I’ve said it before but I’ll repeat it. In my opinion, Silicon Valley is the most vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem in the world. The sheer amount of venture capital available helps but there’s a lot more than money that you can’t quantify and makes it unique. It’s hard to replicate the dozens of tech meetups happening everyday where people discuss any startup-related subject you can imagine. It’s even harder to replicate the collaborative culture you can find here. Everyone openly discusses their future plans and you feel like anyone you stop on the street can give you extensive and valuable feedback for your business.

This is what I call the “insider bias”. Just by being here, you’re exposed to ideas and concepts that others don’t have access to, but you hear them so many times that at some point you think everyone knows it. Everyone knows about the lean startup cycle, the 90/9/1 ratio, or the freemium conversion funnel, right? Wrong! One of the things that impressed me the most about Silicon Valley is the level of tech-related discussions you can get. With anyone! They might not know the difference between income and revenue but they can give you a half hour talk about how UI is different than UX.

You can’t replicate that, but you can immerse yourself in this ecosystem even without being here. How? Connecting to the Silicon Valley information hubs, attending virtual events, reading, interacting with local people, even working for people in Silicon Valley. It’s an organic process and can take its time, but slowly you can start feeling as if you were here. Here is how I did it.

1. Twitter. First, I started following relevant people on Twitter. The particular list of names is personal and debatable (the list of people I follow is public and you can check it at twitter.com/hugobernardo), and it will depend on the type of business you’re running. If you’re into tech, then you might want to check Techcrunch, Business Insider, or the newest Pandodaily. If you’re going to be a founder, you should follow some VCs and angels. You can check “The Most Respected Venture Capitalists” to start with. If you’re in the wine business, like I am, follow the most relevant wine bloggers and reviewers. You don’t have to be checking every single tweet, and you should definitely curate your list, but Twitter has this strange effect that makes you feel like you’re best friends with the people you follow, which makes you a little more of an insider. Even if you and I know you’re not ;)
2. Hacker News. I find Hacker News, Y Combinator’s news and discussion forum, is an invaluable source of help and information, in a way I don’t find anywhere else (except maybe attending live events). The name says it all - most people hanging out there are hackers, a lot from outside Silicon Valley. Try to contribute whenever you can, but even if you don’t, you can read about the latest in technology, and learn from people who are the real deal.
3. eMeetings & classes. Meetups are an incredible way of learning and receiving feedback. The problem, of course, is that you need to be here to attend. However, a lot of events now stream live, and the number is increasing. Of course, you don’t get to network but you’ll learn a lot. Go to meetup.com and find the groups that interest you the most, then check which events stream live. Also, Stanford has a lot of online resources (classes, conferences, etc), and attendance is free. Here’s the link.

Do these 3 things and you’ll quickly feel as if you were here. That way, whenever you decide to come to Silicon Valley, you won’t sound as if you’re alien. Plus, you’ll likely establish useful connections in the process that will make the transition a lot easier.

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When I first started writing this blog, the idea was to illustrate what it feels like to be an immigrant entrepreneur in the Silicon Valley, and in the process help others who, like me, wanted to make the jump. 

However, when I recently sat in a couple of panels with Portuguese entrepreneurs, I quickly realized my posts had an insider bias. Even if I’ve only been here for 2 years, there’s already a lot of knowledge I take for granted that people outside the US (or even Silicon Valley) don’t have access to.

So I decided to start a series of posts that hopefully will help the aspiring immigrant entrepreneur to better understand the (unquestionably?) world’s most vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem. I feel most blogs I read assume that people have already a decent knowledge of how things work in the US and in Silicon Valley in particular. The idea of this series is to be basic, sort of an intro to Silicon Valley.

I’m planning to write 11 posts but feedback is very welcome and I might change the lineup. Leave your comments here or send me an email with your ideas.

Here are the planned posts:

1. Immerse yourself in the Silicon Valley community without being here
2. Forget your local market. Think global, think big, and act accordingly
3. Understand the startup cycle - team, prototype, traction, funding
4. Look for help, be connected, but don't take help for granted
5. Don't blow intros, respect everyone, manage your email
6. It’s never been easier to stay connected - use all resources available
7. Leverage your local market but don't over-invest in its uniqueness
8. The necessary bureaucracy - visas, lawyers, banks, accountants
9. What to localize and what to outsource
10. Basic rules for fundraising
11. Crossing the pond - commitment and timeline

Image: gaebler.com

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This post was originally published on fnBlog.

A few weeks ago we had our annual share of tech predictions and a common trend was the inclusion of companies such as Airbnb, Zipcar, and Getaround. What I love about these companies (I should include Netflix here) is that they took on industries that failed to innovate for decades. For me, those companies have been a tremendous inspiration.

I grew up in the wine country, where my family has been trying to succeed in one of the most conservative and slow-moving industries you can imagine. The wine industry hasn’t change its modus operandi for decades, despite being dysfunctional for those who operate in it, and extremely opaque for the consumer. Casual wine drinkers dread the supermarket wine aisle, where 500+ brands with prices all over the place make the buying process a nightmare. I believe buying wine shouldn’t be harder than buying any other consumer product, and that is the main reason why I created Easy Vino.

The Wine Industry is Changing

Wine was born an exclusive product, made for connoisseurs and collectors. The industry has hardly changed until the Baby Boomers created a whole new segment of casual wine drinkers – people who just wanted to drink wine with no interest in having a deep understanding about the product. However, the industry organized itself around the wine expert, and that is why wine reviews include terms such as “pencil shavings” or “fresh cut grass”, and why wine ratings make little sense for the normal consumer.

Recently I have been sensing a change in consumer behavior. The new consumers are anti-establishment and reject all the snobbery surrounding wine. They don’t want to learn about wine, they just want to drink a good wine at all times. The market is not prepared for them though.

Technology and Slow-Moving Industries

Easy Vino was created to address this new trend. But how can you disrupt an industry that refuses to innovate? The end user is your best friend. If you can create an outstanding user experience, the industry will follow. For the wine consumer, that means being able to pick the best wine without thinking about it. We are building a wine recommendation app, combining taste preference, social graph, and location-based information, to help consumers pick wine at specific restaurants and retail stores.

