian sites by traffic, etc. “If it’s to do with technology and Australia then we’re on it.” What’s more amazing, the site’s ostensibly a labor of love by a group of dedicated contributors — there’s no advertising to be found. (Which, also, partly explains a design that is far surpassed by its content.)

VS Consulting Group

Vishal Sharma’s startup blog is an excellent place to start any review of the Australian tech scene. The site features Australian startup reviews, trends, and interviews with Aussie entrepreneurs. The blog has been a bit quiet as of late, but it’s well built for longer lasting content. There’s a comprehensive list of Australian startups, Australian research and analysis, and interviews accessible from the header.

Tech Events

Tech Events is a user generated Australian tech events site. It’s not a calendar service — nor is it meant to be. It’s a group of people interested in sharing technology events in and around Melbourne with new events posted in a blog-like format.

Phil Morle’s Technology for Humans

Phil Morle’s Technology for Humans is just a damn, great blog. Phil covers Australian startups and tech, but what’s really great about his blog are his usability insights and future of the web discussions. A few of my favorites are Web App Goal #2: Don’t Try to Change the World and Can Everyone in Your Startup Answer These Questions?

ITnews Australia

ITnews Australia covers both Australian and global IT news. There’s more of a focus on enterprise companies and gadgets.

Builder AU

Builder AU is a great resource by developers, for developers — regardless of whether they come from Australia or not. A series of blogs cover everything from Python tips to Design Principles, with a bit of Australian startup news mixed in.

Also worth checking out are BlogPond with its list of the 100 top Australian blogs as well as Scott Middleton’s blog.

MIXTT, a recent TechCrunch50 startup, doesn’t think so. Outside of work and school, the way you really meet people is via your friends. Why not create a social network around that fits that model for social interaction? Eve Peters and her team have done just that. MIXTT is the social network for groups to meet other groups.

It’s a lot like MeetUp, but with a focus on groups meeting groups for fun, socializing, partying, and if you’re lucky, dating. What better way to use the web than to help you get off the web, get out, and meet people. In fact, “MIXTT is pretty much a guaranteed good time.”

When you join MIXTT, you’re immediately directed to create a group. (You might have your own profile, but the focus here is on the groups.) Next, fill out your group with a few friends or browse other groups. You can look up people’s social calendars, where they’re going to be, etc. When you zero in on a group that looks like a good time, well, go meet them. Better yet, bring a posse of your own and see what happens (a Beat It-like re-enactment, maybe?).

The MIXTT site is certainly designed for a good time, but there may be a few kinks in their plan. Like I said at the beginning, no one wants to be the first person of their friends to join a social network where all they’re doing is talking to themselves. A Facebook application would certainly help that. I also wonder how often I would actually update an online social calendar, but maybe future versions of the application could make use of email or Twitter-like updates.

Ultimately, you’ll get out of MIXTT what you put into it. It sure looks like fun — the site has a cool design, the pictures are full of party scenes. I just moved to San Francisco and could use a new social outlet. Their blogs (MIXTT blog and Check Please) are great, and, well, who doesn’t want to see a women-lead startup succeed?

Scripped follows the ‘give away your core product for free and make money on the side’ model. Their core product, their script writer, is free. They also offer script storage services for a $5 fee, editing for $100+, and script marketing and contest submission services. The support services are partly thanks to partnerships with Coverage, Ink and WordHustler.

Their editor is simple but gets the job done. User’s can write scripts directly into a format that’s production ready with the proper indentation, font sizing, and page layouts. If you’re not happy with a draft, create a new one under the same project. When you’re finished, export to PDF for wider distribution or take advantage of their partnership with WordHustler to submit your content to publishers and contests. The various features support the beginning of the content creation process through the writer’s (hopeful) pay-out

The site’s design is evocative of a bygone, pre-computer era. The editor’s font looks like it’s straight off the typewriter. Coupled with black and white cartoons throughout the site, it’s just the sort of hip throwback that should do well attracting young, wordy users.

If there’s something Scripped could improve on, it’s the organization and coordination between some of it’s various parts. The Creative Support section isn’t quite as easy to access as some of the other features, but it could be really useful — especially for the company’s bottom line at $129 per script. A better marketplace-like view into available projects would be nice too, and the site sometimes feels too much like a blog than the writing portal their products seem to suggest.

Interaction will continue to be a challenge, but judging by the list of future features in their Pipeline, Scripped is intent on building a user community that will support the next generation of screenwriters.

Again, if you know of any other startup sites that I’m missing (especially non-English sites), let me know in the comments.

Europe

Arctic Startup

Arctic Startup reviews internet and mobile startups from Nordic and Baltic countries, and they’re one of my favorites on this list. The site has a great, cool blue design that is unique but still evocative of TechCrunch. I appreciate the honest way they present new startups, with a description of both the strengths AND the weaknesses of the company / application.

The Next Web

The Next Web covers anything and everything related to the future of the web, no matter where it comes from. That said, the team is largely European (largely Dutch) so their coverage gives generous play to European startups. Posts run the gamut from startup reviews, reactions, and general industry news including a recent reaction to Jason Calacanis, a Romanian music site review, the Pope on Twitter, and some great advice for entrepreneurs in this economy.

alarm:clock euro

alarm:clock euro, like it’s American counterpart alarm:clock, reports on the comings and goings of VC money in Europe with a focus on funding rounds and buy outs. Each post comes with a description of the startup, the amount they’ve been funded for, and (the interesting part) a few thoughts about why they think the investment is a good or bad one.

TechCrunch UK

TechCrunch UK is TechCrunch for startups in the UK . (I’m assuming people know what TechCrunch is.) Amazingly, it appears as if its entirely written by one guy, Mike Butcher. Here’s hoping he gets that star intern he’s looking for.

TechCrunch France

TechCrunch France covers the French startups scene as well as translates and re-posts a portion of TechCrunch’s original posts.

Startup 2.0

Startup 2.0 is a pan-European startup contest that took place last May (and presumably, will be held again). Voting takes place online for a chance to win ad space in TechCrunch, a Microsoft software pack, and Sun hardware. Personally, I would have expected a better prize than with something closer to what VenCorps offers.

Altaide Valley

Altaide Valley is another blog focusing on the connections between France and Silicon Valley. The blog is owned and operated by Altaide, a French strategic technology firm.

TigerPrises

Toivo Tanavsuu’s TigerPrises covers Estonian startups and general technology trends in the Baltics, particularly mobile. Toivo also writes for Arctic Startup.

Startupbin

Startupbin covers web startups in Finland. Timo Paloheimo is another blogger from Arctic Startup, and he’s also created Google minus Google — a Google search site without Google sites in the results.

Other European startup sites worth noting are SwissStartups.com and SomBiz (a Finnish, invitation-only Web 2.0 entrepreneur network).

StartUpArabia

StartUpArabia is another one of the blogs that made me want to write this international startup series. Mohamed Marwen Meddah’s site covers new Arab technology startups as well as general market news and information. The site covers startups all over the arab world, with recent posts covering sites or news everywhere from Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, and Lebanon. You can also find events (largely in Dubai) and a job board on Startup Arabia.

StartupIsrael

StartupIsrael’s design has a bit of a web 1.0 feel to it, but it seems to be largely a web 2.0 powered site. The site has an active events list, informative book list, and the authors re-post links to Israel startup news (in English) from Hebrew news sites. They also aggregate a few popular U.S. sites in one of their sections.

ArabCrunch

ArabCrunch and StartupArabia seem to overlap a lot in their coverage, and I suspect the two sites will compete for quite some time as they both have very high quality sites and articles. ArabCrunch does seem to do a better job of posting general industry news. From the looks of their tag cloud, the site stresses heavily on Jordanian news and startups.

Israel Startup News

Israel Startup News covers a variety of startups — not just web-based startups. This site really demonstrates the diversity of startups coming out of Israel with energy, medical, and web startups featured on the site. Dani Dechter’s done a great job pulling all of these different early company stories together.

TechWadi

TechWadi is a networking association for Arab Technology professionals in Silicon Valley and around the world. They host a series of events, largely in Silicon Valley.

Green & White

This Pakistan-focused site covers startups, business models, new media marketing, and usability — great! The site leans towards being more professional-focused with sections on IT, HR, Marketing, etc. They’ve also got a great, active side bar worth checking out.

VC Cafe

VC Cafe covers Israeli startups from abroad — originally from Silicon Valley, now from London. The site tends to feature funding rounds for Israeli startups, but there’s also general startup news and industry news as well. It may be last on this list, but don’t let that fool you. Count me in as a new subscriber.

Also worth checking out, TheWebsessed.

Baveo allows users to post photos, videos, and text updates to a blog devoted entirely to the newest members of the family. The site is well designed for parents and family on the go. Parents can post directly to their Baveo blog via their site or their phones, and friends and family can stay updated via email or text messages.

I recently had the chance to chat with Ari Greenberg, Baveo’s CEO and founder. Ari helped break down where the idea for Baveo came from, how the team came to be, what they’re up to, and a few other thoughts about being an early entrepreneur.

After witnessing a childhood friend and his wife blog about the birth of their first child, Ari’s idea for Baveo was born. Ari saw the chance to make a wonderful and important experience even better. Expecting parents deserved a better and more integrated blogging experience.

Previously at Magnify.net, Ari spent his free time exploring the project further. He had always known he wanted to start his company, but he lacked an idea worth pursuing.

Baveo quickly became that idea, and when he realized it, Ari wasted no time building a team of three. Everyone works for equity, and Ari wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s how he knew the team believed in the idea and wanted to see it succeed. It also ensured the team would be honest with him and tell him when things weren’t going right. Both are equally important.

The site is currently invite-only so the team is working towards building out new features and publicizing the site. There’s a large community of mom and dad bloggers out there for them to tap into, and they’re exploring ways for users to better capture and share baby memories.

No matter what they think now, though, the team is focused on letting their users decide where Baveo goes next. “Everything needs to be about the user,” Ari says, “Users will tell you what they want if you listen.”

For all of you expecting parents out there, sign up for a Baveo invite now. Let your friends know what’s going on with your little cherub and let Baveo know what you think of their service. They’re listening.

On the startup end, I think the setting is a bit different. The startup industry is astoundingly global, which is just what the internet was designed to make possible. You don’t have to create your company in Silicon Valley anymore (thank god because the world can only handle so many social thing-a-ma-jiggies). What’s different with startups, however, is that the industry isn’t as globally aware of itself, or at least not obviously so. It’s global, but it’s hardly interdependent.

With that in mind, I’ve been on the look out for international startup sites. I’ve compiled what’s hardly a complete list (especially because its limited to English language sites), but it begins to shed light on the global startup scene. If I’ve left anything out, please let me know in the comments. First up, India and Eastern Asia:

India

Pluggd.In – Pluggd.In reminds me a lot of Silicon Alley Insider. It covers new startups, funding rounds, and general industry trends. Their team reflects their diversity and depth of coverage. They have an active user community, and my interactions with their Chief Blogger – Ashish Sinha – was largely what prompted me to write this post. You can also check out their newly launched (and better designed) Ecosystem, a directory of startups, VCs, incubators, etc.

Startups.In – Startups.In has been essential to this series and has helped me identify a few of the startups on this list. The site takes an Alltop.com-like approach with aggregated startup news from China, India, Kenya, and Korea (lucky me). It’s a great international resource, but after this International series by Enter Venture, they might need to update their list a bit.

