Thisisgoingtobebig.com

Be the last team standing

Charlie O'Donnell — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:30:20 +0000

An amazing catch setting up a 4th quarter come from behind victory against a team we weren’t supposed to beat.

Where have a seen this before?

The Giants did it again, winning their fourth title in my lifetime.

Now I know how Yankees fans feel—except that this year and in ‘07, these were teams that were counted out before they really got started.

It made me think about teams and confidence. This weekend, I judged the Mashery API hackathon and the Startup Weekend EDU edition. I got to watch teams come together in a short period of time to achieve success.

Confidence, especially when you’re the underdog, is empowering. It makes people on your team want to work together to achieve a common goal. The Giants were clearly confident going into this game due to their late season momentum. They felt like they deserved to be there and not like a 9-7 team that barely made the playoffs.

You could tell which Startup Weekend and Hackathon teams gelled during the weekend and came together when it counted. Those are the types of teams I want to back as an investor—because it’s not how you start or what you look like on paper.

Too often, raising money is a proxy for success. Raising money is winning your division—but come playoff time, it really doesn’t matter much. The teams that come together on the same page win—not necessarily the 13 win teams or the teams with the $13 million in the bank.

I will hopefully be at the parade on Tuesday. You can win VIP tickets here:

The City will conduct a public giveaway for 250 winners (500 tickets) to the ceremony in City Hall Plaza on Monday, February 6th from 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM through www.nyc.gov and 311 by phone or text by sending a text message to 311692. People will also be able to access the entry form through the New York City Mayor’s Office Twitter page.

So stop counting wins and dollars raised. Go out there and be the last team standing.

See you around this week. I’ll be speaking at the Find a Cofounder event tonight and Ultralight on Thursday.

Anatomy of an Innovation-friendly School

Charlie O'Donnell — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:00:44 +0000

University research is a big business for many schools. It certainly worked out pretty well when Stanford licensed the search technology that Larry and Sergei had been working on back to them at Google. They netted more on that deal than Fordham has in it's whole endowment (but still, go Rams!).

On top of that, most of a school's major donors are likely to be entrepreneurs in some way. You just don't wind up with $25 million to name a dorm unless you've gotten equity upside in something.

Throw in the Zuckerberg at Harvard story--or rather Harvard "losing" Facebook and you wind up with a lot of schools wanting to figure out how the next big business can wind up on campus.

I've been thinking a lot about what an innovation-friendly school looks like and have a few thoughts--and it doesn't just mean building labs or creating more flexible IP licensing schemes. More and more startups are getting built without relying on University research--because hard technology is rarely the barrier to innovation these days. The challenges are more business challenges and design challenges--so schools need to rethink how they interact with innovation communities if it's not going to only be through commercialization:

Recognize that creating a founder should be a secondary goal. I think it's actually easier to create founders by increasing the number of people a) exposed to the startup scene, b) teaching the right skills like sales, marketing, software development, etc that enable people to get things off the ground and c) getting people motivated to really understand their industries of choice, and to be leaders in those fields. Give them that and they'll decide on their own to be a founder.
Support the student club ecosystem. Student clubs can be very powerful connections into the startup and innovation world. They have flexibility on programming, access to space, and can supplement curicculum in a world where official curicculum change takes years. If you had a computer science club, they could be all working on Codeyear together well before any teacher could weave it into their classroom. Unfortunately, most schools make it ridiculously hard for students to start official clubs, making it take, on average, almost a year, maybe more. They don't have great marketing channels to those clubs and the faculty don't advocate for participation as part of your education.
Entrepreneurship education needs hard skills training. Part of me wants to just say that entrepreneurship education needs to be moved out of the business school altogether, but I know that's probably too jarring for most schools to think about. Still, B-school business plan competitions remain the air guitar championships of the startup world--people thinking about and writing about companies they'd like to start instead of actually starting businesses because they have the skills to do so. If you're not matching the students that want to create an online business with computer science students or kids from your design school, you're wasting their time. If anything, the business school students need to figure out what their value add is to a design or software development student. Sales and marketing skills and a huge network of customers, capital, and talent are huge value adds--but I know very few students honing that. Instead, they're focused on "strategy", which lots of makers already have a good starting sense of.
Open your doors. If innovative people can't figure out how to get into the building, you're not going to learn from practicioners how to build successful companies. That means making it easier for meetups and innovation conferences to use your spaces. Schools are in the business of selling their conference space--but I'd argue that giving your space away to the best designers in your city, and encouraging your students to interact with them and attend that event will net you more in the long term than the $5000 someone is paying you to rent the room for the day when they have no synergies to what you want your kids to learn. The conference rental team should quickly switch from trying to "sell" space to trying to offer space to the kinds of people you want to put in front of your students.
Be a community center. The other day, I was at a local school meeting with an academic. The school had plenty of lounges around, so after the meeting, I thought I might hangout to get some work done. The only problem is, the guest wifi needed a password. I actually went through the 20 minute hassel of tracking down the school's IT team to get me one. It was doable, but I'm sure I'm the only person that would have bothered. Does the school really want active investors leaving so soon, or would they rather us be visible in the hallways and lounges. Schools should create co-working areas where startups and other innovative folks from the community can come in and take meetings or work a few hours. They don't have to be big, contrived incubators--just a few couches and maybe a plug or two--and open wifi. This way, instead of sending the next big startup across the street to Starbucks to meet, you invite them in campus, increasing the serendipity factor that a student might run into an entrepreneur or a VC, get funded, or get an internship.
Kick the students out. I don't mean literally, but I do think students need to mix with their professional communities a lot more. It should absolutely be a requirement for any student interested in entrepreneurship to attend local meetups and conferences. If that isn't a requirement of a class, they're simply not going to do it--but they need to in order to build the network that will drive their success.
Kick the faculty out. A lot of schools talk about "access to faculty" as a driver of why startups should involve themselves in school programs, incubators, and competitions. That implies that faculty have something the startups can't get on their own--and it's a power dynamic that I think is changing. Yes, if I'm creating an optical laser, I might need to talk to a PhD, but if I'm doing a data mining startup, a lot of these grad students are hanging out at the Machine Learning Meetup. The faculty should be, too. In fact, outside of Evan Korth and Chris Wiggins, I don't think I've ever run into a faculty member from a local university at any innovation event--that is, other than professionals who come on campus to teach as an adjunct. If you're teaching entrepreneurship, online marketing, design, etc.--anything that will result in innovation--you absolutely need to see and participate in what's going on outside your classroom so that you can bring it back in to your teaching.
Teach students how to fish in their careers. Most small companies will never be big enough to show up at your job fair--and their hiring is mostly opportunistic anyway. Yet, that's where the job growth comes from--small companies. You need to teach your students how to pick an industry, find the 25 most interesting an innovative companies, and create a plan to reach out to make inroads. This doesn't involve resume template training--it involves helping the student become more recruitable through their network and skills. It needs to start earlier and put a much heavier focus on *creating* the right opportunity, not just getting recruited by big companies.
Connect with your alumni better. You undoubtedly have alumni entrepreneurs who are motivated to come back and assist you. It's really meaningful for students to know that they can wind up starting companies or playing leading roles at innovative startups at places that aren't MIT and Stanford. You just need to take the time to find and celebrate the successes of the most innovative alumni you have.