Technology helps and timing is everything. What we are doing was not possible just a few years ago. The ability to cramp significant processing power in a mobile device, combined with the location-based information available today made our solution possible. The one advantage of working in a slow-moving industry is that the big players with a lot of money to spend are not even thinking about these problems. They’re focused on running business as usual, which gives a lot of room for fast-moving startups to become relevant in the space (just ask Blockbuster).

My point is, if you are frustrated about how certain businesses are run, look out for opportunities to disrupt them, assess the state of technology, and then see if there is a way to put the end user on your side. By the time you become relevant, it’s too late for them.

Image: Tom Curtis / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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The President of Portugal was in California last Sunday and Monday and that was big news. For most people it was big news because the last time a President visited California was 20 years ago. To me it was big news because a good part of the visit focused on entrepreneurship and Silicon Valley. Usually our politicians like to visit big companies and announce big investments that generate big headlines back home. But it’s hard to make big announcements theses days so it’s fitting that the focus turned to startups and entrepreneurs.

I spoke yesterday on a panel about entrepreneurship in Portugal vs Silicon Valley and one of thing I was very happy to hear was the enthusiasm around building strong ties among Portuguese entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and between us and those in Portugal. A strong network means more opportunities for those in Portugal and there’s no other place in the world like Silicon Valley if you want to be a tech entrepreneur. A better network here means higher probability of success and we desperately need success stories.

One of the problems we historically had in Portugal is jealousy. Whereas in Silicon Valley we look at someone else’s success and think “how can I do the same?”, in Portugal we think “I wish she crashes and burns”. The first reaction means entrepreneurship, because we see success as a source of motivation. The second reaction generates inaction and a toxic environment where people are secretly hoping that you fail.

How do you change that? You do with repeated success and with a transparent path to success. When I say transparent I don’t mean formulaic. I mean giving people a chance to succeed the same way other did. I mean equal opportunities for real.

One of the reasons people in Portugal are suspicious about success stories is that they perceive it’s not transparent - maybe you need connections, maybe you need a rich parent, maybe you need to play dirty.

I believe Silicon Valley is an equal opportunity land (I do, despite recent disputes) and the Portuguese entrepreneurs I’ve met here are generally very down to earth. A strong Portuguese network in Silicon Valley means more opportunities for those of us here and in Portugal, which means more chances to build success in a way we can replicate.

The other key step is collaboration. That’s what made Silicon Valley so special and historically Portugal hasn't been good at collaborating. That’s why I was so excited to see such level of enthusiasm about building a community here. This is a step in the right direction and one that can help entrepreneurs here and in Portugal. And Portugal desperately needs its entrepreneurs.

Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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I want to tell you a story. This is a true story; it’s about me, my family and my country, and it's not pretty. This story starts in the fifties. In the 1950s Portugal was a poor country, on par with Romania, the Philippines, and Ghana to give you some examples. We were ruled by a dictator and my family remembers stories of hunger and very difficult times to live a decent life.

Two decades later, in 1974, Portugal lived a revolution, became a democracy, and all of the sudden we thought we were a modern Western nation. My family recalls 25% annual salary increases, free everything (apparently I was fed on a lot of free baby food), and an overall feeling that “we have the right to be as rich as Germany”. Nonetheless, we were still a poor nation, so for some time we kept playing the role that China played in the last decade (and still does) - cheap labor. That kept us going.

Then came the European Union. Portugal joined the European Union (then ECC) in 1986 and we had our “drug dealer” moment. If you’re not familiar with the drug dealer life story (don’t ask) here’s a long but realistic portrait. From 1986 through the early 2000s we spent all we were given and more. Money was endless so, as good drug dealers, we bought Ferraris, big houses and luscious vacations. Unfortunately I’m not exaggerating a bit. Our politicians did the same, and we built freeways to nowhere, world expos, football (or futbol) stadiums, and even tried to host the Olympics and the America’s Cup. 

Because we were a fucking Western nation!

Now I’m not playing the saint here. My family wasn’t left behind. In 1977 my parents had an old Citroen and a 2-bedroom apartment in a poor suburban neighborhood in Lisbon. That’s how my sister and I were raised. In 2000 we had 3 houses, a vineyard, 5 cars (no Ferrari), and I was eating foie gras and drinking fancy wine. We weren’t selling drugs, we were just riding the wave. It was the Euro wave and we made the cut.

In 1998 I left Portugal, first to study, then to start my own company. I left my country thinking we were a fucking Western nation (no shit!). That sentiment was reinforced after living in Paris and Madrid. Our living standards were definitely not inferior to those of my friends in France and Spain. 

Then all of the sudden I started feeling something was changing. I was living in Madrid and my salary kept increasing while my friends talked about trouble in Portugal. I thought that was the typical Portuguese whine. But then the economy tanked and everyone started talking about recession. At that point I thought that was serious but thankfully our government came to the rescue and we kept buying fancy cars and spending vacations in Brazil and Bora Bora (that was popular in Portugal 10 years ago).

Then came 2008 and the mother of all recessions (at least for my generation). I was in the US already and I thought that was really bad but thankfully our government came to the rescue (again!) and kept things going. Ok, maybe we weren’t buying Ferraris and going to Bora Bora but BMWs and Zanzibar weren’t that bad after all.

Then came 2011 and you can read my last post to understand where we are right now. Let’s say we are a step away from being under the bridge begging for a piece of bread. That’s the unfortunate life story of another drug dealer (again, I highly recommend this link). Not only we spent all we were given, we spent thinking the inflow was never ending.

If you’re American, it’s up to you to discern whether or not the US are headed in the same direction. I was too young in the nineties to understand the implications of what our decision makers were doing. When I see the US economy I can’t help but thinking about the drug dealer story. China can bail you out now but no one will bail you out indefinitely. Either you quit early on or you’ll end up under the bridge. 

Your choice...

Image: David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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This week the Portuguese government presented the budget for 2012 and I was surprised (not to say shocked) with some of the measures approved. Granted that Portugal is under siege, with the IMF and the European Union demanding hefty budget cuts to reduce public debt, but it’s hard to believe that this budget can solve the country’s short term problems and it will definitely hurt long term growth. 

When I first read the budget proposal, there was one question I couldn’t stop asking - do our politicians know math? I’m not talking about complex derivatives or even  quadratic equations, I’m talking about ratios. 