Webyantra – Webyantra reads like a mix of Hacker News and TechCrunch. It has both startup news as well as random other tidbits they pluck from the founders’ other company, SlideShare. I get the impression Webyantra is one Indian startup feed you don’t want to go without.

DesiStartups – The startup for Indian startups is small but great. The blog covers several new Indian startups a month with an approach similar to Enter Venture. The site reviews early startups with a bit of constructive critiscm included. Most of their startups seem to be extremely early stage.

StartupDunia – StartupDunia does a great job covering the Indian startup scene, and surprisingly enough, it’s author isn’t even located in India! Pranav Dharma covers the Indian startup scene from Florida — go figure.

Business India 2.0 – Business India 2.0 focuses less on startups and more on the internet at large. Their most recent series of posts provides a great breakdown of the online advertising industry.

Also worth noting from India are YourStory, Thinking Aloud, MediaNama, Alootechie, Unwireindia, The Startup Guy, VC Circle, Trak.in’, WATBlog, TechPluto, and Venture Woods

Korea

TechnoKimchi – TechnoKimchi easily has the best name in this series. Taewoo Danny Kim writes an insightful blog about the human issues behind the web. Just check out his great About section or his analysis of the meaning of ’social’ in Asia with this post. It’s about people and technology, not just people or technology.

Web 2.0 Asia - Chang-Won Kim’s Web 2.0 Asia covers the Korean IT / tech industry with everything from events (Chang helped found Open Web Asia), new applications, and industry news. Chang’s other project (read: company) was just acquired by Google. Now, if only I could read Korean, I could explain what his company, TCN, does.

Korea Crunch – It looks like Korea Crunch went on hiatus for awhile, but now it’s back. From the looks of the snapshot on their most recent post, the blog looks to have a bunch of startups ready for review over the coming months.

Hong Kong

852 Signal – An homage to 37signals? Or something else entirely? I’m not sure, but maybe the blog’s founder, Angus Lau, will visit Enter Venture and tell us where the name comes from. In the meantime, 852 signal covers the next generation of web products coming out of Hong Kong. The blog is a great resource for finding out about new Asian startups without a lot of the noise on other sites. The site has a great, clean design and covers Hong Kong events, startup news, and anything else in the Hong Kong web tech market.

China

China Web 2.0 Review – The site focuses on interviews, search engines, social networking, and other web trends in China. As someone with little Chinese web awareness, I particularly liked their recent post, TrendsSpotting Handbook of Online China, which features a great slide deck on web penetration in China.

China Tech News – China Tech News isn’t exclusive to startups, but it covers the greater Chinese tech industry. In fact, this site seems to largely cover multinational companies and joint ventures, but like I said, I’m largely unaware of the Chinese startup scene. This seems like a good starting point for assessing the industry at large.

techblog86 – techblog86 covers the intersection of China’s mobile, tech, and startup worlds. Compared to ChinaTechNews, it’s also a sight for sore eyes. Not only does the site make use of a clean design, but it’s a lot closer to what we’re looking for in this startup site review. At least recently, the blog tends to focus on mobile web issues.

Singapore

Young Upstarts – Young Upstarts is a business and technology blog about new ideas and entrepreneurship. The blog covers Singaporean startups and events, but it’s not exclusive to Singapore. One of their recent posts features IdeaBlob, a U.S. based startup.

Project Senso – Project Senso is the Singaporean entrepreneur and founders network. The site features a blog on its homepage but the main use of the site seems to be its message boards.

Singapore Entrepreneur 27 – Singapore Entrepreneur 27 runs several tech events in a manner similar to the original Entrepreneur 27. The organization looks to be run by a group of students and early entrepreneurs.

Japan

Asiajin – Asiajin covers the Asian web industry but tends to focus on Japan. The site’s design isn’t all that impressive, and I originally underestimated the quality of its content. They do seem to have tapped into the Japanese startup scene with posts on events and a variety of different types of Japanese startups, and they feature links to a bunch of other Asian startups in the right sidebar. Check it out.

Also, notable from the inside, looking in.

Taiwan

Web 2.0 Play – Web 2.0 Play covers mobile and web applications from Taiwan. The site seems to be updated a few times a month with interviews, event reviews, and general industry news. It doesn’t seem to cover newly launched startups.

That’s all for now in this startup site series. Stay tuned for future posts as I’ll cover startup sites from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and everywhere in between.

It’s the vision that’s tough. It’s hard to see all of the steps from beginning to end. You run into what some might call ‘project friction’ where, if only you knew all of the steps to get to your goal, you could get going and do something about it. Building a business, though, is a hard thing to explain on paper.

One of the best ways to see how it’s really done (as I mentioned in my SA to SV post) is to join a startup. That’s why I joined a startup, and it’s more important than any of the 9 reasons below. I wanted to see what motivated people to work for a dream and a prayer. I wanted to see how someone ran a company going through rapid change. I wanted to see what I’d do similarly and what I’d do different.

In Dave’s first post to Enter Venture, he really touched upon the inherent risk in every job. There is no such thing as a safe job (except for the few people in this country remaining in unions). Why not find the environment that suits you best? It may be a startup. It may not.

Personally, I think you’d be crazy not to even consider joining a startup. Here’s why I like my startup job so far:

1. Lack of structure – If there’s anything startups have, it’s potential. You can be anything and everything. You’re just going to have to figure out what that is, and as a startup employee, how to make it happen. No one’s going to tell you what to do.

2. Free food - Google’s cafeteria stories have created an industry standard among startups where you HAVE to offer free food. Hell, you’re probably not getting paid too much so the founders have to at least make sure you’re eating. (Full disclosure: I like free food — a lot).

3. Casual everything - I spent the previous year wearing a suit everyday. Now, I wear a t-shirt and jeans and play with the office dog in my spare time. ’nuff said.

4. Building something new – I’m going to defer to a comment I once heard from another Columbia alum. ‘There once was a guy named Goldman. There once was a guy named Sachs.’ You can build the next big thing a lot easier as long as you’re not working for the old, next big thing.

5. Like-minded, entrepreneurial people all around you - People in startups tend to come from all kinds of backgrounds, but they have one thing in common, they want what you want. If you’re like me, it’s the other 8 things in this list.

6. Define what you get paid… sorta – At a corporation, your pay represents your years experience, your peers, your role in the company, blah blah. At a startup, you can be a part of defining the success of the company and, therefore, the success of all those options you’re holding onto. You’ll still get paid more as an engineer over an office manager, but damnt, if the office manager figures out your business model, he’s going to do pretty well for himself too.

7. Work with people, not people playing the role of Manager/Executive/Director/[insert title of someone above you here] - The problem with highly structured organizations is that people are often put in roles where they actually believe in the titles they’re given. They feel like they have to live up to it and act the part. It’s hard to act superior in a startup, especially if you show up to work in your PJs.

8. Barely a meeting to be had – Every company has external meetings. The problem with internal meetings, though, is that they’re only useful for a few people. Everyone else uses them for doodling and quality ceiling-staring time. There are better things you can be doing for your startup than polishing your doodling skills.

9. Work on the most important stuff, all the time - There are always a million things to do. On any given day, you can only do those things that are the most important. Whoever liked doing the bullshit work, anyways?

If any good comes from the financial crisis, I’m hoping that it helps developers on Wall Street realize that there are paths they can take other than the supposedly “stable” employment that large banks provide. Scratch that — I’m biased. I’m hoping they realize there’s one specific path they should be taking: working at NYC-based startups.

After talking to a few of my friends who work in IT for various large financial institutions, it doesn’t seem like the crisis has had the effect I’d hoped for, yet. Instead of it giving them cause to seek out greener pastures, they seem to be happy that they still have jobs. Rather than adjusting their appetite for risk (or exposing the real risk associated with Wall Street), some developers seem more attached to their jobs than ever.

Now, this isn’t universal, but the fact is, a lot of blood has been shed on Wall Street. Lots of folks are looking for jobs and plenty more will be at risk. The risk/reward of working in IT on Wall Street will surely change even if that’s not obvious now. The alternative — working in a startup — needs to be better publicized.

Josh Kopelman is doing a great job leveraging the financial crisis to tackle this issue head-on with his new website, Leave Wall Street, Join A Startup. That’s the kind of awareness I’m looking for. He lists out plenty of reasons for joining a startup that are dead-on, from the work environment, to creative control, to the potential equity upside.

I love his approach. The startup community in NYC needs to jump at the opportunity, build sustainable solutions, and attract technical talent. It might be easy to hire talent in the short-term, but long-term solutions are needed to ensure success when the crisis ends (and they always do). With companies like Lehman and Bear Stearns tanking, there aren’t many left to complain about startups’ lack of credibility or brand equity. What other objections are there?

A long-term solution begins with creating a better funnel between the various local educational institutions and the startups that reside here (shameless plug: this is one of the goals of Columbia Venture Community). We need more insitutions like CVC, NextNY, and the NY Tech Meetup that can provide continuity of awareness and thought leadership and broadcast success stories throughout the rapid turnover of the startup lifecycle.

The long term solution also requires more awareness and a bit of a reality check. There’s as much risk in your Wall Street job as there is with a startup. Bail yourself out.

The book is written based on Brooks’ experiences with large project teams for IBM working on systems that pre-date this author’s birth.  While the lessons are written for software teams, they’re not necessarily about software. In fact, most of this book is focused on people and project management.

The Mythical Man-Month explains why “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” It describes project tracking and the effect of small slips in your project schedule, and the importance of documentation. You can just as easily see this on the bookshelf of an M.B.A. as an engineer.

Part of what’s so interesting about this book is that it helps you gain perspective on the history of software and where the present fits in. The industry has come pretty far since 1975, but it’s still only decades old. The essential lessons of the Mythical Man-Month will continue to become more like fundamentals and less like exact truths.

In fact, I think part of that has already happened. As someone with only a few years of software experience, I had heard a lot of the Mythical Man-Month’s lessons before. I just didn’t know their origin. I think it’s reached the status where the lessons are more important than the work. Some day it will be whittled down to what fits into a chapter of a text book, if it hasn’t already.  Students today don’t read Einstein’s paper on relativity, but they’ll certainly be taught it.

My final thought on the Mythical Man-Month is that, sure, it reads a bit outdated. How could it not? You should understand what’s in this book, regardless. At this point though, you can probably get most of The Mythical Man-Month’s lessons from the Wikipedia page. Check out the whole book for a little bit of history.

Other reviews:

• Amazon Reviews
• Slashdot Review
• Tal Cohen’s Book Review
• Scott Rosenberg’s Review
• Ed Willis’ Review on On Lamp

I’ve been working on blog marketing a bit these days and think Carsonified has nailed it. I’m happy to write this post (and would love to attend their events) so I’ll do them one better. I’ll link to their Carsonified Golden Ticket campaign and to their next Future of Web Apps Expo event in London from October 8-10.

For a little fun with the rest of the post, I’ve put together my Willy Wonka-inspired reasons for wanting to see events like the ones at the Future of Web Apps Expo event in London from October 8-10

Willy Wonka: It happens every time, they all become blueberries.

Enter Venture is all about early entrepreneurs. I want to help Enter Venture readers avoid becoming blueberries by listening to what Edwin Aoki of AOL has to say in his “Web apps are dead, long live web apps…” talk.

Willy Wonka: It’s Wonkavision.
Grandpa Joe: It could change the world.