Why being an early stage VC is like being a college football coach

Charlie O'Donnell — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:54:45 +0000

I was listening to a sports call-in show the other morning and the host made an interesting point.

In the NFL, the coaches pick the players. In college, the players pick the coaches.

He tried to generalize and say that's why all the college coaches are the fresh-faced energetic types and why the NFL coaches look like they've been doing nothing but pouring over video at a desk for 90 hours a week with coffee and a donut.

I don't have the stats to prove or disprove that particular point, and I try to avoid generalizations, but what is certainly clear to me that the most important thing in college football as a coach is being able to recruit the talent. You have to be able to walk into someone's house, meet mom and dad, garner trust, and shake hands to close the deal and bring a wary high school kid to your program. If you can't recruit, you're dead--because at the end of the day, the best kids are choosing the schools, not the other way around.

It's the same in venture capital. It's not about stock picking, like in the public markets, where everyone has the same access to opportunities and everyone can buy a stock.

Actually, it's about VC picking. The investors get picked, not the companies. The best opportunities will get funded by someone, and it's the entrepreneur's choice as to who that will be.

Furthermore, you also need to be able to recruit talent. The most important way that you can help a company is to help recruit employee #1, #2, #3, etc... be it a developer, marketer, salesperson, etc. In that case, too, you and your investment are the ones being picked, because the best talent has their choice.

So over and above everything else, things like personality, energy, trust count for just as much as ability to call plays, manage the clock, or pick out the right technology trend. If you can't get the talent, your program is toast.

Ten Tips for Pitching Your Company

Charlie O'Donnell — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:53:54 +0000

1) An investor is taking a meeting with you to confirm or deny a hypothesis they undoubtedly already have about your business. Find out what those are right off the bat by saying something like, "Based on what you know, what interests you about what we're doing so far and what are some of the concerns I can address?" No sense going on and on about the market if being excited about your market is why I asked you to meet me in the first place.

2) Investors will jump around no matter what order your deck is in--be comfortable about it and be able to answer any question at any time. Don't get visibly frustrated if they interrupt.

3) Have offline copies of whatever you're doing, so you can demo using screenshots if you have to.

4) Be able to say what you do in a concise manner, in the pitch, in the opening e-mail: "We do X for Y using Z solution, and that's exciting because there are a billion Ys who currently pay a million dollars a year for that."

5) Be clear about the ask: "We're here to get advice about the following specific three questions." "We're raising 500k to get us launched and a growing userbase." "We're here because we have an offer on the table to sell the company and we're not sure what to do." Don't try to pretend you're not raising.

6) Be honest about your situation. If you can't figure out what grows traffic yet, just say it, because pretending you have growth when the numbers don't look good is even worse. If you made mistakes, say what they are--because otherwise I'll be scratching my head trying to figure out how you spent what you spent to get to this point. Mistakes happen.

7) Know that back of the napkin math of how many people need what you have and why this could be a big business.

8) Persistance is good, but when someone is clearly not going to get there on your deal, figure out what else they can be good for, besides other intros to investors. Most of the time, an investor is going to take a pass, statistically, so have a backup ask--like a contact you know they know who can help you with biz dev. Don't spend a ton of energy on one investor like they're the last investor on the face of the earth.

9) Speed is not a reason to raise money--unless lack of it is hindering basic aspects of your development. Usually, being the fastest one to market isn't necessarily an advantage. Actually, it often makes a company look too nervous about the competition--as if there aren't enough barriers to entry or execution in your market.

10) Know how much time you have for the pitch and stick to it. Don't be halfway through your hour long version before you realize the investor only had 30 minutes. Finish up five or ten minutes early in an hour long meeting and an investor will love you--because they'll have time to think, get coffee, use the bathroom, or make the intro you asked them to.