Here is a quick Math 101 for Politicians. While public debt is an absolute number, budget deficit is a ratio. And it’s not just any ratio, it’s one where the numerator (tax revenue) and the denominator (government spending) are tightly related. If you change the denominator, you need to understand the implications of that in the numerator and vice-versa. If you reduce certain types of spending and, as a result, you get less tax revenue, the final ratio will hardly change. The 2012 budget proposal ignores this basic premise. It’s an amateurish exercise, where the government tweaked numbers to achieve whatever deficit goal they were looking for, without considering potential consequences of those changes on both sides of the ratio.

I’ll elaborate. This budget hammers three classes - public workers, retirees and small business owners. How? Slashing government salaries and pensions by 14% across the board, and almost doubling sales tax on restaurants and bars from 13% to 23%.  This is not just a sign of weakness from the government by going after those who are easiest to track, but it’s also an exercise of poor math. The government expects private consumption to decline by 5%. Now you do the math. At least 15% of all consumers will be affected by the 14% salary cut and 25% of restaurants and bars are expected to file for bankruptcy. Now compute additional factors like lower consumer confidence and lower salaries in the private sector as a result of the government’s example and you see how I don’t get this math. You can't mess up with the denominator and expect the numerator to remain the same.

The saddest thing about this budget is its lack of long term perspective. None of these measures help growth, business owners or entrepreneurs (those who were challenged to be the engines of the recovery). It doesn't even send a message of optimism since further cuts are expected in 2013 and now everyone knows who’s going to pay for that. It’s bad math coupled with bad politics. And it’s too sad that it’s my country.

Image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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This post is not about smoking exactly but it is about addiction. I’ve been wanting to write a post on constitutional limits to government debt for a long time and you’d think that by now the subject would be cold. You’d be wrong – a bunch of European countries, Portugal included, are still trying to enforce the rule. What were all these people watching when the US put up a degrading political show during the debt ceiling negotiation? Plus, let me tell you one thing about the Portuguese culture (I’d extend the analysis to most countries) – people, including and especially politics, will always find the back door to a law limiting their rights. Just like smoking, if you don’t fix the addiction and simply throw your last pack in the lion’s cage, you’ll find a way to get that pack back once you’re desperate. In Portugal specifically, where laws are hard to enforce, you can imagine how effective constitutional limits would. Portugal is the land of fait accompli policy – go over the debt ceiling and then we’ll see what happens.

But let’s ignore geographic specificities and focus on why a debt ceiling is ridiculous. I’ll use another metaphor to illustrate my point – a debt ceiling is like telling someone they can drink as much as they want and later preventing them from using the restroom. Maybe it wasn’t that good of a metaphor but my point is, politics all over the world have a mechanism to stop governments from spending more – it’s called budget. During the budget negotiation is when you tell a government to stop drinking. If you allow it to go to the water fountain there’s no way back – either it’s going to pee on its pants or it’s going to implode.

Sure, sometimes the political calendar doesn’t make this process linear but that’s part of the democratic process. Plus, political hypocrisy never prevented those who approved the budget to come later claim they can’t raise the debt ceiling. So I question, why are we rushing into this kind of process? Do we really want to put up this kind of show every year or so? I guess politics can be that cynic and it’s sad.

Image: scottchan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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I’ve been on a plane and offline for the last 16h and as a result I missed the reactions to Amazon’s mega announcement of the $199 Fire plus a $79 e-reader. However, I know there is an obvious question everyone is asking: is the Fire a legit threat for the iPad? The early reactions I read either left the question unanswered or dismissed the Fire as a contender in the “grown-up” tablet space. Let me say this upfront: the Kindle Fire is the biggest threat the iPad has faced (granted, the competition so far has set the bar pretty low) and I wouldn’t be surprised if the tablet war became a thing of two – Apple and Amazon.

Those who dismiss the Fire as a competitor because it’s a different type of device (smaller, cheaper, less features), I’d like to remind you Steve Ballmer’s words right after the iPhone launched. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I strongly recommend you to watch the video. It’s one of those moments that would force most CEOs to resign, except apparently Steve Ballmer.

Let me elaborate on the last paragraph. The problem with looking at a market from a feature standpoint is that you’ll miss the next big threat. This is a statement, not a hypothesis. You know the famous Ford statement “if I'd ask customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse”. Feature focus will have you looking at incremental innovation and will make you miss the fast train that will run over you. Recently examples show it: Netflix broke the video rental market, not Blockbuster (and Blockbuster didn’t see it), Zipcar is disrupting the rental car business (and the car industry?), not the low-cost rental car company, the iPad is disrupting Microsoft’s Windows/Office business, not OSX or Linux or some other OS, and the original example, the clunky reception-challenged unable-to-message iPhone changed the whole wireless communications business, not some feature-packed phone. Clients don’t really care about features, they care about their needs and how you’re helping them.

The Fire is a contender and a very serious threat, not just to Apple who has the quasi monopoly of the tablet market, but especially to all those trying to survive the whole tablet wave (hello Microsoft?). Here’s why.

1. Hardware/Content Integration. Apple showed the way – you know what beats free? Easy. Users weren’t willing to trade Naspter for expensive CDs but they embraced ¢99 songs as long as they were at the distance of a click and immediately available on their mp3 player. I’m not a fan of walled gardens but they work and Amazon is in a privileged position. The Fire comes with seamless integration with Amazon’s e-books ("Earth’s biggest bookstore"), songs, movies, series.  Plus, they already have you credit card, so all you need to do is to click on the “Buy” button and voila, you can immediately enjoy your purchase. Apple is ages away from being a contender in the e-book space and Amazon is on par or almost in the music and movie space.

2. The Ecosystem. The tablet app world is iPad’s kingdom – Android apps for tablets suck because so far the hardware hasn’t received any decent traction. How do you beat that? With a $199 device. At this price point, there is no question that the Fire will sell like crazy and that will lure developers to churn out apps for Android. A more attractive Android ecosystem will probably hurt Amazon but it will mostly hurt Apple as it will entice manufacturers  (what else are they going to do, webOS?) and create a reinforcing loop around the ecosystem. And by the way, Amazon App Store will be there to help you navigate an increasingly complex app world – with seamless integration with their hardware.

3. Vision. Everyone else’s strategy seems to be to copy whatever Apple is doing – with a 6-month to 2-year lag (4 years if you’re based in Finland). Ask RIM, Nokia, and Microsoft how that plays out. Amazon is so far the other visionary in this space. If you believe, as I do, that we’re entering a post-PC era, this is a huge advantage.