Is this Internet TV thing going to happen or what? I need Ron Richards to tell me how the industry is “Bringing Internet Television to the Masses”.

Willy Wonka: The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozzberries taste like snozzberries.
Veruca Salt: Snozzberries? Who ever heard of a snozzberry?

How am I going to scale internationally? I don’t know the language. Blaine Cook and Joe Stump can help me avoid pitfalls with “Languages don’t scale”.

Willy Wonka: [singsong] There’s no earthly way of knowing / Which direction we are going / There’s no knowing where we’re rowing / Or which way the river’s flowing / Is it raining? / Is it snowing? / Is a hurricane a-blowing? /

Those iPhone Enter Venture posts have been doing well for me. I want to keep up and know “How the future of the mobile web is going to change everything” from Stefan Fountain of Soocial.

Willy Wonka: Oh, well then you know all about it and what a terrible country it is. Nothing but desolate wastes and fierce beasts. And the poor little Oompa Loompas were so small and helpless, they would get gobbled up right and left. A Wangdoodle would eat ten of them for breakfast and think nothing of it. And so, I said, “Come and live with me in peace and safety, away from all the Wangdoodles and Hornswogglers and Snozzwangers and rotten Vermicious Knids.”

I know I have to take care of my community, even if I think they’re a little short, orange-faced, and wear strange green clothing. Kathy Sierra can tell me “How to grow and nurture my community”.

Willy Wonka: So who can I trust to run the factory when I leave and take care of the Oompa Loopa’s for me, not a grown up. A grown up would want to everything his own way, not mine. That’s why I decided a long time ago that I had to find a child, a very honest, loving child, to whom I could tell all my most precious candy making secrets.
Charlie Bucket: And that’s why you sent out the golden tickets.
Willy Wonka: That’s right. So the factory is all yours, Charlie. You can move in immediately…

Children are in charge in both Willy Wonka’s factory and the web industry these days. Mark Zuckerberg’s Fireside chat should set that straight.

In plain English, Crazy Egg shows you how your visitors use your site. Where are they clicking?

Crazy Egg offers 5 free tests of their service so I recently started a month long Crazy Egg test. Soon after I began, I wrote about the wpSearch plugin for WordPress. Crazy Egg tells me that people actually read this blog and try some of these things out. That’s good to know. It also tells me people tend to click the “Enter” in “Enter Venture” because it looks like a button. The other major button, the LinkedIn button, is second only to the search bar in number of clicks.  It even tells me I need to do something about that subscribe button…

Rather than explain any more though, just check out Crazy Egg’s results for Enter Venture. The images (and free trials) speak for themselves:

The Heat View - The heat view shows you a rough focal point for a user’s eye for popular areas.

The Confetti View — This is great for figuring out exactly where your users clicked. Notice, most of my users do not click Search. They must key it.

Statistics Overlay - This view gives you both the number of clicks and the exact element that is actioned with those clicks.

The different views do overlap a bit with their function, but so be it. They look cool in the process. I’ve been thinking about experimenting with advertisements on Enter Venture at some point. Crazy Egg’s $9/month (after a few more free trials) would likely be money well spent to help maximize those advertisements.

First, though, you need to get a startup job. Here are 10 sites (in no particular order) that I found helpful in my startup job search:

1. Doostang – Doostang may be the exclusive career community for top young professionals (whatever that means), but it’s also a great place to find startup jobs. A lot of startups are created by ex-young professionals, ergo, ex-young professionals are already on registered with the exclusive career community for top young professionals. They want you to join them in their “ex” status.

2. LinkedIn – For those of you that live by the “getting a job is all about who you know” mantra, well, you probably don’t work at a startup. With LinkedIn, “who you know” certainly helps you get started, and that’s sort of comforting.

3. Startuply – Startuply is quickly becoming the it place for listing startup jobs. A lot of the blog job boards further down in this list have 100-200 job postings, not even necessarily all for startups. Startuply currently has just under 1,000 startup jobs listed. They provide background information on the companies, and it sounds like they’re just getting started with their feature set. I have nothing but great things to say for their outreach efforts too. They quickly responded to a bug post I reported, and I was happy to send over a screenshot to help them out.

4. craigslist – This came as a surprise to me too, but craigslist turned out to be a halfway decent option for my startup job search. Startups are pretty tight with their cash, and craigslist has a price and distribution that can’t be beat. There are just two things you need to keep in mind with craigslist. One, there will be hundreds of resumes submitted for every job. Two, because there are hundreds of resumes submitted for every job (including the one you’re applying to), pick only those jobs that fit you perfectly.

5. Crunchboard – TechCrunch’s job board is one of the best places to find startup jobs because TechCrunch is where you go to find startup news. Makes sense, no? (Also, kudos to TechCrunch on the redesign. It’s about time.)

6. 37signals Job Board – 37signals job board is another blog with a great job board, especially if you’re a developer or designer.

7. Silicon Alley Insider Job Board – SAI’s job board is obviously a great place for New York startup jobs, especially with the startup boom in New York. What’s less obvious is that there are a few west coast jobs sprinkled in. You might get lucky with one of these.

8. Authentic Jobs – I’m not sure how I found Authentic Jobs, but I know that I found some of the most interesting opportunities on this site. There’s a mix of freelance jobs you can scope out too.

9. Company Websites – The great thing about applying for startup jobs is that you’re often applying to companies you’ve heard that have websites you’ve actually used. When you read about a new company on TechCrunch, go check out their website to see if they’re hiring. (Hint: They usually are.)

10. Get out, ask questions, meet people, make friends – (OK, I lied, 9 websites and a dose of the real world). You need to do a whole lot more to get a startup job than merely visiting job board sites. This list wouldn’t be complete without mentioning that. I was able to meet a few people during my search and most people were more than happy to send my resume along. People understand what it’s like looking for a job, and if they work with startups they certainly want to see them succeed. Everyone likes playing matchmaker.

(Also, worth checking out even though they helped only minimally in my search were Joel on Software’s Job Board and the Crayola Crayon-looking StartUpers site.)

Update (9/14/08): When I made this list, I focused on the startup job sites that were most helpful for me. It wasn’t a list of all the startup job sites out there. If I had done a bit more research, I would have noticed Sean Aune’s post with 18 Startup Job Sites (damn, 18 is more than 10) to help bolster this list. A lot of these are general sites, but there are a few in here worth mentioning that have some potential:

• CoNotes – I’d never seen this one, but it looks promising. If anyone’s used it, let me know what you think.
• GoBigNetwork – I’m not convinced this is a the best place to find a startup job. It seemed like a better place to find a startup partner or investor. The quality of job postings isn’t as good as some of the other sites in this list eiter.
• Mashable Jobs – The same logic works here as with the TechCrunch job board. It wasn’t as helpful for me, but it likely would be for others.
• nPost - nPost is more strictly technical though there are a few non-technical jobs in here. I used nPost to some success, but it’s more like a Joel On Software job board for startups.
• Venture Loop – Venture Loop lists companies backed by VC firms and so fills a need I mentioned in #10 of my original list. People like playing matchmaker in this industry, especially when they have an interest in that match’s success.

Over the past year (only some of which has been recorded on Enter Venture) I grew attached to the New York City startup scene, Silicon Alley.  It is the only startup hub this early entrepreneur has ever known, and, well, you never forget your first.  I started Enter Venture in NYC, and it is entirely based on shared ideas with friends and colleagues from there.

I tried out a number of different Meetup events ranging from Internet Marketing, Columbia Venture Community, NY Video 2.0, NY Tech, and a Mashable event or two.  The scheduling gods conspired to keep me from attending the New York Web Standards meetings, but for the web standards-curious, these sounded phenomenal too.

I loved the underdog feeling at NY Tech events.  There was a constant sense of mission to prove the success of NY Tech.  There is a feeling that the NYC technology industry is going through a special transition right now.  People are asking questions, but they’re also looking for answers.

I’m not alone in this feeling either.  Mark Davis — a VC, blogger, and leader of the Columbia Venture Community — is in a much better position to make this statement and says the same with his NY Region is Hot post on Get Venture.

While looking for jobs in the Bay Area, I noticed this.  It seemed to me that there were more jobs posted for NYC than the Bay Area.  That’s a highly unscientific assessment, but I have also heard several early entrepreneurs think about, and decided not to move to the Bay Area just to be a part of the NYC community.  Something’s going on in NYC.

Over the past year, I also worked for the NYC Dept. of Small Business Services on the NYC Business Express project and website.  Over the next few years, the site will change the way largely traditional, non-tech businesses interact with city government.  There are too many stories of restaurant, laundry and grocery store owners spending precious hours in line for permits, only to find themselves tripped up on the city’s maze of requirements.  The group I worked with is attacking these problems from every angle, and I was priveleged to be a part of this large, difficult project. (I wont say much more about my time with SBS except that I’ll probably come back to this.  There’s an enormous experience that I need to process a bit more.)

So why did I leave all of this and move my life to Silicon Valley?  The reasons are not all work related, but the ones that are have to do with experience.  Like my process with Enter Venture, I want to experience a wide swath.   There are lessons from Silicon Alley that I’ll take with me, but Silicon Valley, and San Francisco in particular, will require a new perspective.  Whether I fail or succeed with that new perspective, I believe I will be wiser for having taken the chance.

I’ll have a new job with a startup that will color that perspective, but I’ll also have  new events, new lessons, and new experiences to share with early entrepreneurs.  I’m aware that I’m entering the echo chamber but ready to embrace and explore it.  I even have a new whiteboard, currently full of a few months worth of post ideas.

Stay tuned.  Enter Venture has gone west

I’m moving to San Francisco at the end of August, and most of my time is spent figuring out what’s going in which box, trying to find a place to live, and thinking “why are people on craigslist so crazy?”. This moving thing takes up a lot of time, especially with those crazy craigslist people.

Since I haven’t been able to start, or finish, any of these posts, here’s a preview of what’s to come:

• Startup and entrepreneur resources around the world
• Tools to help analyze your blog
• Easy ways to extend your site beyond your blog
• WordPress plugin reviews
• iPhone application reviews
• Impressions of Silicon Valley
• …and a few more book reviews

After this, no more lame “I’m not here right now.” posts.  I swear.

The Columbia Venture Community looks poised to be the group that finally brings entrepreneurship to the forefront of the Columbia community (and if not, it at least looks like it could save a senior or two from unwittingly going into banking or consulting).

I’ve written about the Columbia entrepreneur community, or lack thereof, before. In fact, it was my first post. Over the past several months, however, I’ve noticed a marked change in the buzz over Columbia’s commitment to entrepreneurship. It’s come from several places. The focus group I mentioned in my first post was organized by the Columbia Center for Career Education. In April, I attended a Business School-run event, the Columbia Entrepreneur Organization’s Pitchfest. In May, I attended my first Columbia Venture Community event run by Mark Peter Davis, a Business School alumn.

It was at the CVC event that it really felt like things were starting to come together. It was the first time I had really seen a group for all of Columbia — alumni, engineers, business, law, etc. It was the first time I saw an event and a group that looked like they had staying power. Not since CORE somehow got Mark Cuban to speak on campus have I felt that. (I’m not sure if CORE still operates since they’re still sporting the several years old Cuban photo so maybe this is a bad comparison?)

On Tuesday of this week, I attended my third Columbia Venture Community event (one of them slipped through my blogging fingers). On a lazy August day at 6pm on the upper west side, I was shocked to find 50+ people in the basement of Lerner Hall. School’s not even in session!