SOPA's Jane Jacobs Moment

Charlie O'Donnell — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:30:44 +0000

Fifty years ago this year, the New York City Board of Estimate voted down Robert Moses' plan to build a ten-lane elevated highway across lower Manhattan--leveling fourteen blocks along Broome Street in Little Italy and what is now SoHo, as well as the West Village. Jane Jacobs, a community activist, led the community resistance to the highway.

When it was turned down, Assemblyman Louis DeSalvio said in a speech:

"Except for one old man [reference to Robert Moses], I’ve been unable to find anyone of technical competence who is for this so-called expressway. And this old man is a cantankerous, stubborn old man who has done many things which may have, in their time, been good for New York City. But I think it is time for this stubborn old man to realize that too many of his dreams turn out to be nightmares for the city. And this board must realize that if it does not kill this stupid example of bad city planning, that the stench of it will haunt them and this great city for many years to come."

I'm kind of a NYC history wonk. The other night, I went to a great Brooklyn Brainery talk on Moses. The talk brought up these words, which I had heard before, and gave me a new context for them.

The image of the lone, grumpy old man made me think of the supporters of SOPA--old media, entrenched cable companies and Washington bureaucrats who don't know how the internet works. Meanwhile, no one "of technical competence" could be found to support it.

So it collapsed, just like the dreams of Robert Moses' highway.

What's interesting to me, though, is the parallel between how Moses came to power and this bill. Robert Moses got his start as a Parks Commissioner. And really, who doesn't like a park?

In fact, his early work to put parks in the city was pretty popular--especially in an era when NYC wasn't nearly as green as park-friendly as it is now.

Being "pro-park" back then sounds like the words that Chris Dodd wrote today after the blow to SOPA:

"We applaud those leaders in Washington who have chosen to stand with the millions of hard working Americans all across this nation whose livelihoods are threatened by foreign criminal websites designed to steal. "

Pro-park, pro jobs, anti-people stealing using technology. It all sounds pretty good--until you realize that being "pro-park" somehow leads to plowing a ten-lane highway across New York's most vibrant neighborhoods--killing them off the way highways strangled East Tremont in the Bronx and Red Hook in Brooklyn.

How could things get so far? Centralization of power and broad, sweeping, somewhat vague authority. Robert Moses held over a dozen various government appointments at one time, controlling a huge amount of resources and having little to no oversight whatsoever.

Kinda sounds like this bill the big media companies wanted passed doesn't it? That was the problem with PIPA and SOPA. They were vague in their implementation and centralized authority in a system that could be seriously harmed by one, far reaching authority holding too much power.

It's ok. They just want to build some parks and take down some foreign "rogue" websites--and protect jobs. You see, it's really all about language and marketing. Everyone wants a park, everyone loves jobs. That's how it almost passed.

But we, the people... we knew better than and we know better now.

The end of the Lower Manhattan Expressway was the beginning of the end for Robert Moses and I think it may signal the beginning of the end for current content industry. It will have to change. They'll have to invent new business models to reflect our modern world the same way urban planners had to stop thinking of cities as places you drive around in.

A Seed Fund Grows in Brooklyn: Announcing Brooklyn Bridge Ventures

Charlie O'Donnell — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:30:06 +0000

I am ecstatic to announce the creation of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures--my new seed investment fund.

It is the first venture capital fund based in Brooklyn--the city’s most exciting and creative borough. It is home to cool startups like Etsy, Makerbot, Pontiflex, HowAboutWe, Energyhub, and Loosecubes. Gilt Groupe maintains a significant presence there, as does scores of creative agencies and design firms. By some estimates, 50-60% of New York’s startup community lives in Brooklyn--and at Etsy it’s as high as 80%. It has grown to be a dynamic place to build a company--and has the potential to be the very best place in the world to start a technology business. I will be working hard to help it reach that potential, while continuing the work I’ve been doing for NYC’s tech community as a whole for the last seven plus years. I'll be back and forth over the bridge taking meetings all over, but you'll often find me at the new NYU-Poly Incubator in DUMBO where I'll have a desk.

Brooklyn is my home. In fact, I’ve never lived outside the five boroughs. I grew up in Bensonhurst. My dad was a NYC firefighter and my mom worked as a teacher’s aide helping physically challenged students. I went to high school and college on scholarship. Succeeding through the generosity of others is the reason I’ve always wanted to contribute something back to my community. It’s why I teach entrepreneurship at Fordham University and why I find the job of being a venture capitalist so rewarding.

My experience at First Round over the last two years has been amazing from day one--and I thank Josh and the rest of the team for giving me the opportunity to work with them. I got a term sheet out less than 100 days into the job and was lucky enough to get to work with my friend Rob May as a Board Member for my first investment, Backupify. I'm grateful to have also worked with Steve and Jared from GroupMe, Chantel from chloe + isabel, Sean from Salescrunch and Wiley from SinglePlatform. The last year was especially helpful to me in my career development. It not only brought opportunities to work directly with great teams like Philippe and Justin at Refinery29 and Matt and John at Docracy, but I learned a lot more about being a team player, a better board member, and what it takes to build a successful firm.

Every up and coming venture professional thinks about what kind of a firm they would want to build if they could start their own firm. I was no different--and the possibility of doing something on my own has been a long term goal. In fact, it’s what Henry Blodget told me I should do the first time I met him--back in May of 2007 during a pre-Business Insider lunch at Coffee Shop. Josh Kopelman said the same thing to me about a year ago and we’ve talked a lot about firm building in my time at First Round.