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Entrepreneurs get often a lot of crap for not being innovative enough. It goes like “I don’t want to hear about another mobile application, I want real radical innovation”, and then they go on a rant about how entrepreneurs used to be so much more creative and think bigger. For some reason some now feel the need to include Facebook or Twitter in there, and I wonder how many of those thought Facebook or Twitter were so radical when they were created. I would guess not many because neither one was radically innovative although they were game changers.

I don’t think entrepreneurs were more or less creative than they are now and I definitely don’t think innovation was more disruptive 20 years ago than it is now. The problem is lack of perspective. It’s easy to look back and say “Wow! The Internet was such a great radical invention that dramatically changed the world”, and although the general concept is correct, the actual statement is completely false. The Internet would be a lot different if it wasn’t for the WWW, which was genius but not as radical as you might think. And the WWW wouldn’t be what it is today if it wasn’t for the dot-com boom and companies like Google, Amazon, AOL, eBay, Salesforce and many others that changed the way we do business, consume information, store data, etc.

Take the iPhone example. There’s no much radical innovation about it. You take a 2000 Palm (you should know by now that I’m a big fan of the original Palm concept), add better design, finger moves and a tightly controlled ecosystem and boom! iPhone. However, the iPhone was a disruptive innovation, especially for the wireless industry. For years the wireless industry had been trying to find the holy grail that would increase ARPU (average revenue per user). In 2006 ARPU was the key metric for wireless carriers as penetration was reaching a cap (in Europe most countries had above 100% penetration of wireless accounts) and the only way to increase revenue was by having each user to spend more. However the industry was increasingly competitive and mature and, as a consequence, ARPU was declining. Carriers tried everything: text messages, ringtones, MMS, games, you name it. The belief in 2006 was that ARPU wouldn’t increase until network speed was faster and people could watch video and make video calls. And now we know that won’t be a reality until next year or even 2013. But in the meantime data ARPU increased from $5 in 2005 to $20 2011. That’s 26% CAGR for a mature industry. That was the iPhone effect. The iPhone made us consume data through apps. How? By providing a better user experience and creating an ecosystem that allowed other people to come up with ideas to improve our mobile experience. There is nothing radical about the first iPhone or the apps but it was a major game changer.

I could go on with a list of examples of non-disruptive innovation that dramatically changed our lives but that would probably be tedious and actually wouldn’t give you a full perspective of how small incremental innovations change the way we live. My younger brother (we’re 8 years apart) had a completely different experience in school than the one I had. He’s born in the Google age so he never had to visit a library or consult an encyclopedia to write school papers. The difference between him and I is the 90s dot-com boom and a bunch of incremental improvements that together radically changed the way we access information and transformed a crippled fairly useless WWW into a de facto world wide web.

If you think about how you access information today, it’s amazing how most of the experience comes from small incremental improvements, probably in the form of apps. You don’t use real maps anymore because your phone has GPS (fairly old  technology by the way) and maps, you check your email on your phone, reserve a table at a restaurant, take photos on the go, sometimes you even think how it was possible to live without apps, let alone without a cell phone. It’s quite amazing and it’s a product of continuous small advances from people who thought they could improve your experience a little more, just like Google did when they looked at other search engines.

I’m not saying that radical disruptive innovation doesn’t happen. It does but a lot less frequently than you might think. Next time you think about that big innovation that changed your life, think better and try to check how many steps it took to make it happen and how radical each of those steps were. Probably not much.

Image: maple / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Every time I try to register a domain name I come across the same problem - dozens and dozens of domain names that are taken with no apparent purpose other than blocking other people from getting them and maybe make some money out of it. And every time I rationalize, “It’s a free market, anyone can do it, they got there first”. This time around I even measured the ratios (see below).

However, this is not a free market. It’s actually a regulated market, where an official entity grants you the rights to a piece of real estate that only you can use. In the case of .com domains, that contract has no strings attached, which means that anyone can buy whatever they want for whatever purpose they want. 

The result is uncountable domain names that have no real content attached. In my country we say “either you do it or you get out of the way”, which the Americans brilliantly summarized in one word - cockblock (in the rare case you haven’t heard about it, you can check the definition here http://brnd.ws/rpqZSH). The vast majority of these domain hogs have no intention of ever building anything on that real estate. They just got there first and don’t want to get out of the way.

This reminds me an episode that happened to me when I was a kid. It was summer time and I thought a good way to make some extra money was to sell lemonade at the intersection close to my house. This intersection had a lot of traffic going by and long lines during rush hour, and it was summer and hot. I sold 2 jars in just a few minutes so I went back home to make more and come back to business. To my surprise, when I got back I had 3 bigger kids waiting for me to “inform me” that that intersection was “theirs” and I did not hold “rights” to sell anything there. Were they selling anything? No. But apparently they got there first and thought that was good enough.

I don’t even care much about this issue. At the end of the day I always come up with a new stupid name that no one has remembered to register yet. But that doesn’t mean it’s not annoying or wrong. If you’re buying the rights to a piece of real estate and then just sit there preventing others from doing something productive with it, you’re just being a parasite. And if you think you did something productive by coming up with those domain names, I’ll tell you that if my job was to register “interesting” domain names I could be ICANN’s best customer. It’s just that I have better things to do.

PS. The stats for my latest search were the following. Out of 200 names I tried (excluding obvious ones that I knew would be taken), 80% (157) were taken. Of those, only 9% had content and another 7% had advertisement (parked domain with no real content). The remaining (131) had zero content. In this search process, I registered 5 domains that I have no intention to use (and as a result will let expire). If you ever come across one of these and want them to build something, I’m happy to give them away.

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Another post, another prediction, another take on a tech giant. It’s possible that in a few years when I revisit this I’m going to think it was the stupidest thing I’ve ever said, like when in 2000 I predicted that Pocket PC was going to fail (which it did) and Palm would be the king of mobile platforms (wow!). I’m actually mildly proud of that one as iOS mimicked a bunch of good things Palm had – monotasking, fool-proof navigation, developer ecosystem. And it’s about Apple that I want to talk about, particularly about one key feature where 2000 Palm and current Apple are dramatically different – openness.