There were 50+ real, living and breathing people with some affiliation to Columbia who weren’t off ’summering’ elsewhere for August (which probably means there weren’t too many VCs in the crowd), and who couldn’t think of anything they’d rather be doing than talking about startups. Brilliant!

I spent the networking portion of the night speaking with a variety of interesting people that helped reaffirm my gut feeling about CVC. GoodGame TV developer, Oliver, and I talked about getting started in PHP. GoodGame TV features an entertaining series of videos covering everything gaming related. Great content, not so great UI. (Oliver, expect an email from me. I think a few simple changes would take care of some of the UI issues). I also chatted a bit with Vikram Venkatraman and Sol Kahn, both classmates, colleagues, and friends from our mutual obessions with entrepreneurship.

Tejpaul Bhatia, founder of MediaMerx, promised a Guide to Raising Venture Capital post for Enter Venture in the future — and yes, I will hold you to that Tej. “Everything you’ve ever heard about raising money on blogs is wrong” Tej told a few us. We look forward to hearing what’s right, Tej. I also enjoyed conversations with Frances Ning and Jonathan Wegner. Jonathan’s business card he gave me at my first CVC event still ranks as one of the best I’ve ever picked up (Update 9/21/08: They’re called Moo Cards, and I just ordered a few for Enter Venture). Frances was notable as one of the few women at the event and aspired to to build feeder organizations that would bring Chinese nurses to America.

Everywhere I stepped I was tripping over interesting people, and again, remember, this is August.

Unfortunately, I was not able to stay for most of the presentations, but I was able to see Bartek Ringwelski and Sasha Davidov present InterviewPoint. InterviewPoint is a database of real interview questions from real interviews as recorded by real students. Users can share questions and strategies, as well as benchmark their resumes against other students in similar interviews. I haven’t been in the banking / consulting interview mindset for awhile now, but something tells me that a Vault guide + InterviewPoint combo would be the perfect recipe for your banking or consulting interview.

Of course, this is the Columbia Venture Community. After realizing you could start your own InterviewPoint, there’s no reason for you to go on that consulting or banking interview after all. With all of this excitement around the Columbia entrepreneurial community, there’s no better time to shun the all too familiar Columbia paths. Come out, meet other entrepreneurs, and see what else is out there beyond the banking / consulting world. Bring friends. Join a startup. Start a startup.

It figures that this group has only now come along just as I’m about to move to San Francisco. Two years since I’ve graduated from engineering school, it’s great to finally see entrepreneurship gaining some traction at Columbia.

Farewell CVC and good luck. I expect a Zuckerberg or two by the time I get back to NYC.

After my first iPhone App Store review, I realized I’d made a mistake. I hadn’t dug nearly deep enough to really comment on the App Store. I had only begun to try out many of the applications, and as I admitted, I’d really stayed away from paid applications.

So let’s do this again, shall we? I even paid for an application or two this time. (Imagine that, people paying for software.)

5 More of My Favorite Apps

1. Jambd – I am the last person in the world that would ever use this celebrity and gossip new application, but that doesn’t mean it’s not great. Jambd just works and works well. No crashes (Nytimes take note), fast load times, and a great way to browse a stack of related pictures make this application a joy to use.

2. Crash Bandicoot Racing – If you’ve ever played any of Nintendo’s Mario Cart racing titles, you’ll know what this game is. You drive around by rotating your iPhone like a steering wheel and fire missiles and bombs at your racing opponents with a few taps on the screen. This game has great gameplay and Nintendo GameCube-level graphics. It’s well worth the $9.99 and has probably sucked up way more of my time than I would like to admit.

3. Pocketpedia – This serves a direct need of mine that I’ve been supporting with various emails and notes on my iPhone. Pocketpedia allows you to search Amazon and build lists of items you want. This is exactly the solution I was hoping for while browsing Strand Bookstore during many of my lunch breaks this past year.

4. AOL Radio - Boston probably has one of the country’s best set of rock stations. With AOL Radio I can listen to at least 2 of my favorite stations no matter where I am. If only it had all radio stations, it might be a killer application.

5. Sportstap - Sportstap is one of the few applications that subtly uses mobile ads. It’s also the only sports application that is covering the Olympics as far as I can tell. That differentiation has helped make my primary sports application selection a lot easier.

5 More Apps with Potential

1. pTerm – This is a great application for running SSH on-the-go. All you command line junkies take note.

2. Glucose Charter - If you’ve ever seen a friend prick their finger to get a blood sample to measure their blood sugar, you have to think applications like this have potential. Hopefully with better access to information and nutritional tracking, this will save a finger or two.

3. Education Applications like Molecules and 3D Earth – Both of these applications bring education a step closer to the 3D world. Imagine if kids learned organic chemistry from 3D models all the time. They’d spend less of their time trying to draw sticks and lines to simulate 3D and more time visualizing 3D structures from the beginning.

4. Bible – You can search the Bible from you pocket. My high school would have practically required this thing.

5. MixMaster – Who’s hasn’t wanted to mix a little something at one point or another?

5 Apps I Hate

1. CraigsMobileList - I like that I can get a little bit of Craigslist with this, I guess. Why are is this interface so crowded though? Why can I save searches but I can’t save pages? Why can’t I get more than 25 results? I’m not sure what happened with this one, and I want my money back.

2. Lander - This, like many basic games for iPhone, could be fun for a minute or two. What bugs me about this application is that I have no idea how to play and there’s no simply no guide / help / rules with the application. Seriously, nothing is unacceptable.

3. Pour1Out- I wanted to like this application, but it simply doesn’t work well.

4. Tasks – The interface isn’t completely intuitive and I think a task application should be a lot more organized.

5. Jott – I’d long ago given up on voice recording services, but only 15 seconds of recording time is still way below my expectations.

One of the things I love about the App Store is how new it is. No one knows what they’re talking about with this thing. The playing field is relatively level, the startup costs seemingly reasonable, and the opportunity I’d there. You can even get paid for your software.

Early entrepreneurs would be smart to use this platform. There aren’t as many iPhone users as there are Internet users, but there’s not nearly as much competition here either. The number of iPhone and iPhone-like phones is only going to continue to grow. Every business has the opportunity to establish themselves in this marketplace. What we’re seeing now is a race to become primary destinations. There are $9.99 applications that do the same as free applications. That’ll change.

It’s going to be great seeing this new market unfold itself (especially if Apple would start releasing these things faster).

As for the WordPress iPhone application — not bad. I don’t think I’ll write many more like this because this has taken forever, but I love that I can if I want to. It’s a bit of a pain without WYSIWYG, and typing HTML on a keyboard is tedious. It just means I would have to keep basic formatting with these posts.

Fortunately though, Kenny Katzgrau was not over his head. I found his blog, Code Fury, where he alluded to a WordPress plugin he was working on that would leverage a stripped down version of Zend_Search_Lucene to greatly improve WordPress searches. As far as I was concerned, this was the best of both worlds. I could play around with lucene, and I could improve Enter Venture’s search function.

After contacting him, Kenny was kind enough to let me play around with an earlier, pre-alpha version of wpSearch. I had a bit of trouble with the initial install, but search results were better than my default WordPress search. The plugin used an Ajax layer to display search results, rather than my native search template, which I didn’t like. Not so anymore.

This version of wpSearch is great. It seamlessly integrates with my Enter Venture search template. It offers the ability to customize the search relevancy on Titles, Content, and Tags, and the results speak for themselves. Just check out the top 5 results for a few keywords with the default Wordpress search versus wpSearch:

For the majority of these results, wpSearch finds exactly what I’m looking for while the default Wordpress search seems to return the same results time after time. The two have similarly relevant “new york” searches (which is to say, neither is perfect), but wpSearch is perfect on the “book” search as it finds 5 of my 6 book posts in the top 5 results. My 6th book post came in at number 6.

The one knock on wpSearch is that the install may slip some people up. There are a few steps to complete, and it still looks like some kinks need to be worked out based on the WordPress plugins page’s comments. It’s much better than the original version and should only get easier.

Congrats to Kenny for putting together what seems like a potentially great new way to search with Wordpress. I look forward to future releases.

Everyone else, let me know what you think of wpSearch.

I am, however, really excited to talk about iPhone applications because I’m really excited to have my iPhone back. I’ve been without it for 3 months since I dropped and cracked the screen. I have replaced the phone just in time for the App Store, which is a much cooler, easier to use version of the CNET Download.com site, tailored specifically for the iPhone.

Some of the blogosphere’s response to the App Store launch has been critical. That NDA issue is a big deal, but it’s solvable. I think some of the prices are misguided — $10 for Tetris?! Really? Can I get an iPhone-crash-free guarantee with that? The market will ultimately take care of this too.

On the whole, this particular user is completely satisfied with the first release of applications and looking forward to future mobile innovations on the App Store. As a glimpse of that future, here are my top applications and ideas for applications.

Feel free to add your own ideas to the Comments.

5 Favorite iPhone Apps

1. Mlb.com At Bat – Have you ever seen video playback of this quality on any computer? I have a MLB.tv subscription, and it never, ever looks as good as the replays you can watch on Mlb.com At Bat just minutes after the play occurs. Mlb.com At Bat is like having a personalized, DVD quality version of Baseball Tonight’s highlight reel in your pocket.
2. Pandora – Apparently Pandora’s been around forever because my roomate remembers first hearing about them in college. If it weren’t for the iPhone, I might never have known about Pandora. I don’t think I’m alone here. Pandora’s online radio just became a whole lot more compelling now that I can carry it with me.
3. Google – Google has an iPhone version for a lot of its major products so they’re obviously at the top of the list. GChat and Google Reader are my two personal favorites.
4. Wordpress – I have not used the Wordpress application too much yet, but I already know I love it. The level of control it gives me over my blog at all times is reassuring. The Guarantee Fairy has nothing on that.
5. (Tie) Truveo & Twittelator – At first, I would have said Twittelator. This level of access to Twitter has made me much more active with the service and is what prompted this post. At the same time, I just spent half an hour checking out Obama in Berlin videos on Truveo. I’m hooked on both of these applications.

5 iPhone Apps with Potential

1. PayPal – Paypal’s application is a great example of clean, simple, easy-to-use design. I wish I had more reasons to send money to people with email addresses just to try it out.
2. Bloomberg – The iPhone application is nothing compared to a Bloomberg terminal, but it’s certainly of the same quality and style.
3. NYTimes – This application would be great if it would just stop crashing. I’ll read the NYTimes and use this application all the time as soon as it’s updated.
4. All Games – Most Games are paid applications. The problem I have with the paid applications is that they’re mostly in beta. I want to see the dust settle a bit on paid applications before I start pulling my credit card out. (The MLB application doesn’t count. I had to have that.)
5. Shakespeare – I walk around with the entire collection of Shakespeare in my pocket these days. If that doesn’t get you laid in literature circles, it at least speaks to the potential of online books for the iPhone.

