StubHub Rocks
Brad put up a post last night about how tight StubHub is (see “StubHub Seriously Has Its Act Together“). I promised a post on my rockin’ StubHub experience buying tickets to Game 4 of the NLCS in “Jumping on the bandwagon” so here goes: The thing about specializing in a specific vertical is that if you get it right, the experience is worlds better than your generalist competitors. When StubHub was started conventional wisdom suggested that eBay had a lock on all things auction. But it turns out that there are plenty of very specific niches for which the eBay one-auction-fits-all model falls short. Ticket sales is clearly one of them. If you’ve ever tried to buy or sell tickets on an eBay auction you know exactly what I mean. Tickets to an event are a highly specialized good – every ticket is not the same (each seat is different and each venue is unique in its seat layout), events are time specific (i.e., they occur at a very specific date and time before which the ticket is valuable and after which the ticket has zero value), there are major logistical challenges with shipping around tickets and ensuring they get where the are supposed to get when they are supposed to get there, and there are significant challenges in dealing with last-minute purchases (transferring the ticket from a buyer to a seller hours or minutes before an event). …
October 23, 2007· 3 min read
“Everything just works”
On a recent trip to Chicago I had the chance to visit Dick Costolo, former CEO of FeedBurner and now proud employee of Google. Brad and I took Dick out to a congratulatory dinner. Before we went out Dick gave us a tour of Googleplex Chicago. As we walked around the impressively decked out office (200 inch screen in the presentation room? Wow!) he told us how smoothly the operations ran at Google. “Everything just works” he said, demonstrating the video conferencing system. On top of that, the systems in the Chicago office are exactly the same as the systems in every other office. Learn how to do something in Chicago and you know how to do it in Palo Alto, Boston or Munich. Most of the offices even have the same look and feel. While it may be a bit formulaic, it’s productive. And clearly Google is all about maximizing the productivity of its staff. That . . . as well as the fact that they actually had a working video conferencing system that required no IT staff to actually set up a video feed . . . is pretty impressive. …
October 18, 2007· 1 min read
Jumping on the bandwagon
I admit it – I’m not a huge baseball fan. I used to love baseball. I collected baseball cards, followed the box scores and (in true nerd fashion – especially for that era) kept complicated spreadsheets tracking the stats of my favorite players. The Bill James Baseball Bible was my religion. That was before 1986. That was before, in the time between I left my neighbors house where I was babysitting to be with my dad to enjoy the Sox winning their first World Series since 1918, the world stopped, all reason was thrown out the door and I ended up pacing my room all night cursing the fate that had caused me to be born and raised in Boston. I pretty much gave up on baseball at that point, enjoying the game from a somewhat safer distance. I took a detour back into the fold in September and October of 2004 to finally enjoy the victory that should have long ago been. …
October 16, 2007· 2 min read
Echo . . . echo? . . . echo??
No . . . I didn’t die . . . I just stopped blogging for about two months. This wasn’t part of a master plan or some kind of anti-social experiment. I got incredibly busy, was traveling every week and got behind. Something had to give and unfortunately it was blogging. Ok – enough excuses. I’m back. I’m as opinionated as ever. I’m going to tell you what I think about things (even if you don’t ask). Thanks for hanging in with me.
October 16, 2007· 1 min read
TechStars Rocks!
Wow! What can I saw about the TechStars investor pitch/demo day except that it was fantastic. The teams were extremely well prepared and every single one of them really nailed it. We had about 50 private investors and venture capitalists in attendance to see the 10 TechStars teams go through what they’ve been up to this summer. Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I’ve been somewhat of a TechStars groupie this summer – I’ve spent many hours with the teams giving feedback, advice and lending a sympathetic ear. I’ve seen early ideas and kluge demos turn into the seeds of real business ideas, real prototypes and true products. The journey has been amazing to watch. For me this was the best part of yesterday – the progress that each of these companies has made this summer is truly remarkable. …
August 17, 2007· 2 min read
Setting the record straight
_But the limits of Y Combinator’s model remain unclear. A typical young tech company should be spending a little less than $40,000 a month, says Seth Levine, a venture capitalist at Foundry Group. Y Combinator gives companies a fraction of that, leaving entrepreneurs “eating ramen and not paying themselves,” he says. And 6% is a huge amount of equity to give up for such little money, he says. _ _Although Levine has shared his expertise with TechStars, a new Colorado program that’s similar to Y Combinator, he says it’s rare to find a business with serious long-term prospects in such a program. _ …
July 20, 2007· 5 min read
Monday morning
As promised – a few thoughts on StartupWeekend now that I’ve had a chance to both get over my disappointment that we didn’t release anything on Monday morning and more importantly time to think about what worked and what didn’t work last weekend. There seems to be no lack of opinion on the subject (see the comments to the “Success and Failure” post on the StartupWeekend website and the mass of comments left on the TechCrunch article about the weekend or just do a Google search for StartupWeekend). …
July 13, 2007· 7 min read
crunch
i wouldn’t recommend doing this to your wheel. the fall (over my handlebars and very fast, but off the trail and at least not on top of any rocks) was not nearly as painful as the walk to the car (about 4 miles and with my bike on my back – at least it was my hardtail which only weighs about 17 pounds). so much for the HuGi (guess i’m in the market for a new wheel) … …
July 9, 2007· 1 min read
48 hours ago…
Just over 48 hours ago 72 people came together in Boulder Colorado to see if they could come up with a business idea and launch by midnight Sunday. We started Friday night with a handful of ideas . . . winnowed the list down to the top 3 favorites . . . and picked one to run with. Here’s the result: The process of working on a business with 70 people in such a short period of time was amazing. I’ll put up some of the notes I took throughout the weekend in a post tomorrow but you can see a running tally of the experience at www.startupweekend.com. This was entrepreneurship on steroids and was as much about the social experiment of starting a business as it was about the idea itself (something lost on many of the comment authors on our TechCrunch posting, but not lost on anyone who actually participated). …
July 8, 2007· 1 min read
You’re burning too much money
I don’t know much about your business but I’d guess that you’re burning too much cash. Ok – that’s an over generalization but it’s also probably true. Businesses – and particularly early stage businesses – have some kind of gravitational pull towards spending too much money. Some of this is just the nature of entrepreneurship – entrepreneurs tend to be optimistic people who believe strongly in their business idea and their ability to grow their company. Some of this is that spending less money by definition means making trade-offs and potentially slowing down. Some of it may be left over exuberance from the internet bubble when businesses were rewarded for spending cash faster and looser. I don’t know all the causes, but it’s almost universally true. …
July 3, 2007· 3 min read