I was thinking about this when last week I was looking for a tasklist software for my Mac. Several months ago I decided I was giving up on Mac Mail. It happened that I also migrated all my domains to Google Apps so I could either use gmail or a better email client. I finally chose the latter and started using Sparrow (awesome email client in case you’re looking for one). But Sparrow was lucky that I had the chance to play with it on a friend’s laptop before actually buying it. Otherwise I would have picked Gmail web client, which is better than most email clients and it’s free. The thing is, there is no way I’m going to pay $10 for an email client before I try it out. It’s not about the money, it’s about the idea of paying without trying. The problem is that Sparrow bought into Apple’s policy and doesn’t allow a trial download.

So when last week I decided to pick a tasklist software that could integrate with my other productivity tools, I was faced with the same problem. After reading a bunch of reviews, I made a shortlist of applications to try. The problem? Some of them were exclusively sold through the Apple Store and I couldn’t give it a try before buying. As a user I still had a lot of options as fortunately not every developer has yet stuck to Apple’s exclusivity. But it worries me that Apple is trying to build the same ecosystem for OS X as it did for the iOS – if you want to build an app, you have to comply with Apple’s rules and sell exclusively through the App Store. It’s going to be a lot harder to build that ecosystem for OS X as there’s a stronger legacy and users won’t easily give up on their freedom to download software from wherever they want, but Apple’s intentions seem very clear.

The problem with the walled garden that Apple is building is that is doomed to fail. I know it sounds like heresy but no walled garden has ever survived to openness and freedom. This is not a tech issue; it’s a social one. We (humans) don’t like walled gardens. Between perfection and freedom, we will always choose the latter. I don’t know if Apple thinks it’s better than any previous giant but no giant is big enough or good enough to fail. Everyone thought that AOL’s walled garden was rock solid. If in 1994 of 1995 you criticized AOL you’d be called insane. Is AOL even relevant these days? In 1998 we were afraid we would have to live under Microsoft’s tech dictatorship. Today that sounds laughable.

It looks like Apple is trying to stretch the borders of its kingdom to unthinkable limits and that is bad for innovation, and therefore for the end user. The limitations of Apple’s policy are already visible. If you’re a developer, don’t you want your users to download a free trial before buying your product? I do. Don’t you want to invite a select group of users to your beta? I do and 100 is not enough. Don’t you want to have the freedom to choose different price strategies? I do but it took Apple years and plenty of complaints until they allowed any sort of subscription models.

History shows that walled gardens don’t work and that’s why I say Apple’s walled garden is doomed. I don’t know how it’s going to happen (competitor? Apple changing its rules?) or when it’s going to happen but I’m positive it’s going to happen. So if I were you, I’d keep an eye on open platforms (HTML5?) and be ready to change rapidly. Just in case.

Image: Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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You got to give Google credit for sparking an intense debate about the state of social networks, and boy is it interesting! If you haven’t followed the discussion, please check at the end of this post a quick summary of the most interesting opinions with links to the original posts.

I’m not going to get into every single aspect of this discussion but I’ll tell you why I think Google+ can’t succeed in its current form, despite the fact that I’ll be posting this on G+ (and FB and TW) and the 10+ million users they've already pilled up.

1. G+ is not disruptive. True, the circles is a cool feature that generated a lot of buzz but it gets old quickly (for me it was after 3 days) and it’s not a real innovation. The problem is that G+ hasn’t disrupted the social network space, therefore giving me zero incentive to switch my entire network over to their platform. I already have 2 windows opened for facebook and twitter (or tweetdeck for that purpose) so why would I want a third one with nothing new to offer? I still think Google is in an enviable position to disrupt this space. They have access to all my email, contacts, photos, blog content, and a lot can be done with that (like automatic circles?). But it hasn’t and as a result I’ll keep using Twitter and Facebook and will keep G+ on the background just in case.

2. G+ feed is not efficient. The problem is that G+ is trying to be Twitter and Facebook at the same time and ends up being less efficient than either one. You can’t beat Twitter’s lean feed without becoming Twitter, and Facebook feed reads better. Plus I don’t follow people I don’t know on Facebook so that limits the size of my feed. Sure, I do have circles to limit the size of my feed but will I ever use those? I already feel I created too many circles and it’s impossible to keep track of who’s where after just 2 weeks. Plus I haven’t gone back to moving squares into circles since the first few days. I think there’s a UI problem that needs to be addressed (this is Google after all) but the problem is more fundamental than that. I use Twitter for broadcast content (to and from people that I may or may not know) and Facebook to connect with people that I know. I have that very clear and I know exactly when to use one or the other. By mixing both G+ blurs its use case and makes it harder for me to know when/how to use it. I don’t think the social network space is a zero-sum game (I use both FB and TW daily) but I don’t think that combining all in one is the solution.

3. Circles are not about privacy as they are about spam. G+ tells us that privacy matters, and that’s why we have circles. But does it really matter? And do circles really help me with that? We had this discussion when we first started Piictu – should the content be public or private? Will people care? It’s obvious that people are increasingly comfortable with exposing their life in public, especially the <25-year-old segment. To me the problem of friends groups is more about spam than it is about content privacy. I definitely don’t want to spam all my followers with something that’s directed at a group and I use email for that. I can see how G+ might want to be the replacement for email but that’s not clear and, by the way, Katango does a much better job at joining my friends in logical message groups. I’m skeptical that in the social network age we can control the privacy of the content we share and I think G+ is transmitting its users a false sense of control over who sees what, which can backfire. It’s me being skeptical but I’ve seen too many backdoors on Facebook to believe G+ will do any better. I think circles should be more attached to my email groups and less to privacy.

My point is, I think G+ has great features but its use case is unclear right now. I’m sure a lot of people will just switch from Facebook and/or Twitter (this one less likely, I believe) but in my opinion that won’t make G+ a winner. In any case, what G+ accomplished is already a win for the end user as I think this will drive innovation across all platforms.

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This is a quick summary of the recent discussion with links to some of the most interesting posts:

- Circles, Lists and Organization. Can we, should we, and will we organize our friends online? G+ circles is its most distinct feature and the most debated one. You can start with Paul Adams, who’s been arguing in favor of digitally grouping friends for a long time. Then read Kevin Cheng’s brilliant analysis of Google circles, which I subscribe entirely, and Fred Wilson’s follow up about implicit and explicit groups.