5 Apps I Want

1. Credit Card Sensor – This requires a bit more infrastructure than a simple application, but it’d be an amazing leap toward the idea of having one application in your pocket. If you could figure out a way to put any item in my wallet on my phone, it would also make this list.
2. More Video Applications – I want an application that gives me quick news updates, movie previews, downloadable content, etc. Truveo’s a search engine. I want a better content provider application.
3. Emergency Services Contact – By leveraging the iPhone’s location awareness services, this application could determine a caller’s exact location immediately for police / fire fighthers / ambulances to immediately navigate to the scene.
4. Level – I know, this is random, but who hasn’t needed a level when they’re hanging a picture? I’m sure someone could make a simple level tool that every iPhone-carrying-window-hanger would love. Update: There is a level for iPhone. PosiMotion has an “A Level” application. iPhone-carrying-window-hangers rejoice!
5. Fingerprint recognition unlock – I love the idea of having a lock on my iPhone. With my notes, my calendar, contacts, email, etc. on my iPhone, I think that makes sense. The problem is, I can’t stand the idea of having to unlock my iPhone every single time I want to use it. This thing has a touch screen, right?  If you can’t take an actual image, how about the shape and width of your fingerprint? I’d love to simply press my finger to a point on the phone to both activate and unlock it. That’d be both security and convenience.

I know a few of these things are impossible right now given the restrictions Apple’s put on the iPhone SDK, but give it time. The walls will slowly come down.

When it comes to experience, though, early entrepreneurs should broaden themselves. When you’re starting out, participate in a wide swath of activities to better understand each part of a business. Write a business plan. Code part of your site. Try testing the site. Present your pitch. Whereas a scientist knows how to do research, an entrepreneur must know how to do the research, the grant writing, the accounting, and the floor mopping.

Widening your experiences also teaches you what you’re not good at. When it comes time to build your perfect team, experience will tell you that maybe you’re not the best guy for accounting, even though you know how to do it. Find a rock star accountant as soon as you can.

In the spirit of this idea, here are the 5 ways I try to broaden my experiences:

1. Read.

I’m an RSS (and book) junkie. I read anything from typography and web standards to financing and marketing (and biographies, fiction novels, and an occasional book of the Core Curriculum variety).

2. Get out there.

I practice my message and get new material by going to NYC tech events. Try to find events that are targeted to your market but emphasize different parts of your market. I can’t say enough for Meetup to help with your search. NYC has several Meetup web groups, some specific to video, marketing, web standards, programming languages, etc. There are also sites that announce weekly events. For NYC, try Garysguide, NextNY’s calendar, and Silicon Alley Insider’s weekly posts.

3. Try it.

Enter Venture is just one way that I try out my ideas. I practice teasing out ideas on my whiteboard and rough site specs for feedback from friends. You can build a local version of your site to practice your coding skills. Open Photoshop, or Gimp and play with some color scheme ideas using tutorials on the web. Sign up to be a software tester at uTest.

4. Analyze.

I’ve been using Google Analytics, Feedburner, and WP Stats to track visitor usage and identify visitor trends. I’m in the midst of using Crazy Egg to better understand usage patterns on the site, which will help drive my next round of Enter Venture updates.

5. Improve.

If you follow #1-4, you should always be improving. Be aware of what you’ve improved on and celebrate it. Be, also, aware of what you need work on and work on it.

Start from #1 again.

(If there are any rock star accountants out there, let me know what you’re up to.)

On every blog and developer checklist, however, I kept hearing about this book, the Pragmatic Progammer by Hunt and Thomas. Recently, I was due for a new technical book and decided I could use an essential guide in the fundamentals. Pragmatic Progammer was the perfect choice.

I started reading this book for two reasons. First, for the developer side of my sweeper practice, I wanted to be efficient with my time, ensuring I would do things the right way, the first time. Second, I foresee a career of working with developers, and it makes sense for me to know what makes a good developer, how developers think.

While reading Pragmatic Programmer, I also realized that many of the lessons were applicable to any job, craft, or career. Use the best tools, be efficient with your time, improve as you go, plan, test, be thorough, etc. These lessons are ubiquitous.

Throughout the book, the authors have sprinkled just these types of career-neutral tips that perfectly summarize the book’s concepts. Rather than explain them all to you, I thought best to try something different and use this post to give you all of Pragmatic Progammer’s 70 tips — for progammers and people, alike:

1. Care About Your Craft
2. Think! About Your Work
3. Provide Options, Don’t Make Lame Excuses
4. Don’t Live with Broken Windows
5. Be a Catalyst for Change
6. Remember the Big Picture
7. Make Quality a Requirements Issue
8. Invest Regularly in Your Knowledge Portfolio
9. Critically Analyze What You Read and Hear
10. It’s Both What You Say and the Way You Say It
11. DRY – Don’t Repeat Yourself
12. Make It Easy to Reuse
13. Eliminate Effects Between Unrelated Things
14. There Are No Final Decisions
15. Use Tracer Bullets to Find the Target
16. Prototype to Learn
17. Program Close to the Problem Domain
18. Estimate to Avoid Surprises
19. Iterate the Schedule with the Code
20. Keep Knowledge in Plain Text
21. Use the Power of Command Shells
22. Use a Single Editor Well
23. Always Use Source Code Control
24. Fix the Problem, Not the Blame
25. Don’t Panic When Debugging
26. “select” Isn’t Broken
27. Don’t Assume It – Prove It
28. Learn a Text Manipulation Language
29. Write Code That Writes Code
30. You Can’t Write Perfect Software
31. Design with Contracts
32. Crash Early
33. Use Assertions to Prevent the Impossible
34. Use Exceptions for the Exception Problems
35. Finish What You Start
36. Minimize Coupling Between Modules
37. Configure, Don’t Integrate
38. Put Abstractions in Cod, Details in Metadata
39. Analyze Workflow to Improve Concurrency
40. Design Using Services
41. Always Design for Concurrency
42. Separate Views from Models
43. Use Blackboards to Coordinate Workflow
44. Don’t Program by Coincidence
45. Estimate the Order of Your Algorithms
46. Test Your Estimates
47. Refactor Early, Refactor Often
48. Design to Test
49. Test Your Software, or Your Users Will
50. Don’t Use Wizard Code You Don’t Understand
51. Don’t Gather Requirements – Dig for Them
52. Work with a User to Think Like a User
53. Abstractions Live Longer than Details
54. Use a Project Glossary
55. Don’t Think Outside the Box — Find the Box
56. Start When You’re Ready
57. Some Things Are Better Done than Described
58. Don’t Be a Slave to Formal Methods
59. Costly Tools Don’t Produce Better Designs
60. Organize Teams Around Functionality
61. Don’t Use Manual Procedures
62. Test Early. Test Often. Test Automatically.
63. Coding Ain’t Done ‘Til All the Test Run
64. Use Saboteurs to Test Your Testing
65. Test State Coverage, Not Code Coverage
66. Find Bugs Once
67. English is Just a Programming Language
68. Build Documentation In, Don’t Bolt It On
69. Gently Exceed Your Users’ Expectations
70. Sign Your Work

The internet’s biggest time problem is that there’s no starting point. It’s the most flexible version of recorded history, but it doesn’t have all of recorded history on it. You can find information on almost any topic in the world, but there’s no beginning and no end. For example, just imagine being a completely new user of the internet. Where would you start?

(I did a funny search on Google as part of my research for this post. I Google’d “how to use the internet,” and there are actually a few results for this. Of course there would be results, but isn’t it funny that someone would have had to know how to use the internet and a search engine in order to find these sites in the first place? I digress…)

The point is, we often talk about how the internet has put the world’s information at our fingertips. We can search to our heart’s desire and find detailed information on a seemingly infinite number of topics. That’s just the point though, isn’t it? We’re always searching.

Before the internet, if I wanted to learn something, I picked up a book and read from page 1 and read it to the end. Compared to a similar process on the internet, I’d start at page 25, then read pages 1-10, a bit of 76, n-1, and then I’d assume I’d read enough.

Our information is fragmented. It’s disjointed in time and sequence. I’ve been working to improve my web development skills and have felt this first hand. There’s no one place for me to start and finish. I find myself reading blog posts about advanced topics before I know the basics. I find information that’s outdated but must rely on intuition and error checking to be sure. Random topics rise to the top of the search pile based on a popular blogger. Who’s to know where this information should fit in time? Where’s page 1?

When you visit a blog, you’re presented with the most recent blog post. I’m not sure a new visitor always wants to read the most recent content. Whenever I find a blog I really like, I try to read a sampling of the earliest posts as well as popular posts. I want to know where the blog started, where it’s gone and how long it’s taken to get there. The archives help a bit, but for my purposes, they’re often ordered backwards each month (including Enter Venture’s archive).

No one’s really figured out how to organize the web this way, but I have the feeling plenty of people would appreciate it if someone started putting a bit of chronology to the web’s information. There’s an enormous opportunity to organize the world’s educational matter this way, but it doesn’t stop there. A chronologically organized archive of the world’s newspapers and history would be pretty swell too.

One of the biggest drivers of the internet’s time problem is the emphasis on NOW. Sites have to deliver fresh content. As users, we’re inundated with up-to-the-second information and are fickle with our attention.

You see this problem manifest itself everywhere. It’s not entirely unique to the web, but news stories last barely a week before there’s a new NOW to focus on. There’s no time to reflect on what happened last week. If you use an RSS reader, you find yourself overwhelmed with articles that have to be read now, else suffer the dreaded Google Reader’s 1,000+ unread items. You have that Twitter account with all of your friends and followers that have your attention. Your Facebook chat window. Friendfeed. Yoono. Gchat. Email. Now. Now. NOW.

That brings up my final issues with the time problem of the internet. It doesn’t represent all of time! Remember those nearly 6 centuries of recorded history prior to the internet? You know, the ones that aren’t on anyone’s Facebook feed? Between then and the internet era, there are a few important things you should know about. Some of this information is worth at least as much of your attention as “Robert Scoble posted a message on Twitter.”

I love what Google is doing with its Books Search Library Project, but it’s just a start. Just imagine what it’d really be like if we had access to all of the world’s information, and if we organized it in a way that suited the way we both made sense of time and navigate the internet. Before the internet, it took a lot of effort to record history. Ideas were condensed and forced to be organized in scrolls, books, and libraries. Only the best ideas rose to the top. It’s not just a time problem, it’s a bit of a sequence problem, a focus problem, and a hubris problem.

What’s that they say about those who forget history? They’re doomed to forg… — sorry, hold on, someone just commented on my wall.

Serial entrepreneurs master the process of creating a business. At a recent NY tech meetup, Kevin Ryan, CEO of AlleyCorp, explained how he built his businesses. He spends several months working with a small team to build the business, then focuses on recruiting and moves quickly to the company board. It doesn’t matter what type of business he’s building. He builds to his process, and by the looks of AlleyCorp’s portfolio, it seems to be working

The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki explains exactly the same sort of process. Just check out the book’s major sections:

• Causation
• Articulation
• Activation
• Proliferation
• Obligation

Figure out what you want to do, how to make meaning. Next, refine your message. Start your business. Grow your business. (As for Obligation, it’s just a great life lesson about how to play nice on your way to the top. It’s a little ‘be the change you hope to see in the world’-ish.)

In 200 or so pages, he explains his process for building a company. Rather than a book though, this reads more like a checklist. Each part of his entrepreneurial process is condensed and mapped out, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find a private checklist similar to Art of the Start stashed away at Alltop headquarters.

This book is great for helping you refine your idea. At the beginning of your entrereneurial journey, the sky’s the limit. You could become anything. Before you can ever get started though, you have to explain your brilliant idea to someone else. Most often, this person’s attention span is the length of a powerpoint slide or two. Art of the Start helps you do this. It teaches you how to build constraints into your process to elicit refinement and creativity.