It has always been of critical importance to be able to sit across the table from an entrepreneur and believe in my product. Now, I’ll have to work twice as hard to ensure that I can say that about my own firm--that I can believe in the value that I can bring, along with the community and platform that comes with it. I will certainly write more about this in the coming weeks, but there are some key aspects to the way I’d like to conduct business that I’ll be focusing on:

Leading or co-leading seed deals--having enough capital to meet a team at a hackathon, for example, and telling them, “I’m in and you now have a round.” I don’t like the idea of telling an entrepreneur to go get someone else interested and then I’ll be able to commit.
Being the first call--making sure I’m the kind of investor that people feel like they get value out of by going to first, before they have all the answers and way before they have the investor pitch together. I won’t fund everything, but hopefully I can help everyone out who comes to see me.w
Being decisive early--realizing that there will always be risks and choosing to be a part of eliminating them as an investor, not waiting for them to go away.
Adding value--especially around recruiting (I’ve placed over 20 people at startups in the last two years), PR and product management.
The Brooklyn ecosystem. Given that many of the companies I work with don’t even have offices yet, and that many of their founders and future employees live in Brooklyn, I won’t be surprised of the majority of the fund winds up being invested in Brooklyn startups. It’s a great place to build a business--creative, less expensive, flexible, etc. However, my goal is not to geographically limit the fund but to help create and leverage an ecosystem that connects and attracts talent and knowledge in such a way that people all over the city want to be a part of it. I want to erase the barrier to attending a Meetup in Brooklyn and make building here a bigger part of everyone’s consideration set. I’ll fund deals elsewhere for sure, but I hope to convince folks that you won’t want to be elsewhere.

To that end, I'm excited to show you "Made in Brooklyn", a short video about some of the entrepreneurs and companies building in Brooklyn and what attracts them there:

Made In Brooklyn from Brooklyn Bridge Ventures on Vimeo.

I’m looking forward to continuing the dialogue about Brooklyn Bridge Ventures and furthering our community together. I thank everyone who has supported me and the companies I’ve worked with over my ten plus years in venture capital and startups. New York City, more than any other innovation hub, has been built on community and I’m excited about continuing my journey as an inspired participant.

If NYC is going to be a real innovation hub, we can't have our own senators supporting SOPA/PIPA

Charlie O'Donnell — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:11:53 +0000

I haven’t spent much time talking about SOPA and PIPA, the two twin bills trying to make their way through Congress right now. When I saw folks like Fred Wilson, who has a much bigger reach than I do, and all the major internet companies lining up against it, it’s easy to think, “Well, what more can I do to add to the volume… they’ve got it covered.”

That was until I found out that New York’s own senators, Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer, appear to support these bills.

Let’s take a step back from a moment. I understand why policymakers would think these bills are a good idea. It’s basically all in the marketing. “Stopping Piracy” and “Protecting IP” sound like good ideas in theory. Unfortunately, it comes at the expense of destroying the conditions around which internet innovation has thrived.

Since the DMCA, we’ve basically operated in an environment of “ask forgiveness rather than permission” when it comes to copyright and IP online. I could make a video recreationally, include a digital copy of a song, and it was up to the rights holder to decide whether or not they wanted me to take it down. That allowed me the freedom to create and innovate, and to show the rights holder how cool it could be for me to use their stuff.

Many rightsholders asked for their stuff to be taken down, as was their right, but many were fine with it. That’s the way it should be, because if you had to wait for many of the big media companies to innovate with their content, we’d still be in the media dark ages (in many ways, we still are).

Now, there are bills on the table that would basically allow the government to shut down my website—my entire website—for putting up content that someone else has the rights to. It’s the equivalent of trying to perform delicate brain surgery with a meat cleaver—they’re trying to eliminate bad behavior by breaking the whole internet ecosystem.

And let’s be clear about what this is about—it’s protectionism. Big media companies don’t want innovation. They don’t like the idea that they can’t charge us $16 for a CD with only one or two good songs anymore. That was a good business. They don’t like that people are unplugging their cable and just using Netflix and Hulu instead.

The reason why people are turning to technology isn’t because they like to steal content. It’s because they pay $120 a month for cable and they really only watch two shows and some sports. Big media has been abusing consumers for years and they want to continue doing that over the medium of the internet—but they’re losing ground. Technology and the internet is inherently pro-consumer, because it empowers us and gives us more choices.

iTunes, Spotify, Kindle, and Netflix have proven that if you give us better choices and more convenience, we’re more than happy to pay for media content. This is what movie studios and the rest of the SOPA supporters need to do. Instead, they’re kicking up a notch the kind of mentality that the record industry had when it was suing its own customers instead of coming up with innovative new business models.

Back to Senators Schumer and Gillibrand. Senator Schumer spoke at Internet Week in 2011. It’s been a pretty popular move for New York area politicians to jump on the bandwagon of the emergence of New York tech growth—a phenomenon they largely had nothing to do with—and say they’re supportive of the community. He told an audience of technologists and entrepreneurs:

“What we need to do is figure out the right ways to nurture you, to encourage more people like to you come here, and to support you and those that join you, so that the businesses represented here today can thrive and grow."

Well, Senator, a group of 83 prominent internet investors and engineers wrote an anti-SOPA letter to youand the rest of Congress in December. These were people like Vint Cerf, the guy who designed the way the internet works. The people you say you want to nurture are against this bill. Yet, you’re siding with big, protectionist media companies.

It’s an embarrassment, frankly, to our tech community. If you support this bill, you are not supportive of us. All of our local politicians—our Senators, Mayor Bloomberg (his company, Bloomberg LP, is against it, but haven’t heard where he stands personally), and other policymakers need to be fighting this.