- Plain feed, curated feed, edited feed. Should the feed reflect exactly your social graph (a la G+), should it be curated (Twitter) or should it be edited based on some algorithm (Facebook top news). Few people are siding with Facebook. Mike Elgan has a great post on Facebook’s approach and why he thinks it’s ultimately wrong, and Tom Anderson (MySpace Tom) wrote another great post on algorithm-based feeds.

- Feed density and content. Twitter’s revolution came in the form of 140 characters. Sure it’s limiting but you can’t argue it’s super efficient. For me it meant the death of RSS and online news altogether. I now get it all on Twitter because it’s fast and I can quickly scan through the most recent posts. Facebook allows richer content but naturally less content for the same space. G+ offers even less content for the same amount of screen. Plus Facebook and G+ have likes, +1, comments. Twitter has none of those. Opinions vary. Robert Scoble is a big fan of Google+ and its feed, Mike Monteiro not as much, and MG Siegler thinks Scoble is wrong.

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A lot has been said recently about how you should go about finding a co-founder, and more specifically a technical co-founder. I think the idea of “earning a co-founder” is good as it is the very structured process of co-founder dating that Elizabeth Knopf explains. However, 2 questions remain unanswered after I read this: Should you have a co-founder? And once you find a co-founder, how do you know he/she is the one?

These questions are way more important than the whole co-founder dating problem because they’re more fundamental and have a long-term impact in your startup. The thing with co-foundership is that it’s such a personal decision that you can find a million different opinions and all of them can be right. In most cases, people are driven by their personal experience and think that what worked with them should work with you. I’m not sure that’s always the case but I’ll tell you what I learned from my personal experience and you decide whether that’s valuable or not.

1. Should you have a co-founder?

There are 4 reasons why you might be considering finding a co-founder

1.  In the short term, it’s cheaper to have a co-founder than to hire someone to do the job. I hear way too many times people saying they’re looking for a co-founder because they don’t have the money to pay someone to do the job, the job being whatever: coding, designing, selling. If this is the only reason why you want a co-founder, it’s a wrong one. I would advise you to read the remaining 3 and think again. It can’t just be about the money.
2. The startup emotional roller-coaster is easier to get through when you have someone by your side that can reassure you about the soundness of your business and the possibilities of success. Let’s be honest, it’s great having someone telling you “this is going to work out” when you start questioning the assumptions, and family and friends don’t do the trick. But a mentor can, or someone else who you respect and know will always be honest with you.
3. You want a balanced team with people equally incentivized to see the company succeed. Most likely you don’t have all the skills needed to build a successful startup. Dave McClure says the perfect team needs a hacker, a hustler and a designer. I think people can combine some of those skills or even all three of them, in which case the problem will probably be time. Will you be able to be all three of them efficiently? And if not, do you want a co-founder or do you want to hire someone to fill in? That will depend on how crucial you think that role is. If it’s key and you want someone as incentivized as you, then you need a co-founder. If not or you think it’s easily replaceable, then maybe you don’t need one.
4. You want someone at your level that can challenge you and help you take the company to a whole new level. To me this is the most compelling argument to have a co-founder. When you hire a person, it doesn’t matter what your style is and what you tell her, she’ll always be an employee. A co-founder will challenge your premises and that will help you shape your idea and build a more solid business. Of course, you have to make sure your co-founder is able to do that. You can find advisors and mentors that can help you with this process but it’s not going to be the same. Advisors and mentors don’t have the time to think about your business in detail and won’t be there for all the important decisions you’ll have to make. You might be able to do it by yourself, there are plenty of examples of successful solo entrepreneurs, but please do think about this aspect before making a final decision.

2. How do you know the person you just found is the one?

So you went through the whole co-founder dating process and you think you found the right person. But how can you be sure? The right answer is you can never be sure but there are a few questions you can talk about to dramatically increase the probability of success.

Some people will tell you one way to solve this is to give a minority share to your co-founder. That way you can always pull the plug and go by yourself or with someone else. You can read Mark Suster’s opinion as he argues in favor of that solution. I’m not dogmatic about this but I do think that when you “hire” a co-founder you might create an unleveled partnership where it’s harder to challenge your assumptions because it’s “your” business. Again, to me this is the most important aspect of having a co-founder so I’d be very careful to make sure you have a true partnership.

Other than that, here are a set of questions you HAVE to make sure you talk about with your potential co-founder before you seal your agreement:

• Equity split. This is an obvious one but for some reason a lot of people postpone this conversation. As I said, I’m not dogmatic about the split but make sure you discuss this early in the process and everyone is comfortable with the final number.
• Vesting – things change, shit happens, and sometimes people decide to move on. It doesn’t matter why it happens as long as you make sure that you have a vesting calendar in place. The last thing you want is to have people leaving the company after 6 months with a huge chunk of equity, which will leave you looking for a co-founder with no equity in hand. Make sure everyone is on the same page.
• Expectations, goals, exit, pull the plug. If you read a lot of Mashable and Tech Crunch you’ll hear about companies being sold for dozens of millions or even hundreds of millions. It’s easy to be dragged into the perception that you should never accept any less than that but the truth is that most companies fail, and a lot of the successful ones either survive with meager revenues or get acquired for a small sum. So it’s important to manage expectations and set personal goals. When are you going to pull the plug? What is an acceptable exit, how long are you willing to stick around? These are awkward discussions to have early on but you better have them before you start than having to face those issues later.
• Salary. Are you going to have a salary? If so how much and when? What triggers a salary bump? This is usually an easier question to have but an important one.
• Pivot or not to pivot. This is another awkward conversation but you should talk about how willing you are to pivot and what could trigger that.

I’m sure you should be talking of other issues but from my experience these are the ones that can cause serious trouble if you don’t talk about it early on. With all this in mind, you’re ready for co-founder dating.

Image: Michal Marcol / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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The learn startup concept is quite attractive and simple to understand but people like easy slogans with 1 or 2 words, and with the lean startup movement came the Fail Fast movement, which for the most part is an ill-conceived idea. According to most people talking about fail fast, or more precisely fail fast fail cheap, you learn from failures (which is true) and in the beginning you know very little about your customers (which is kind of true) so you shouldn’t spend much time building a thoughtful business plan as most likely it will be wrong (which is a wrong approach). So build something quickly, put it in the market, learn from your customer’s feedback, and if it’s a complete failure you haven’t spent much money and can quickly move to something different. Of course, the cheap part depends on who’s looking at it – I’m sure an investor will never think you failed cheaply. With the fail fast movement came the Pivot movement. You can’t go around entrepreneurs without hearing people talking about pivoting, usually along with some examples of companies that successfully pivoted from a total failure to an extraordinary business.