To show you a little bit of what I mean, I’ve pulled out a few quotes / notes from the book:

• Who has money? How do we get it?
• Describe your business model in 10 words. Pitches should explain your concept in the first minute
• Prove concept, complete design, finish prototype, raise capital, ship testable, break even.
• Clean up your problems or disclose your problems, but never hide your problems.
• The Ideal Board consists of the customer, the geek, a calming influence with experience, a Jerry Maguire with connections, and a tight-ass who pushes for totally legal and ethical practices.
• Find lawyers who are problem solvers, not ones who tell you what you can’t do.
• Create contagion: cool is beautiful, contagious, disruptive
• Product should be easy to understand ‘out of the box’, but have legs. The more you use it, the more you discover
• Create buzz then get ink.
• Make friends with the lower ranks of reporters.
• Allow users to test drive the service, then decide whether to stay or go.

Flipping through the pages of Art of the Start reinforces Kawasaki’s emphasis on process. It reads like a guide or text book full of tables, exercises, images, and well organized paragraphs. Thankfully, the book reads more like a blog than a text book and costs a lot less.

If you take anything away from The Art of the Start, appreciate the devotion to process. Kawasaki has numbered out the steps to starting and growing your business. If you want to learn a repeatable entrepreneurial process, this is a great place for an early entrepreneur to start.

I had actually been waiting for that as a type of milestone. The last time no one visited the site for an entire day was May 10th. I kept writing and watching my visitor statistics in order to keep myself out of the red. I wanted to see how long I could keep the streak going. 113 days later, I’m happy with the results.

I started this blog on April 16th and have been tracking my visitors and subscribers ever since. (On June 9th, I added both Feedburner stats and WordPress stats. For the next Enter Venture stats update, I’ll have more data to compare all three.)

In my Enter Venture Update post from June 9th, I mentioned the most popular posts up to that time:

1. Columbia Venture Community
2. Dealing with Constraints
3. Back up, what the feed are you talking about?

Now, the most popular posts, not including pre-June 9th data, are:

1. Two Ideas for the NY Startup Scene
2. NY Video 2.0
3. Columbia Venture Community
4. Mashable Exhibit Hall – NY Internet Week
5. The value of engineering education

I’ve noticed two popular trends for the blog — events and ideas. Events bring tend to bring in the most traffic, but it’s more fickle. People go to an event, read about the event, and then the event passes on. Ideas tend to bring in lasting users, users that subscribe, users that comment.

Going back to one of my earliest posts, What this blog will be about, the one thing that hasn’t seemed to break the popular posts lists are my book posts (actually, these updates haven’t either). I think this is a case when I’m going to ignore my users though. I like those book posts and hope that they’ll become a better resource when I’ve compiled a bigger, more comprehensive list for early web entrepreneurs.

Check out some of the other things I’ve learned about my readers over the past few months:

Geography:

• 86% US (Largely NY, California, and Massachusetts)
• 3.8% India (Mostly from Hyderabad — what’s up guys?)
• 1.67% Canada
• < 1% from 23 others (significant time spent by users from Germany, Sweden, and Taiwan)

Referred by sites:

• 47% Direct traffic
• 24% Google referrals
• 6% Gmail referrals
• 3% Read Write Web referral

Using the following browsers:

• 62% Firefox
• 24% Internet Explorer
• 14% Safari

Much can be learned from these few tidbits about how I’m gaining traffic, what my users are like, and where they’re coming from. Stay tuned for future Enter Venture developments that will address what I’m going to do with this information. The first goal was to simply get people reading this blog. Next, I’m going to focus on how to grow Enter Venture.

Enjoy your 4th of July.

Visible Measures – Matt Cutler, VP Marketing & Analytics

Visible Measures analyzes the effectiveness of internet video and video advertising to determine how the video is being consumed and spread virally. Their solution is particularly cool in that you can analyze the way people are viewing a video — when they’re rewinding, when they’re navigating away, pausing, etc. For example, in this video of Kobe jumping over a car, they can track the precise part of the video that people end up rewinding to watch again. (The jumping over the car part, obviously). I can see how valuable this information would be for marketers, especially for those videos without the obvious ‘jumping over a car’ rewind section.

Boxee – Gidon, Co-founder

Update: I’ve received my alpha invite — thanks guys!

Boxee’s product looks awesome. Before I talk about their presentation, if you guys are listening out there, hook a brother up with an alpha invite!

Boxee is a social networking digital media center for the Mac (and other platforms soon too). Boxee scans your home network and builds a rich media experience over your digital library with browsing features similar to, but better than Apple TV and iTunes. Boxee imports third party content so you can read more information about your videos, see a pilot, or read lyrics to your songs (super cool — I never know the lyrics to even my favorite songs). You can use a remote (super cool again — maintains the tv media experience). You can invite and follow friends’ libraries (super cool one more time — can we finally realize a free on demand media service with this?). You can tune into your friends’ playlists, import slideshows from Flickr and Picassa. You can zoom in and out of your videos. Better yet, you can extend Boxee even further as seen with their Muxtape example.

Again, guys, if you’re listening, I’d love an alpha invite. I get the impression that I’d have a lot more to say about Boxee with more than a cursory feature review

MediaMerx – Tejpaul Bhatia, Co-founder & CEO

I reviewed Tej and MediaMerx’s service in my original Columbia Venture Community post. My original comments remain the same — great opportunity, great sounding company. For an example of MediaMerx’s service in action, check out videopassport.tv.

Hulu – Kevin McGurn, VP National Sales

Kevin McGurn presented one of the hottest new video sites — Hulu. He talked about Hulu’s focus on really building a site that highlighted already beautiful video assets using simple design and high resolution, high quality video. It’s quickly become the destination for professional videos of your favorite movies and tv shows. I could go on and on about how Hulu seems to have nailed the professional online video site. Just check out their site — your favorite shows are probably already up there.

Move Networks – Bob Bryson, SVP Sales & BD

Move Networks is another company bringing higher quality video distribution to the web. Their focus is on getting the highest quality video to the user, regardless of their connection or local environment. Users with the best connections can get the best video, while users with slower connections get a lower quality video, rather than an interrupted video experience. This sounds like a great solution for content providers — just check out their client list for proof.

Thanks everyone! I’ve included a video of all the great presenters thanks to Yaron and Blip.tv! This is a Meetup group I’ll definitely be visiting again, and next time, I’ll be sure to stay for a drink afterwards.

1. It’s great to know how to teach one’s self
2. It’s great that there’s this thing called the “internets” to help

Point #2 is something I want to revisit later. Using the internet as a learning tool has its pluses and minuses. The pluses are obvious. You can search for anything and often, thanks to today’s search technology, find exactly what you’re looking for at the end of that long tail. The minuses, though, I think are less obvious and something I’d like to dedicate a longer post to. The internet has a time problem. We’ll just leave it at that.

Point #1 is the real reason for this post. Continuous education and self teaching are vital to the success of any early entrepreneur. It’s impossible for you to know at the outset everything you’ll need to know to be successful. Your success will be defined by your ability to continuously learn (and adapt, and get lucky once or twice).

Now, I have struggled for the past two years to better understand the value of my engineering degree. I have yet to really use the subject matter knowledge acquired from four years of biomedical imaging engineering. My single summer internship studying brain waves was fascinating, but a lifetime of working in hospital basements is not exactly what I’ve planned for myself.

What I’ve come to believe, and this past weekend substantiates this, is that an engineering degree teaches you the fundamentals to be a better self educator and problem solver. No matter what you go on to do after college, these fundamentals will help guide the way you improve, break down problems, and work with a team towards a solution.

Here are the 5 reasons I think my engineering education was crucial to my early entrepreneurship path. There’s certainly more, and I’d love to hear what other people think:

1. Self Education

I’m not sure if it’s by design or due to the general ineptitude of most engineering professors, but engineering tends to be really poorly taught. I certainly don’t blame the professors. Most of them were hired to do research. They simply aren’t there to engage you in the content, and the textbooks certainly don’t help.

You have to engage yourself in engineering. You have to find the right combination of study groups, office hours, and practice problems that work for you. You learn to focus and compile. You learn by doing.

The way we refer to ’studying’ before an engineering exam is probably a misnomer. More often, this time is spent practicing. Take that problem from Week 10 that you’re sure will be on the exam. Write out the solution step-by-step. Then, write it out again, but this time, change the numbers. Last, give yourself a final practice test by doing the problem without the book in front of you.

Even when you work out the answer to the equation, your job still isn’t done. Your next class will ask you to implement that solution with a program in Matlab. You’ll never know everything about Matlab and all of it’s functions so you better get used to digging around it’s help files and teaching yourself what you need to know along the way.

2. A Problem Solving Framework

I think the problem solving framework is best represented in an engineer’s final thesis or project.

My senior BME project team took on the following project: How could we create a portable set of underarm crutches to be used by sports trainers? We spent the first few months simply breaking down the problem. How small is portable? (Trainers typically carry duffle bags). How much weight must they support? (Accounting for the football team’s linemen, a lot). How much money do we have to build this prototype? (A little).

Once we knew the answers to these questions, we could think about solutions. Using our newly acquired Self Education skills we figured out the details for implementing.

(In case you’re wondering, we ended up building a crutch made of hinged aluminum segments with a wire running through the center that could be tightened and released to extend and fold the crutch. Cool stuff.)

3. Finishing spirit

It’s incredibly hard to get partial credit in engineering. Say you have a Java assignment that’s due at 9am on Friday morning. You could spend every waking hour from the Sunday night prior working on that assignment. You’ll make all kinds of mistakes, get sidetracked by random problems, but still find incremental improvements. What every engineering student knows, though, is if their program doesn’t run at 9am on Friday morning, it’s all for naught. Everything has to work when you hit ‘Enter’. I think it’s this feeling that keeps us up the night before. Success is relatively binary.

4. Side-by-side work

I can’t speak for every major, but one of the best things about BME was working side-by-side with professors and TAs during projects and labs. You can learn so much more than answers to problem sets this way. You see their passion and technique. How do they hold their instruments? How do they comment their code? It’s typically worth emulating.

I don’t think this extends outside of engineering all that often. Your poetry professors can’t write an example poem with you looking over their shoulder. Your ChemE professor can run that experiment though. Your CS professor can dazzle you with that on-the-spot ‘Hello world’ program in CS1007.

5. Teamwork

This was a bit of a late edition to the post. It’s also different than reason #4. Side-by-side work has more to do with emulating the best than working with a team of your peers.

I’m not entirely convinced that my engineering degree helped instill an appreciation for teamwork that I didn’t already have. Twenty years of team sports had already taught me most of what engineering school reinforced. If you haven’t had a similar experience, count this as an important reason #5.

I can remember a conversation my lab team once had with a graduate teaching assistant during some downtime in senior lab. He was a BME PhD student with a BS in MechE. He told us that if he had to do it all over again, he would have been a BME student from undergrad onwards. Obviously he just wished he could have spent another 4 years of his life talking about BME, I thought, but that wasn’t it. Instead, he told us that a BME degree would allow us to do anything. If you didn’t like medicine and biology, you could leverage your EE and CS classes. If you didn’t like those, you could leverage all of those math classes. If you didn’t like those, well, you could just fake it.

As I’m writing this now, I think his words ring true for practically any engineering major. Engineering isn’t about finding the right path over the course of a short, immature 4 year period of your life. Engineering is about learning how to learn, learning how to problem solve, and learning how to improve.