Chuck Schumer and Kristin Gillibrand need to switch their positions immediately on these bills, which should really aptly be named the “Stop Innovation on the Internet” bill. If NYC is going to fulfill its potential as an innovation hub, we can't have our senators supporting SOPA. They’re on the wrong side of history here, and they don’t understand enough about the internet and how it came to be to see why.

Speed Kills: Bootstrapping Activity in Your Network

Charlie O'Donnell — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:11:17 +0000

The other day, a guy I met was raving about the idea behind Loosecubes. He's always looking for random desks and conference rooms and so booking them on the fly like AirBnB seemed like a great idea to him. He put in a request for a space but didn't hear back right away. This wasn't all that surprising, because it's a relatively new community and I'm sure people aren't getting requests everyday from it yet. The slow response caused him to look elsewhere. I talked to Campbell, the founder, about it and she was open to thinking about solutions--because while the concept is awesome, its obvious that the experience would be more awesome if you requested a spot and heard within minutes. I thought it might even pay, as a marketing expense, to just outsource automated phone calls to space owners to ensure they know about requests right away--at least until the requests came in often enough that you had to check them everyday.

The same thing happened last night when Tara Hunt demoed Buyosphere at the NY Tech Meetup. She asked for fashion advice, but didn't get it in time to show the full circle demo. She mentioned that she had asked friends to jump on her question for the demo, but perhaps this should be an actual position in the short term. Its probably worth spending dollars to make sure the experience of your first users is amazing--that people are answering questions right away. It makes the experience better, and certainly more comment worthy...and that will help grow the network.

If you're suffering from a chicken and egg scenario, where one side wants service right away, paying people to make sure they get an extremely high level of service right upfront can really pay off over the long run. This is where effective community management is actually effective customer service--because your service IS the community.

I once heard that the number one way to improve conversion and traffic on your site is to make it lightning fast. Sometimes you do this with server architecture, and other times you do it with community architecture.

The Race is Long

Charlie O'Donnell — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 12:30:52 +0000

"Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind…the race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself." - Baz Luhrmann, Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)

Jordan Williamson, the Stanford kicker who missed three field goals in the Fiesta Bowl, will wake up today and feel like crap. Tomorrow, he'll wake up and still feel like crap, but a little less... and a little less the day after that, and less the day after that.

His Stanford e-mail is undoubtedly filled with two things... love and hate. If there ever was a moment in someone's life where you get to find out who your real friends are, this will be it.

There are a few important lessons you pick up from going through something like this--all of which strengthen your character, confidence, and refocus you on the important things and the best people in your life.

You are still standing.
What you do over the course of your career and, more importantly, over the course of your life, far outweights a single play, game, deal, etc.
How hard you work after failure will determine your character--not that you failed.
Love inspires others to be the best people possible. Hate weakens people and makes them shallow. People can never hate as much as other people can love--so hate will always lose and eventually go away.
The idea of giving up and walking away never really enters your mind if you are doing something you truly love.
If you are not open to learning from failure, your experience will be a missed opportunity.
You will absolutely get another chance.
All of the people who know how hard you worked to get to the point where what you did even mattered at all--they'll remember your effort and bet on you again because of it.
Your real life results as a person matter more than your Google results.
There were tons of factors that led to your efforts even mattering--to think that the results simply came down to you is naive. There's always a bigger picture to keep in mind.

Technology Trends: 10 Areas of Innovation to Watch for 2012

Charlie O'Donnell — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 15:47:00 +0000

One of the best things any investor can do is to pull back from the day to day of getting pitches and think about high level trends. What areas are going to change? What areas need to be disrupted? What types of things might happen in 2012, as opposed to needing another 3-5 years to come to fruition.

The thing you need to be careful of, however, is only paying attention to big trends, because you never know when you're thinking big data and you miss the awesome direct sales jewelry company.

That aside, here are ten areas I think you'll see some interesting things happening in 2012...

(PS.. .there are various companies in this article I have or have had business involvements with. Reader beware.)

Open Government

Election years tend to be good for technology diffusion. 2004 gave us widespread blogging and Meetups, and 2008 showed how the web could be a community organizing and fundraising tool. We're entering another election year, and recent history has given us unprecedented access to information and interaction with our elected representatives. Companies like Publicstuff and Votizen that help us connect with our elected officials and local governments are going to get a lot of dollars and attention this year.

Calendaring

I've seen about a dozen companies in the last year trying to help me figure out what to do with my time and how to collaborate with my friends around events. Most don't really seem to understand how mainstream people interact with each other, but some are getting closer and closer to something interesting. Time is money and there are too many people wanting me to spend a lot of money on better ways for me to spend my time for their not to be better channels for this, because I still can't figure out what to do with myself this weekend.

Brooklyn

New York has quickly become one of the best places in the world to start a company, but if you look at demographics, Brooklyn is a unique area whose innovator and maker population outnumbers most other cities in the country. It has the diversity and cheaper rent necessary for great creative potential and I think you're going to see a lot of development next year of Brooklyn as its own unique, but complimentary community of innovation. It feels a lot like NYC as a whole did back in 2005--a handful of relatively disconnected folks, a few marquee companies and a whole lot of pent up interest in doing something impactful in the local community.

Android Backlash

I've never been an Apple fanboy. I do have an iPad, but I've been seriously excited about the potential for Android for quite a while now. There are a lot of things I love about my Android phone--like the easy integration into the rest of my Google life. With the release of iCloud, that's less of an advantage now than it used to be. Sure, some of the Android devices are beautiful, but if they become obsolete in a year from a software perspective in less than a year, this is going to be a serious problem. Open and free seems nice until stuff stops working. I've been experiencing a lot of crashing on my Galaxy S lately, and the number of running programs that I didn't turn on is getting ridiculous--slowing my memory to a crawl. Apple simply would never allow this and the fact that I'm seriously considering dropping my Android phone even before my contract is up makes me think the little green robot's days are numbered unless Google takes some seriously bold action to fix this.

