Entrepreneurship

 by Brendon J. Wilson

Mini-Bubble??

A couple of weeks ago, I heard Julie Hanna Farris of Scalix contrast the current environment in Silicon Valley with that of the Bubble era:

It’s been interesting to reflect on the past nine years. Scalix is my fifth startup. The first startup was in ’95 at the beginning of the bubble, and so I watched what happened as we went up the bubble. The last startup was a company that had an $850 million dollar exit after one year. I watched the discipline of the investment banking community completely go out the window from the first startup (it was the “four to five quarters” discipline) to my last company. They would approach us and sit down and talk with us and we’d say, “Well, we’re working on our first big deal and we think we’re going to have revenue soon,” and they’d say, “Well, you don’t really need that – why don’t we talk about taking you out?” It was a bizarre experience.

Scalix also is two years old – we started during a desert, and I started the company as an entrepreneur-in-residence at a venture firm. I’ve often wondered if that hadn’t been our start, if we would have been able to get off the ground because it was quite an adverse climate. I think the return to discipline is valuable – I think what disciplined a company after the crash was fear. And the combination of discipline and fear created a really hostile climate for entrepreneurs. The bar became very high – became, in some ways, impossibly high. Advising the venture firm that I was involved with on deals as they were coming in the door, I was a lot of great stuff, a lot of great entrepreneurs, and it was kind of sad to see that they didn’t really have a chance to get going because of the fear and because a lot of the unanswered questions (because they were so early stage)…there weren’t answers to the questions that were on the table.

We’ve seen a balance come back, but I’m concerned that we’re actually in a mini-bubble now, again. It seems we have a difficult time being balanced and sanguine and getting real about what it takes to build a long-term sustaining company. I think that part of that is coming off the high of the party that felt really good and intellectually knowing, “Well, gee, that was a passing thing,” and another part, an irrational part, saying, “Well, maybe we can do that again”. I see some of that going on right now.

The past month has seen a lot of action. Hell, the last week has seen a lot of action. Yahoo acquired Oddpost; Microsoft acquired Lookout; Google acquired Picasa; Symantec snapped up Brightmail and TurnTide in quick succession. Reaching back a little further, Friendster got VC money, and NewsGator got VC money. Looking forward, Novell appears to be cash heavy and looking for acquisitions.

It hasn’t all been funding and acquisitions. There is much jockeying for strategic alignment and position, and trends of note in the news as well. Flickr (a hometown favourite) and Feedburner decided to get together; MovableType got themselves a new CEO and acquired its French partner; both Microsoft and Sun approved internal employee blogs; bloggers have been invited to the Democratic National Convention; and Technorati has just passed the 3 million blog mark. Meanwhile, Apple has announced a new iPod to follow up on its Airport Express. Things are hopping in the circle of Silicon Valley life.

What’s going on? Is this the start of something real or a bunch of geek intellectual wanking? Is Julie right? Is this activity a result of a lack of discipline, a land rush? Or the Next Big Thing? While, it’s unclear where all of this will end up, I find it interesting to note all of these technologies are enablers for the individual – individuals create the content, individuals control the content, and individuals use technology to choose which content matters to them. Not a distributor or broadcaster in site. Provided the lawmakers don’t get in the way with silly legislation, this has the makings of a truly liberating wave of technology for consumers, a new era of interpersonal connections.

The trick, of course, will be figuring out if anyone can make a buck off it!

in Business / Entrepreneurship 4 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Making Meaning

It’s been a busy week, but I wanted to get back on the blogging horse before I fell too far behind. Too much thinking, not enough capturing ideas in a more coherent and permanent form.

I spent one day last week at Garage Technology Ventures‘ Art of the Start. I had the presence of mind to record the whole thing on my laptop, but the quality is pretty horrible, so I’ll be making transcripts available over the next week or so (the first session transcript is available here). Guy Kawasaki had some interesting things to say, most notably his comments on the need for entrepreneurs to focus on “making meaning” in their endeavours.

I’ve been thinking a lot about “making meaning” over the past couple of months. At its core, making meaning is about improving the world – for me, this had meant trying to figure out how to take my software skills and apply them to real problems (by which I mean “problems that matter”). The question in my mind has been: is it possible to make meaningful change through software?

In my mind, I have associated “real world problems” with environmental problems – the kind of problems that require engineering residing in the world of the physical. In this definition, the path to meaningful change through software is unclear. Software is so intangible – how can a bunch of 0’s and 1’s save us from ourselves? Isn’t software mostly being dedicated to solving ‘artificial’ problems, problems originally created by someone else’s software?

But the more I think about it, the more I’ve come to realize that software has the potential to play a much bigger role – even though the domain of its influence does not often intersect with the real, physical world – at least not directly. However, by applying the pressure in the right places, software can bring about social change that affects the real, physical world.

To illustrate how, consider the recent revolution in the world of music.

Since the advent of the compact disc, we’ve been distributing music in the most circuitous fashion: translating analog signals into digital bits, only to press those bits into plastic discs that need to be packaged and transported. Seems a bit ludicrous, transforming clean (arguably environmental) digital bits into a physical form that requires additional energy to package and transport. But at the time, the lack of bandwidth made it justifiable – but no more. Cheap computers and peer-to-peer networking software has wrought tremendous change on the industry in a short period of time by exposing the inefficiencies in the current system and routing around the brain damage of an industry in decline.

But the battle isn’t yet over – software is currently locked in an epic battle, trying to match innovation against legal attacks mounted by a music industry unwilling to redefine itself. In the wake of this battle, some truly absurd “solutions” have resulted. Consider the mass of companies offering file ripping services – requiring you to ship your CDs (more transportation and energy costs) to them, so that they can validate that you own the music you want them to rip and place on a DVD or hard drive for transfer to an iPod. That is truly messed up.

The key to winning this battle is to continue to write software that outmaneuveurs the legal attacks – whether its software to continue to destabilize anachronistic media industries by enabling or hiding content distribution, or to provide new models for empowering content creators (I’d argue that the Creative Commons license counts as software, albeit legal software). The key will be to continue to prove the futility of perpetuating the current model, and its indirect fallout in the real world (manufacturing and transportation environmental impacts, for example).

Maybe software can change the “real” world. It’s just a matter of finding the right pressure points. Oh, and figuring out how to make a buck at it while you’re at it.

in Entrepreneurship 1 comments