Thanks Columbia. (I never thought I’d say that before I finished paying the bill).

Before I go on, Iet’s talk about the furniture in my room. There’s the desk. That was free from craigslist. Then there’s the bureau — also free from craigslist. The bed frame cost me about $50, and my bookshelf about $40 (also from craigslist. That Craig’s got a great list).

My whiteboard, the only other substantial thing in my room, cost me a cumbersome ride on the F train and around $75. It’s by far the most valuable thing in my room.

Now, why was it worth over 75% more than the rest of my bedroom combined? Quite simply, it’s the best tool for helping you get started on almost any project. It is the figurative “blank slate” come to life. It’s perfect for that idea you’ve been thinking through for days now and finally need to dump.

Actually, once you dump it on the board, you realize there are major gaps missing in your idea. You erase the whole thing, start again fresh. (Rinse, repeat, and you get the idea.)

A whiteboard is every early entrepreneur’s best friend. There are numerous different people you need to contact, things you’ve got to learn, and places you need to go. The whiteboard is a great place for all of this and more. Over the past few months, here are the different ways I’ve found myself using my whiteboard:

1. Task lists

This is the most obvious. My whiteboard currently has a few different task lists going on at once. A list of half baked post ideas for the Enter Venture blog are in the upper right corner. There’s a few technical topics I’ve committed to learning on the left, and a few people I need to email are listed just above my computer in the lower right corner.

On paper, you check or cross off your tasks and end up a book full of squiggles and lines. Whiteboards let you erase your tasks completely. This is somehow more gratifying, I think.

2. Blog Schedule

I’ve tried to keep a fairly consistent posting schedule with Enter Venture as well as keep variety in my posts. Creating calendars on the go has helped with this immensely. I don’t need to map out my blog’s calendar for 3 months. I certainly don’t have 3 months worth of ideas figured out, but a 2 week calendar is perfect for my needs.

I can quickly visualize when I’ll be at an event, whether I’ve added a book lately, or when Vik will be posting.

3. Idea Prototyping

Like any early entrepreneur, I’ve always got a few different ideas floating in my head. When I originally envisioned Enter Venture it was going to be a more comprehensive site with a wider range of social networking features. Prototyping these ideas on the white board made me realize I didn’t have a clear picture of what it was I wanted to create. I kept whittling down features until I was looking at a blog. Here you have it.

4. Doodling

Whiteboards are not only a great tool — your friends will love it! You’ll be the ‘it’ destination for various doodles and messages. People will enter your room and leave having felt like they left a mark, an impression.

Let them do it with a whiteboard. I’ve seen people try to do this with markers and a wall. It wasn’t pretty.

5. A fresh start.

This is the most important. Like any truly great tool, a whiteboard gives you the ultimate in flexibility. For a week, my whiteboard will have a series of screen shots on it. The next week, it has a calendar. Changing your frame of reference will help keep you and your ideas fresh.

In fact, I’m going to clean my board now. I could use a few new ideas for my next post…

Several months ago I asked my friend Laks to recommend a good book that would really help me better understand how software should be done. For the past two years, I’ve worked in two completely different environments and seen two completely different ways of creating a web application. Unfortunately, I’ve never really felt like I’d learned to do things the right way.

I first tried reading the book online, but I didn’t appreciate the book in the same way when I had to follow a link somewhere, get up from my computer, sit down and find my place if I hadn’t left the page open from the night before. I knew I enjoyed what I was reading, but it was hard to keep coming back so I broke down and bought the book version for $25.

Aside from The Elements of Style, I don’t think there’s a smaller, more valuable book out there. I read the book on my way back from this year’s New Orleans Jazz Fest. On what should have been a let down flight, I found myself riveted by all 187 pages of this thing. A day after Jazz Fest and 2 hours into my flight I had the chills.

Getting real isn’t the type of book that’s going to tell you what to do with every little detail. It tells you how to focus on a tightly focused framework that will guide you to how you should handle every little detail. Just check out the chapter titles:

• Introduction
• The Starting Line
• Stay Lean
• Priorities
• Feature Selection
• Process
• The Organization
• Staffing
• Interface Design
• Code
• Words
• Pricing and Signup
• Promotion
• Support
• Post-Launch
• Conclusion

Talk about brevity. This book hits you over the head with its succinctness. Try digging through another book about software and see if you can find as much covered in as few words as 37signals has done with Getting Real.

One of the tell tale ways I know I’ve found a good book is by checking to see how many pages I’ve dog ear’d. I’d say about 15% of this book meets this description. There’s all kinds of gems in here, everything from hiring:

“Find someone who’s enthusiastic… Someone who’s excited to build what you’re building. Someone who hates the same things you hate. Someone who’s thrilled to climb aboard your train.”

To making opinionated software:

“Some people argue software should be agnostic… We think that’s bullshit. The best software has a vision. The best software takes sides.”

To how to approach any type of problem:

“Are you facing an issue that’s too big to wrap your mind around? Break it down. Keep dividing problems into smaller and smaller pieces until you’re able to digest them.”

And on and on. Or not so “on and on”? The book’s only 187 pages!

Finally, if you’re not ready to plunk down $25 for your own copy, check out this David Heinemeir Hansson speech. Let one of the authors push you over the hill:

(Isn’t Omnisio’s video / powerpoint slick? I have to think this will become more popular.)

I don’t think I’ll ever stumble upon the best way to create software, but I think this book is certainly close.

Now, I’ve never lived or worked in Silicon Valley, but I’ve heard about it. I’ve heard that students are encouraged to pursue entrepreneurship. I know that they have startup career fairs. What I knew about the NY startup scene during college was this: nothing.

So, here are my two ideas for how Silicon Alley can change that:

1. Silicon Alley needs to go to school

At the CVC event tonight, I heard and participated in several conversations that went like this:

• “I had no idea there were startups in NYC when I was in school.”
• “Are there companies that come to campus that aren’t investment banks or consulting firms?”
• “Why doesn’t anyone just go recruit from SEAS (Columbia’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences)?”

Great question. I graduated from SEAS in 2006. While there, I had no idea that NYC had even a single startup. I knew exactly who McKinsey, BCG, Booz Allen, Deloitte, UBS, Citibank, and Goldman Sachs were, or rather, after going to Columbia I knew who these firms were. I couldn’t agree more with Ari Greenberg of Baveo when he says that, “before I came to Columbia. I didn’t even know what the hell an investment bank or consulting firm was.”

I get the impression that Silicon Valley really cultivates the relationship with the young talent coming out of its area’s schools. I remember reading an article from Hacker News that said that many of UC Berkeley’s CS majors had multiple job offers.

Just before today’s CVC event, I ran into a recently graduated CS major who lived on my floor when I was a freshman RA (don’t ask). What’s he up to these days? He’s looking for a job. Looking for a job??!! Are you crazy?

Do you know how many times I’ve been at tech events lately where someone announces they’re hiring? This always strikes me as amazing. You’re looking to hire someone at an event full of people already working for startups or people planning to start their own? Really? Is there no better place to ask that question?

Silicon Alley should be hammering on Columbia and NYU’s doors. What more could a startup ask for than a recent graduate with lots of energy, the willingness to learn, and tons of time on their hands? Sure, it takes a leap of faith to recruit entry level developers from college, but it sure beats standing in a conference room while holding a “Looking for Developers” sign over your head.

The message to Silicon Alley is simple. Students have no idea that you exist because, well, you’re not hiring them!

2. Silicon Alley needs to be the most popular kid in school

I think this would be pretty easily attained by Silicon Alley once they start reaching into the area’s universities. How many college students really dream about donning that suit and tie when they graduate, anyways?

The area needs more buzz. It needs to create this buzz by looking outside its IAC walls. It needs success stories that people know about and hear about. Students shouldn’t find out about the Silicon Alley startup scene two years after graduation. They should be dreaming about being a part of it from the moment they step on campus. They’ll see startups, join startups, and think, “Hey, I can start one of these on my own.”

All of a sudden, that CS major becomes more attractive. You don’t need to move across the country. You don’t need to squeeze in that economics minor to make yourself more attractive to the McKinseys and Booz Allens (not that I’m advocating being one dimensional). Awareness will build on campus. Students will start telling stories about those firms that are dishing out free lunch and that let you wear jeans to work.

I can just imagine the career fair now. Imagine a table for Meetup right next to the table for JP Morgan Chase. How many engineers would choose writing back end financial software over working on a hot web product?

As Mark Davis said at today’s CVC event, “Columbia has a lot of people interested in entrepreneurship, but there’s not a lot of community.” The community has to come both from the universities and industry.

Columbia is starting to get it’s act together. Your move, Silicon Alley.

Web 2.0 Chicken Pox

In a previous post, I talked about how social networking buttons were popping up all over the place, but few people knew what they were. Well, I’ll consider this a bit a journalistic exploration. You can also find these links in the Enter Venture feed.

• StumbleUpon - I completely recommend StumbleUpon to anyone that hasn’t tried it. It recommends really interesting websites. For example, in two clicks from my StumbleUpon toolbar just now, I was taken to a site describing the anatomy of a black hole and a site listing the top censored stories of 2007.
• Facebook – Most of my incoming links have come from facebook. Hopefully someone will find this useful
• Digg This – I just can’t get over how cool ‘Digg This’ looks on the page. Ya dig?
• Email This – Because it doesn’t require you to have 30 different log ins with social networking sites

I came so close to calling this post “version 2.0,” but I couldn’t bear it. It’s probably best to avoid this term like the plague given the strong reactions it can induce.

Email Subscriptions

You can now have Enter Venture emailed to you each morning. This might be best for all of you struggling with RSS overload now that you’re using your feed reader. It’s so much easier to delete an email.

Moderated Sidebar: Humor, New People, Popular Posts

I updated the sidebar to better reflect who’s posting on here and the fact that I still haven’t defined early entrepreneurship. Hint: that’s intentional.

I finally showed Vik a little love by putting him in the sidebar. All kidding aside, it’s great having his posts on Enter Venture. He brings a different perspective with the potential to create new ideas and ensures this site remains interdisciplinary.

I installed WordPress Stats for my own administration, and one of the cool things I can do to leverage that information is report popular posts for Enter Venture. Unfortunately, this doesn’t account for activity prior to the Stats installation that was tracked with Google Analytics, but if you’re curious, here are the top three to date:

1. Columbia Venture Community
2. Dealing with Constraints
3. Back up, what the feed are you talking about?

The Trivial

I made a bunch more seemingly trivial upgrades, but that doesn’t always mean they’re trivial tasks. The modified archive pages that now mirror the main page gave me a few scrapes. There were a few bullet rendering updates, alt tag improvements, and alignment tweaks that were more modest.

I think the rule with all of this is that the less you notice, the better. Let’s hope so — except for those Web 2.0 doohickies. Notice those. Enjoy the new stuff.

Sometimes the right choice is no team at all — but this is not the sustainable or scalable option for most operations.

How does an entrepreneur, and a starving one at that, build a team of like-minded, competent, individuals who will work with and not against the entrepreneur or each other?

I don’t know the right answer, but have a running theory:

The optimal team is build both with trusted associates, as well as with experimental new talent.  Unfortunately, payroll takes capital. If you’re starving, that capital comes out of the marketing budget or the R&D budget, or food/rent.

So how do you compensate a resource without funding?