Mobile Payment Disappointment

Square has done terrifically well, but it's largely based on the existing credit card system of payment we already have. I take a piece of plastic out of my wallet, and I can pay for stuff. Adding a phone to that mix as the person paying seeing unnecessarily complicated, especially given the battery life issue. The idea that I might not be able to pay for something if my phone isn't charged is a nightmare--and until we get fuel cells or some other kind of guaranteed long life power, I don't see relying on my phone as a way to pay for stuff for a long time. Credit cards "just work" and peer to peer transactions just aren't big enough to bootstrap a network. What will Facebook do to things? Wesabe taught us that social doesn't necessarily make managing finances online more appealing--and given Facebook's propensity to change privacy settings, I'm not sure a lot of people are going to want to manage their money on Facebook.

What's the business model?

I think you'll see a lot of focus on companies like Tumblr, Twitter, Foursquare and Pinterest--services that haven't really established a business model yet to justify their sky high valuations. They clearly have user interest, but these companies will have a limited window before later stage investors start demanding to see some proof that these companies can be sustainable over the long run at the kind of prices that were paid. I don't think early stage companies need to prove a business upfront, but when you're valued at over a billion dollars, it would be nice to see how one could draw a line from A to B and figure out how to make the numbers work using reasonable assumptions. I hope they can get there, because it would be a major boon to the rest of the market for them to justify their lofty valuations and hopefully the valuations of exits and IPOs.

Design

Hopefully this becomes the year that most of the startup teams you see have not only a business person and a tech person, but also a designer--and you start to see people looking for "design co-founders". Well designed services can be built more and more easily using off the shelf technology and outsourced development--if you know what you're building and why right off the bat--at least to start off with anyway. There are a lot of good ideas that are held back by clunky interfaces or the lack of understanding of how and why people want to interact with a lot of these services to begin with. With an influx of talented designers into startup communities, I think you'll see better, more effective launches and more useful services.

Curation

"You can't have everything--where would you put it?" Steven Wright would love the trend towards picking out interesting, cool, amazing stuff from the universe of options, and pretty soon we're going to see a lot of "Fab.com for X" type efforts. Some of them will be extremely effective, I'm sure, but, like the Groupon wave, I'm sure there will be a lot of niche businesses. Let's hope they don't get overfunded, because they could become halfway decent cashflow businesses if run well. I'm waiting for the "Fab.com for cyclists".

More Accessible Innovation Resources for All

The effort to build diverse innovation communities has, thus far, been built off of movements that cause debate about root causes and who is to blame, while pointing fingers--alienating many who would otherwise be sympathetic to the higher level goals. We're negatively focused on the problems of specific stakeholders (not enough X...) versus a more general and more positive message that we can all get behind--inclusion and accessibility. Words matter, and there isn't anyone out there who doesn't believe that creativity feeds off diversity of ideas, something we can all get behind. We can also get behind making the innovation community and its resources more accessible and available to *all* people--because we're not just short on engineers from underrepresented groups. We're seriously short on engineers period--and we are in serious danger of falling behind the rest of the world permanently in the race to innovate. I think you're going to see a major shift towards getting youth across the board interested in math and science, on accessible learning on demand, and the positive encouragement of innovation. It will be a movement that picks up steam across a very diverse set of communities. We'll be doing more making sure *everyone* gets the opportunity to create innovative change versus just campaigning for people who look like ourselves in our own various constituent groups.

The Year of the Pivot

Last year we saw the success of some high profile companies who had changed what they were working on. This year, we'll see that in spades--because there are a ton of overfunded companies out there that aren't getting traction on their initial ideas that will need to figure something out before the money runs dry. If I were in the conference business... I think "How to pivot successfully with your last few hundred grand" would sellout in a heartbeat.

Lessons for Brooklyn: Information Spillover at the Roots of NYC Tech

Charlie O'Donnell — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 14:03:31 +0000

With all of this news about Brooklyn's tech scene, I've been thinking a lot about what made the NYC innovation community grow so quickly. Talk of buildings and incubators reminded me of the story of Building 20 from "Where Good Ideas Come From".

"...Legendary Building 20, the temporary structure built during World War II that somehow managed to last fifty-five years, in part because it had an extraordinary track record for cultivating both breakthrough ideas and organizations like Noam Chomsky’s linguistics department, Bose Acoustics, and the Digital Equipment Corporation... There were walls and doors and offices, as in most academic buildings. But the structure’s temporary origins—it was originally built with the expectation that it would be torn down after five years—meant that those structures could be reconfigured with little bureaucratic fuss..."

One of the key features of the building was its ability to allow ideas bounce around inside of it...

"...Building 20...is a space that sees information spillover as a feature, not a flaw. It is designed to leak. In this, it shares some core values with the liquid networks of dense cities. ...with that increased fluidity—all those new ideas jostling against each other, in rooms expanding and contracting to meet their needs—it’s not hard to imagine the space generating a reliable flow of innovation in the years to come. Exploring the adjacent possible can be as simple as opening a door. But sometimes you need to move a wall."

Information spillover.

That's a really interesting concept--and I think it's one of the very reasons why the NYC ecosystem has thrived. The "meetup" culture of NYC, where there are three great educational events to go to every night is how the community bootstrapped itself. The entrepreneurs in New York City didn't learn how to run companies from their long histories at Amazon or Google--they learned from each other. They've been learning from blogs, twitter, mailing lists, and by discovering people at events who are willing to grab coffee and do a data dump to each other of things they've learned.