You can see how the fail-fast-pivot movement takes some good concepts from the lean startup idea and twist them into something completely wrong. The result is a dangerous one as it encourages entrepreneurs to dismiss an idea after a failure and clashes with another fundamental feature of entrepreneurship – perseverance. There is a fine line between perseverance and obstinacy but I can tell you that the first few failures are not that line and unfortunately I’m seeing more and more people pivoting into a totally different business when they see no traction after a few iterations. When you pivot too much, you’ll often be back to the start position.

I like the fail fast approach when is correctly implemented (aka lean-startup-like) and this is how entrepreneurs should be thinking about it without going crazy pivoting all over the place:

1. Do your homework before you start. It’s true that when you start you don’t know exactly what your customers looks like but you can try to understand them better before you start. Interview people, do market research, talk to people in a similar space – there are tools to understand your customer before you start so you won't be completely blind. Also, good research can tell you not to start an idea before you try to fail.

2. Build a plan. You will likely break your plan after a few months (damn! even after a few weeks) but that doesn’t make it useless. If you don’t have a plan you can’t measure success. Build a plan, adjust it as you go, and learn from those adjustments, but have some guide to tell you where you should be headed.

3. Iterate (and fail) but don’t forget your long-term goal. It’s easy to get lost in the details and see every failure as the end of the world. Every time you iterate and your clients tell you they don’t like something, step back and think about your long-term goal. Why are you building the product? How does that failure affect that goal? Often times you’re going crazy on a feature that is not that relevant for your end goal.

4. Before you pivot, think if the problem is your idea or your approach. Are you targeting the right demographic? Are you not reading your customers correctly? If you have some successful customers, talk to them and see why they like your product. Learn from that and see if you can replicate that to a larger audience. Exhaust your idea before you move on to a totally different one.

5. Fail respectfully. This only applies if you raise money. If you do raise money, don’t go to your investors saying, “I failed cheap”. Be respectful to your investors, tell them what you tried to make things work, guide them through your thinking process and the reasons that made you shut down the business. Listen to their feedback. Don’t be an uncaring asshole.

I know a lot of people will think this advice is too conservative but it’s intentionally so. I don’t think you should build a 100-page business plan and insist on your idea indefinitely but when I hear the craze around fail fast and pivoting I feel people are just forgetting that a startup is first and foremost a company. A company requires management and hard work.

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I already wrote about how to build an entrepreneurial culture and Portugal has a long way to go until entrepreneurs can be a relevant class. This change won’t happen overnight and we need more than political statements to make it happen.

For years, entrepreneurs have fought an uphill battle due to unnecessary bureaucracy, a dysfunctional judicial system, lack of VC money, and excessive government weight in the economy among others. If we exclude some measures to reduce bureaucracy, nothing has been done to solve these issues. As a result, nothing has substantially changed to promote real entrepreneurship.

My fear is that politicians think that an empty statement will make any difference. It won’t. I feel the situation is changing. Mostly because of the dire economic situation, more people are considering starting their own business, and as I said before, we should take advantage of momentum, wherever it comes from, to promote entrepreneurship. If a domestic economic recession combined with an overheated VC industry abroad can give you that momentum, take it and do something useful with it. Go fix what’s wrong, get yourself out of the way. But please, don’t just say empty words.

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I’m going to take a break from being a bitter motherfu**er who criticizes everything to actually complement an idea I recently heard about. Disclaimer: I was not asked to promote this nor do I have any sort of participation on this idea.

Talking to a friend sometime ago, I heard of this program that was sponsoring Portuguese early stage ventures to come to Silicon Valley for 3 months and learn something new. I thought the idea was smart but I lacked more detail and finally a few days ago I managed to talk to Torben Rankine, who runs the show here in the Bay Area.

The program is called Global Strategic Innovation Accelerators (I’m out of breath!) and the URL is longer than my Firefox address bar. Otherwise the idea is fairly simple. Every quarter, 3 companies are picked to come to Silicon Valley to spend 3 months at the Plug & Play Tech Center and interact with the Bay Area’s entrepreneurial community and ecosystem. The companies can have different goals but they do have a goal they’re trying to accomplish during the 3 months. The program sponsors part of the expenses although companies have to pay a small fee and living expenses.

The application form is short and to the point and the whole process is fairly transparent. As you can guess, I would change a bunch of the program’s details but overall this is a great idea for a number of reasons:

1. Companies have to pay. Everything free is deemed worthless so the fact that companies actually have to pay, even a small amount, ensures that whoever is applying is serious about it.

2.  Immersion in the Silicon Valley community. If you want to learn entrepreneurship, you have to live it, talk to founders and investors, see it with your own eyes, and the SF Bay Area is arguably the best place to learn entrepreneurship.

3. No bullshit. This is not an academic program – it’s not about listening to a bunch of people telling you how to do stuff. There’s a small training component but this is you, your idea and your goal, and it’s up to you to take the most out of it.

In brief, what I like about this idea is that it’s simple yet powerful and can produce long-term impact. It’s not the typical government-run ultra-bureaucratic free program that treats you like you’re 5 years old and makes you fill 100-page application forms and in the end requires a 50-page report. As I said, I would still change a few things and make it leaner, less formal and find a shorter name and URL. But that’s me.

Putting it together and running it is a great achievement and I hope this gets some deserved publicity back home. And of course, it’s always good to meet interesting countrymen and discuss ideas in Portuguese. If you’re around, there are enough buttons around this website that will allow you to reach me.

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The argument was that the lack of AA entrepreneurs is a vicious circle. If there aren’t many AA entrepreneurs it’s less likely to see a success story happen, and therefore less likely that a role model will emerge. As a result, when an AA kid is dreaming about his future it’s unlikely he’s thinking of becoming an entrepreneur.

A similar problem happens back home in Portugal. Much has been said and done to promote entrepreneurship in Portugal and so far everything has failed. True, the VC industry is practically inexistent and the market is small, but that’s not the entire story. You can still bootstrap, and companies don’t have to limit themselves to the domestic market.