Stay tuned for an upcoming post on incentives…

I have launched a social experiment of my own for new talent that includes both experiential incentives and targeted good faith.

My current team includes a few trusted associates, all part-time, and freelanced admin and skilled labor resources. If the experiment above goes well, it will include a few more feet on the ground.

I can’t seem to post word documents to the blog, but am happy to let people see it. It exemplifies much of what I believe in partnering with your talent and structuring fair incentives.

I would be glad to share it with anyone who is interested, and don’t even mind if you use it as long as you ask.

Whenever I go to one of these events, I enjoy a little chuckle to myself when I think of the conferences I’ve attended for my day job.  There’s typically a host of software providers, or a featured software provider, trying to sell any doohickie or widget they can stuff down the government’s throat.  I’m often the only person in the room under 40 and always the only one in the room with a spike of hair running over the top of his head.  For one of the more enjoyable conferences, NYC’s GovTech, the NYTimes tech blogger, David Pogue, gave a great, but revealing presentation about all kinds of new things on the internets — Skype, iPhone (1.0 not 2.0), etc.  It sometimes feels like stepping back in time.

Mashable was about as different from my day job’s conferences as one can get, but maybe it was a little too far in the future?  The event was hosted at Touch, a faux ritzy lounge / club that most people probably think of when they think of New York bars.  That’s right kids, plush couches, and a freakin’ DJ!  The only problem with this is that whole “Exhibit” part sometimes got kind of tough.  People were yelling over one another, and the exhibit area was packed, even during the first hour or so that I was there.  Not a bad bar scene, but again, the exhibit was kind of lost in the mix.

Don’t get me wrong.  I completely enjoyed myself at Mashable’s Exhibit Hall.  A bit of free food, (not free) beer, and internet geeks in the same room makes for a good time. Maybe they just needed a bigger space?

Rather than talk about the event, I decided to do something similar to what I did with the Columbia Venture Community article and review a few of the companies and websites I saw yesterday.  (If anyone else wants to review some of these sites, feel free to do so in the comments.  Yes, you, my 10 readers…):

NameThis – NameThis is another Kluster product and seems very similar to the Kluster site.  NameThis offers allows you to crowdsource the name of your company, product, or, well, anything.  My initial impression with the site is that I’m not in love with the wooden deck-like header overlaid horizontally on the vertically striped background.  It kind of hurts my eyes, but doesn’t keep me from being able to quickly figure out what this site’s all about.  They do a great job of using the most important screen real estate with the important functions of the site – naming competitions.

I ran into a few stumbling blocks when I tried to use NameThis though.  And by that, I mean, I can’t log in to use the site really at all.  I tried to log on to NameThis using my Kluster email account, the log on kept failing, but there was no message to tell me what was wrong.  I decided to “forgot my password” and had an email sent to me with a link to reset my password.  When I reset my password, I was taken straight back to the original log in screen as if there was another unannounced error with the system.  Grrr.  I can log in to Knewsroom and Kluster so I don’t think it’s me.

I can log in to the site and see the current naming competitions, but I can’t participate.  It’s too bad too.  The concept of this site is so simple and easy to understand that I want to participate, you know?  Just the tip, just to see how it feels?

One last thing about Kluster, they seem like they have found a system that will really be able to churn out products.  It seems like they’ve put together three different applications over night so I bet we can expect more.

edopter – edopter was probably my favorite site of the event.  Even better, Matthew from edopter was probably the easiest person to talk to of all the participants.  Great site.  Great people.  Good combination.  I don’t think I’m a part of edopter’s target market, but I can completely see the type of people who would love this site.  In fact, I have a friend of mine that I’m sharing the link with once I finish this post.

For the most part, the site design is great.  I came away with a few ideas for updating the Enter Venture blog design (whenever that will be) .  They do a really good job of focusing your eye on big, clear images and text, which makes for a fun browsing experience.

I do have a few complaints: Some of the graphic design makes it a bit difficult to scan for elements on the site.  The buttons blend in with the rest of the background and text a bit too much — for example, the log in button on the home page.  The search bar also suffers from a similar problem but looks more like a button than an input field.

Concertattack – ConcertAttack has a great, clean site that addresses the popular music / artist / fan / concert market.  I should be feeling great about ConcertAttack, but here’s the thing…  Haven’t I seen this site before?  Or some variation of this site?  I’m certainly not someone who would use the site.  There definitely are a lot of people who would — just check out the activity on the site.

My worry for them is how are they really, really going to stand out?  Something tells me the fans of these sites are pretty fickle.  Concertattack must do one or two things better than anyone else, it’s just hard for me to know what those things are.

VideoClix.tv – VideoClix was a crowded by people so I knew there was something worth checking out in them.  I just watched the demo of their product and can now see why it was so crowded.  VideoClix has made video interactive and clickable for more information and product suggestions.  While watching a video of Steve Harvey, you can mouse over the video for an indication of what’s clickable.  When you click on the video, a small sidebar slides out with more information about Home Depot, sandpaper, Steve Harvey, etc.

The product doesn’t yet seem perfect from the demo, but it’s a certainly on its way towards a really new and interesting viewing experience. I look forward to my beta invite to see more.

Rubicon – Hmm.  Rubicon.  I was at  first excited about Rubicon.  This might be something I could use in the future.  I have a blog.  At the point that I have more than 10 readers, I might want to put ads on this blog.  Unfortunately, I never found myself wanting to get started.  They do some sort of ad network optimization thing where we all magically make tons of money, or “mad cash”.  All I wanted to do is figure out what they could do for Enter Venture.  Instead, I filled out a form, that took me to their “User Interface” (I should have known to bail out here), then another set of questions, and really, I stopped there.  It was clear that this wasn’t something I wanted to use.

After writing the above, I decided to give Rubicon one last try and at least view their 3 minute demo.  Instead of a demo though, I got a voiced over sales presentation.  I think they’re really stretching the use of the word “demo” (short for “demonstration”) here.

MotionBox – MotionBox was another company and site that I really liked.  Put them in the edopter bucket.  MotionBox seems to have found a niche in the family video sharing space.  Their site uses all kinds of language and images that target the “Hi Mom, the baby did x today!” audience.  MotionBox’s user account screens look the best of any of the sites I saw at Mashable.  They’re well organized, have subtle design touches that compliment that organization, and they make it extremely easy to use their system — right down to the short but instructive step-by-step guide that’s just perfect for their target market.

Unfortunately, it’s ridiculously hot in my apartment right now as NYC just got slammed with a heat wave so I need to wrap this up here.  MotionBox deserves a more extensive review, but I’m (thankfully) short of any sample baby videos at the moment and don’t expect any soon.  Maybe then I’ll give them the full test.

Thanks again to Mashable and all of the event’s participants!

Scott asked the panel to give one piece of advice to the entrepreneurs and their startups. Here’s the gist of what they said:

• Mimeo (CEO Adam Slutsky) – “The team is most important.” “Start with the customer.”
• Thumbplay (VP/BD Chris Phenner) – “Get used to what each other smells like.”
• The Ladders (Marc Cenedella, CEO) – “Get going.” “Get real customers that send you angry emails and learn something.”
• DailyCandy (Catherine Levene, COO) – “Focus. Figure out what you’re doing and do it well.”
• Meetup (G.Whalin, CTO) – “Have a vision and stick to your guns.” “Launch iterate. Launch iterate.”
• Etsy (Rob Kalin, CEO) – “Head down and work.”
• Huffington Post (Jonah Peretti, Co-Founder) – “Be flexible.” “Know yourself”
• Huffington Post (Betsy Morgan, CEO) “Leave behind conventional rules.”
• AlleyCorp (Kevin Ryan, CEO) – “Carve out a market that people didn’t realize existed.”

Thanks to CenterNetworks for the video!

You might know you want to start a website, but it’s tempting to imagine your site 3 years down the line, rather than the first 3 months from now. I think this is something you’re seeing with a lot of social networks these days. It’s a way to make a successful business, but not all that distinguishing. We’ll call this the ‘zero to facebook’ method. Remember kids, Facebook started out as a simple friend connection and photo sharing site.

It’s probably been said to death that you should focus on that one, core idea. Become the leader in something. Well, how do you get there? I’m not sure I have an exact framework for finding the right idea, but I’ll offer a completely unrelated story to that point. I think there’s a message in here somewhere…

In high school, I was lucky enough to be introduced to one of the great, growing sports in the U.S. — lacrosse. I had played ice hockey throughout my childhood with some football, soccer, and baseball mixed in, but I had barely ever seen a lacrosse game. The ones I had seen were limited to rowdy, indoor box lacrosse games in whatever now-defunct league the Boston Blazers played in.

(Digression from my digression: These Blazers games were insane. I once saw a goalie, after the teams were pelted by debris for the remaining minutes of the game, pick up a squashed beer can with his stick and hurl the can back into the stands where it would have knocked out a heckler if not for a small railing between the can and his face. You could hear the ‘ping’ throughout the old Garden.)

Anyways, when I began playing lacrosse, I started with a blank slate and little understanding of the game’s rules, techniques, positions, or formations. My lacrosse coaches throughout my high school years taught me most of what I would learn about how to play the game over the four years that I played there.

One thing I learned about lacrosse is that there’s a position called ‘attack’. How cool is that? Attack only play offense (again, how cool is that?). In lacrosse, you have to have a certain number of players on each side of the field at one time. This keeps the defensemen in the defensive zone and the attack in the offensive zone.

When an attack ended up on the defensive zone, it was usually because of some kind of break down and it put the attack, and team, in dangerously unfamiliar territory. Attack spend all of their time trying to beat defensive sets and suddenly they’re on the other side of the battle. To combat this, my varsity coach gave the following advice, “Get to the net first and figure out what to do next once you get there.”

His point was, if all else fails, be the first person to reach the most important point on the field, and then figure things out from there. Run through all of the chaos, and get to the starting point. Once you’re in front of the net, you’re at least clogging up a key lane for the other team. You’re able to look out and find men to cover. You can be directed by the goalie or a defenseman to where you should be.

I think getting to the net first is exactly the type of advice early entrepreneurs need when getting to the essence of their idea. When you start out, there’s a million and one things your website and your business can be. You can offer the world’s greatest social network with messaging, profiles, chat, blogs, forums, vendor services, Q&A, and competitions, but the problem is that everyone’s site has messaging, profiles, chat, blogs, forums, vendor services, Q&A, and competitions. Now what?

You’ll find this same advice all over the place. Guy Kawasaki talks about the importance of having a mantra in the opening pages of The Art of the Start. Getting Real by 37signals hits you over the head with the ‘get to the net first’ mentality. From the first two pages of the Priorities chapter we hear things like, “Explicitly define the one-point vision for your app … What does your app stand for? What’s it really about?” and from the Ignore Details Early On section, “Details reveal themselves as you use what you’re building.” If anything, listen to these guys.

Make things simple for yourself. If Twitter can make a business (and no one’s sure of that yet) out of 140 characters, there’s got to be more one line ideas out there. You probably need to take your idea and cut it in half. You might need to just focus on that one piece of your idea. You might even need to keep thinking about it, but better this than sounding the trumpets for the marketing team and business development teams before you’ve defined what you’re all about.

Once you have that idea, you’re only 0.01% of the way towards becoming a successful entrepreneur. Success will be found in the execution of the 99.99% of your other activities, but starting from the right point will make all the difference.

Get to the net first. What’s your idea?