NYC's resurgence wasn't driven by the presence of money--that element is key but it was pushed by something else. It's not an accident that VC firms started converging on NYC in full force when the social media buzz about Foursquare back in '09 "leaked" the info that there was something amazing going on in this community.

In the same vein, you can put money into an ecosystem but if no one knows about it, it doesn't matter. That's why prominent VC bloggers who came here and started here seemed to leapfrog existing capital that was here in terms of presence in the ecosystem.

For years and years, there was plenty of non-VC money in New York City--I mean, this is New York, right--but that money wasn't building the ecosystem. That's because investors who are fully engaged in the business of investing in startups on a fulltime bases are information brokers. They are stakeholders in the ecosystem who want to spread the word about best practices, potential areas of interest, and about the successes of their portfolio companies. Investors do more to tout and grow their own ecosystem than any other player--because of their direct and long term financial stake. VCs add knowledge, connection, and PR moreso than they add money that wasn't there before.

What's key if Brooklyn is going to become a huge tech hub is that awareness and connection are critical. We need more Brooklyn meetups, native media hubs like Dumbo NYC, and more connectedness between important stakeholders like NYU Poly, and the community. Information needs to spill and flow if we're going to make some serious primordial soup for the growth of innovation.

Don't Forget Brooklyn: NYU's plan for the old MTA headquarters needs to happen

Charlie O'Donnell — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 11:11:42 +0000

Seemingly to save face, Stanford pulled out of NYC's Applied Sciences initiative to build a world-class engineering school last week. At the same time, Cornell got an anonymous $350 million donation to move forward with it's proposal--and rumor has it that the Mayor will announce Cornell's victory as soon as today.

I have no doubt that any new school dedicated to engineering will be a good thing in New York City--one that I will fully support. However, here's a question that I think even casual observers of the NYC innovation community would all answer unanimously:

If you were to place a school in a strategic location to help drive innovation in NYC over the next 50 years, where would you put it? Roosevelt Island or Downtown Brooklyn?

Right... but for some reason, the one interesting proposal in Brooklyn--submitted by the existing most active participant in the local innovation community, NYU, doesn't seem to be getting much consideration.

NYU-Poly made a pitch to transform the former MTA headquarters into a "'Center for Urban Science and Progress,' where engineers can work to solve urban, global problems like traffic, pollution, and energy conservation." The building at 370 Jay Street is currently an underused eyesore. Redeveloping existing infrastructure that already sits on top of multiple transit lines is smart. Even smarter is that the NYU plan seems doable at a fraction of the cost of other proposals to redevelop the southern end of a relatively isolated Roosevelt Island into a tech campus.

Downtown Brooklyn is in close proximity to Dumbo, a burgeoning tech community, and downtown Manhattan's own innovation centers. Make no mistake, Brooklyn is absolutely the future of innovation in NYC. It's cheaper and it's attracting the young, creative class that drives our most innovative companies.

I think, one day, you'll see more people start their entrepreneurial endeavors in Brooklyn, and as companies mature, they'll move into the city. Places like Dumbo and Williamsburgh will become the primordial soup of designers, developers, hackathons and co-working communities in reclaimed spaces that will produce the next great companies coming out of NYC. It's happening now, and by putting in real infrastructure to support it, like an engineering school, you're only adding to the momentum.

Putting a campus a 40 minute subway ride from Dumbo seems like a stretch to me, but I'm just a guy that has a 40 minute subway ride into the city that causes people to say, "Oh, you live far out..." so what do I know?

There's something so brilliant about reclaiming the headquarters of one of the most bureacratic, least innovative entities we know--the MTA--to build a campus focused on building the city of the future. Let's be clear--this isn't about making more web developers. The curriculums of our existing schools should be retooled easily enough to do that. I'm talking about serious efficiency improvements in how we live within our natural environment, move around, and what materials we use. The Jay Street building would also be just steps from Brooklyn Bridge Park, one of the most ambitious urban redevelopment projects we have--where they took six industrial piers and turned them into parkland.

Brooklyn is truly an opportunity for innovation in our community and we should be looking for more ways to support it. Whether or not Cornell wins the city's bid, I hope NYU goes through with it's plans to further develop its footprint in Brooklyn. It's not lost on me that this plan is scrappier and more creative--exactly what Brooklyn is all about.

Playing in the Street

Charlie O'Donnell — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 13:08:26 +0000

I came to a realization the other day about why I love biking in the city so much--why weaving in and out of traffic (usually faster than traffic, actually) and why dodging wayward pedestrians gives me such a rush.

I like playing in the street.

It wasn't about speed or exercise. It was literally about being in the street. You see, growing up in Brooklyn, the street is where all the action is. You start out as a little kid envious of the older kids that were allowed to play in the street. Sometimes, we'd inch out and lean up against parked cars in between them just to feel like we were in the street without actually being in harms way. When you grow up on some suburban cul de sac, there's nearly no difference between the street and the sidewalk--nothing ever happens anywhere. But in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, being in the street meant you were in the game. You weren't relegated to just throwing a football around in front of your house. You could play three, even four sewers (in Brooklyn, you measured the field by the length between manhole covers). Wiffleball could be played crossways, pitching from one curb to another.

