I arrived a few minutes late to Michael Arrington’s talk, but caught most of his presentation in my notes (see below). Mike’s the editor of TechCrunch, the hub for a lot of the enthusiasm and news coverage around Web 2.0, and he’s one of the self-appointed spokesman and evangelists for this new generation of web companies… which is a absolutely a good thing IMO. From my notes at Gnomedex, Mike’s measure of success for an internet company is 1) it makes money and 2) it makes the Internet a better place. My notes from his talk last week…
Pretty good bets
(missed this slide altogether)
Ones to watch
- 1-800-free-411
(missed most of this slide)
What were they thinking?
- inform
- gather
- pubsub
- browzar (wonderful coverage on techcrunch UK, bbc, nytimes)–> about a week later and people looked closer at it and realized that it was just a wrapper to internet explorer
- jigsaw: 7000 new people coming into the site every day, one of Michael Arrington’s best friends is on the board of austin ventures; companies like this shouldn’t exist, Mike believes that we should have regulation in place to prevent companies like this from coming into existence)
- squidoo
- Purple Cow: must read book
- broken revenue model from the beginning
- put ads up and then you get a revenue cut
(be careful with what you promise people when you launch)
Shared attributes of winners
- passion for what they are doing (opposite of this: don’t over business plan)
- do something extraordinary (purple cow)
- removing serious friction
- great founder dynamics
- never raised big money or raised it after they won
- perfect revenue model not required
- and… luanched their copmany with a post on techcrunch
Shared attributes of losers
- poor founder / team choices
- lifestyle / ego entrepreneurs
- raised too much money (may or may not be sign of a bubble)
- spent too much money
- over business-planned
- forgot about scaling (friendster)
- didn’t launch their company on techcrunch (ha)
What server platform?
- PHP (most popular)
- Ruby on Rails (upcoming)
- Java (serious applications)
- .NET
What client platform?
- .Net ActiveX (no firefox)
- AJAX (monster)
- Flash (growing)
- XUL/XAML (interesting)
- Adobe Apollo (flash applications that aren’t running in a browser)
- with an apollo application there would be no break between a local application or an online application
- Desktop hybrid
Market saturation
AVOID:
- social networking (socialzr)
- social bookmarks (switched away from delicious… but after reviewing 20 of them)
- video (250 video sites now… many of them are funded)
- photos
- blogging/podcasting platforms
- portals / homepages
- feed reeders
BIG POTENTIAL
- Platforms
- Desktop apps
- Office efficiency
- Cloud storage (microsoft and google launching next year, omnidrive, box.net)
- Identity (rapleaf is a company I love)
- Developer tools
- Market destruction
- ENTERPRISE
- typically enterprise innovations happened and then it came to consumers
- hasn’t happened recently– blogs, voip, instant messaging, online storage
- new enterprise blog from techcrunch– dan farber is writing
Note: The best entrepreneur’s avoid this type of advice. Invent a new market.
(photograph above by Thomas Hawk, hosted here on flickr)