The lack of role models, however, is a huge barrier. There are not enough entrepreneurs that I can look at and say, “I want to be like him”. Most of the (few) stories of “the person who started with an idea and became a millionaire” involve some sort of shady business and/or practice.

I believe we have a deal flow problem (i.e. not enough stories to tell about) but it’s possible that we’re just not publicizing properly the good stories that do exist. That would be a much easier problem to solve.

How to solve this problem? As usual, there’s no short-term solution. If we do have success stories and real role models, we should be publicizing those, inviting those people to schools to talk about why/how they became entrepreneurs. If we don’t have many of those stories, use the few we have and over-publicize them. I know we have some. Go beyond that, use stories and role models from elsewhere. It might be less effective but it’s better than nothing. Create an aura around the entrepreneur in a way that people will want to become one.

I’m not saying that entrepreneurs will take Portugal out of the hole it’s in now, but in a country so dependent on government spending, having a strong entrepreneurial community would help a lot.

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Bubbles explained like you’re a four-year-old

Let’s first go to Bubble Economics 101. A bubble, which is a process, happens when assets are valued at an unreasonably higher price when compared to their intrinsic value. In other words, you’re selling chicken liver for the price of foie gras (I love food analogies!). A bubble is the result of an abundance of cash, scarcity of assets, or a combination of the two. A bubble is also a vicious circle since every time you buy something for an unreasonable price you’re taking one asset out of the market and injecting cash into that same market. In brief, a bubble is a legal-ish Ponzi scheme and you don't want to be the one without a chair when the music stops.

The big problem of calling something a bubble is that you need to know what the intrinsic value of an asset is and that is a very tricky question because we like to rationalize. For example, you know what the price of bread is so it should be easy to spot a bread bubble if tomorrow you go to the bakery and they’re charging $50 for a baguette. But if this process occurs in the course of 4 years in the context of a shortage of wheat, we’ll rationalize it. If you don’t believe me, just look at gas prices. There are bubbles happening around us all the time but only a very small number of those actually get big enough to become relevant. And yes! The dating scene is very prone to bubbles. 

False positives

Back to THE Bubble, you can see how evaluating the intrinsic value of startup assets is really hard – companies are private, we know very little about their business and we mostly know the good news (or you're facebook's PR department). But say we had access to all the numbers, would that help? The intrinsic value of a company is a function of future earnings and we’re not exactly talking about large stable businesses. You can imagine that anyone who claimed Google was overvalued at IPO is right now hitting her head against the closest wall. Hit it hard, but who could tell? Would you have predicted MySpace implosion 5 years ago? Hell no!

Or would you? That's when we get to the problem of type I errors or false positives. There is always someone predicting bubbles, economic crisis and the end of the world (BTW, it’s tomorrow so if those guys are right someone should give them a prize in the after life). You know the story, every time there’s a bubble or crisis, a few stories come out of “the guy” who saw it coming. What nobody asks is how many times that guy saw it coming and it never came. If you’re not a false positive kind of person (usually that comes with high doses of pessimism), trying to predict a bubble is like buying the winning lottery ticket. And if someone starts arguing with “the fundamentals”, please say out and loud “Bullshit!”

It is not a bubble until it bursts

When finally the bubble bursts, everyone saw it coming, and that is when the false positives and false negatives all gather around beers talking about how obvious it was and how “the fundamentals” just didn’t make sense. That is the moment when the bubble really happens! It’s when it bursts.

So you have three options. You can be the bitter let-me-hide-in-my-bunker-everytime-I-hear-armageddon false positive, the condescending it-was-so-obvious-that-I-never-told-anyone-about-it false negative, or you can tell those two to screw themselves, ride the wave, and raise money as early as you can. You know, once the bubble bursts it’s too late to say, “I saw it coming”.

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For those who have no idea what this means, most wines from Rioja are blends although Tempranillo is the most prominent variety. Outside Europe people don’t understand blends because it’s too hard to explain. It’s easier to say ‘I like Cab, Pinot and Merlot’, which can apply to several different countries, than ‘I like Rioja, Penedes, Umbria, Veneto and Alsace’ to speak of 5 wine regions in Europe (there are dozens). So if you’re not Bordeaux, the easier way to export is to promote a variety and then allow a bunch of wines from that country to jump in the varietal bandwagon.

Spanish producers have identified this trend and have been promoting Tempranillo as their variety of choice. Then regions like Rioja use that brand to produce varietals that are roughly the same as the blends but with a more consumer-friendly label.

What about Portugal? Not so much. Let’s jump into the facts. Portugal is the 7th-8th largest wine producer in the world. It should be a large exporter given the size of the domestic market (10 million people). In addition, it has the world’s top selling wine – Mateus – and an internationally recognized brand – Port. Despite this solid base, Portugal is usually no. 9-10 in the top wine exporters and mostly thanks to Port – you can hardly find regular Portuguese wine outside Portugal. Why? You can blame the lack of consumer focus. I keep hearing producers in Portugal complaining that the consumer needs to be educated, that you shouldn’t make wine easier to drink just because the consumer wants it, or name a wine after a variety just because it’s good for marketing. They sound like the guy who’s been running his business for 4 years with no success but keeps complaining that users don’t get it. If they don’t get it after 4 years, you should change your product.

As an entrepreneur, this is something that particularly pisses me off. When businesses don’t look at the consumer as the ultimate reason why they’re in business, they’re doomed to fail. As a company, I exist because of my consumers. Consumers could not care less if I exist or not.

P.S. If you want to know my opinion, I think Portugal should promote Touriga as the variety of choice – it’s Portuguese, it’s easy to identify, and most producers are using it anyway.

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This is my stove burner theory and I hope the parallel with dating is obvious enough. Now that I’m back to the dating game (for investors, don’t get me wrong), I feel the need to get back to my stove. If this lead looks promising, turn that burner up and the other ones just a tad down so I don’t get burned. Just like with dating and cooking, it’s hard to articulate what’s too much and too little but I feel that after a while adjusting I’ll get the feel of it.

Just like with dating, every new encounter can be a hit or miss – but you’ll never figure that out if you don’t try. Just like with dating, you can be setup and that will likely improve your chances. And yes, just like with dating, you can be left with blue balls, it’s just part of the game.

And now I have go back to my stove, I smell something.

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