I realize that division has affected even the way I work. I think if you grew up just with organized sports and activities, where everyone got a chance to play, you'd be content being a passive participant. You wouldn't want to lead deals--you'd just be happy to get your piece--a participation trophy. When you grow up in an environment where you had to earn your way into a game, and the game took place in the street, you think and work differently. I do my job on the ground--showing up to hackathons, late night co-working sessions, and I try to be places where there's stuff being made--where the kids are playing in the street.

You run more risks that way--you might knock off a car mirror with a football (been there, done that)--but it's also a lot more fun than the sidewalk.

Brain Training and Grudges

Charlie O'Donnell — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:28:01 +0000

I'm sure science knows a lot more about how the brain works than I do. I've read quite a number of books about how we learn and how we make mistakes, but the inner workings of the chemicals and neural pathways are still pretty mysterious to me.

That leaves a lot of room for me to make stuff up about how I think it works.

One thing that I've learned about the body in general is the importance of exercise--and how if you don't use it, you lose it. I think the same works for your mind. My grandmother reads the paper everyday and keeps up with the news. She'll be 94 in February and she even still drives. You need to exercise your mind if you want to stay sharp.

It follows, then, that this would hold true for emotions and the positive or negative thinking that comes with them. When your brain sends a signal along a certain path that enables or encourages you, for example, to get angry, you're exercising that pathway. You're making it stronger and wider each and every time. With each new occurance, the signal is able to travel faster and faster--so fast even that you're no longer even really feeling anger, you're just recalling and remembering anger and starting the process. That can be dangerous because it removes you from the present. You're no longer evaluating the merits and particulars of the current situation--you're just releasing anger associated with other sets of memories.

On the other hand, if you don't let yourself get too upset over things, I fully believe that you kind of forget how to. Those neural and emotional pathways kind of wither and die. You get into the practice of remaining calm and instead of remembering anger, you remember stillness. Letting things slide off becomes your default reaction.

As an entrepreneur, its a form of training that could really pay off. My startup, Path 101, had a personality test associated with it. It really stuck me how much more emotional the average entrepreneur was than I was. I had no idea how other people did it--because doing a startup has a ton of ups and downs, and that seemed like an impossible roller coaster to ride if you were a really emotional person.

I think grudges and fights with friends are a form of exercising those negative pathways that people should seek to eliminate. It's fine not to like people. In fact, I think it's really important to have a filter for the kind of people you want to associate with in your life--and a lot of people should be falling short of that bar. However, when there are people out there that you genuinely like that you had a fight with, that's a bad pathway to train. You're basically telling your brain, everytime you have some interaction with that person, to harbor and feel bad feelings about them. Teaching your brain to have bad feelings about generally good people isn't the kind of exercise you want to be doing on a regular basis. It gets wires crossed and it really muddies the emotional waters.

Yesterday, I reached out to a friend that I had a less than fantastic interaction with the last time around. It had been bothering me how we left off, so I said, "Hey, I was disappointed how things went, but I do think highly of you and I'd love to get past this in some way."

It felt like dropping a load of bricks, as it seemed to feel for them, too. Getting back to feeling positive about positive people makes you feel like you've had a tune-up. Whether that's a business partner, an ex, or just a friend, think about the people you have actively negative feelings about and reach out. Maybe they'll be accepting and open, maybe they won't--but clearing that negativity out of your system, and ending the exercise of bad pathways will be well worth it.

I'm Running for the New York Tech Meetup Board

Charlie O'Donnell — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 18:51:38 +0000

I’m just as familiar with the New York Tech Meetup as anyone. I was one of the first 100 members, dating back to February 2005. I was also part of the original New York Tech Meetup board and participated on it until last year. I offered to step aside to bring a few more faces onto the board last year. Now that there are four open spots, I’d like to return and I have a few specific things I’d like to accomplish.

Over the last seven years, I’ve not only been an active contributer to the NYC innovation community, but I have strived to help make it more accessible, creating new leaders and supporting other people’s projects. Sometimes, that meant publicly nudging Nate Westheimer into leading the NYTM even when he originally wasn’t even going to run for Organizer (Does everyone remember “Nate ‘08?”) or encouraging others to create meetups of their own, like ArtsTech, Fashion 2.0, or the Tech Biz Dev Meetup. That was one of the original principals of nextNY, the community group that I started in 2006—that anyone could and should run an event. For the last two years, it has also included promoting community through this newsletter.

More can be done. One focus that I’d like to try to use the New York Tech Meetup as a platform for is nurturing more leaders. By design, the meetup itself creates many spectators. We go each month to watch people present to us, but how many people walk out wanting to contribute to our thriving community, versus watching it? I’d like to find more conduits for leadership development so that a broad spectrum of diverse people can feel like they can reach and lead just as many people as the NYTM does.

Second, I’d like to find more ways to expand the reach of our community well beyond the island of Manhattan. We have a community of makers and extremely creative talent right across the East River in Brooklyn, but there exists a social and mental barrier to increased involvement in my favorite outer borough’s tech resurgence. On top of that, the New York Tech Meetup can be a beacon for regional talent and entrepreneurs—drawing in new participations from other communities, even as far as the west coast.

And third, the NYTM faces the potential pitfall of a widening gap in community resources. It has the disproportionate potential to raise money, get press, access space, etc. I’d like to see those benefits shared as a platform—so that the sponsorship dollars and space resources that the NYTM has access to can trickle down to other groups. Individuals who have other jobs are struggling to get new meetups off the ground and maintain their communities or find space to meet, while the NYTM gets bigger, raises more money, and becomes a permanent fixture. I’d like to see more work done to leverage the NYTM’s influence and resources to work with schools and big companies to make it easier for other tech and innovation meetups to thrive.

Thanks for listening. You can cast your vote here.