3rd HYSTA Annual Entrepreneur Boot Camp

I spent the whole Saturday on the 3rd HYSTA Annual Entrepreneur Boot Camp. This year HYSTA worked with AAMA together. Therefore, comparing with last year, this year's conference had a good number of audience.

This year's topics are more advanced than last year; last year, there was a talk on how to incorporate a company; how to construct the share structure; how to deal with the issues during the rapid growth of the startup; how to work with board member;
This year is more about how to approach VC and how to pitch ideas.

Here is a good summary about the conference.

As usual, investors look at people. People first. This is really tough for a first time entrepreneur. One audience quotes a data that in one conference, all the VC firms on the panel only made one investment that was not through the referral filters. However, I also heard a story about the bloglines.com's founder, Mark Fletcher, has kept emailing DFJ(?) until one day, DFJ invited him for a talk. I verified with Mark himself when I met him. He said the story is true, but DFJ still didn't invest him. Here are good tips from Mark.

The other interesting takeaway is how to dance with elephant as a startup. Many VCs ask such a question, "what if Google enters this market?" I really believe this is not a good question. Just take a look, how many cases does a big company enters a new market and successfully trumps the ants? We saw many many examples like, big companies try to build in house first, fail, then go out to purchase the best player or buy the second best player. The reason is simple, the elephant needs to focus on fighting with other elephants for butter. It just can't see the ant. Even when it sees the ant, it can't master its muscle from the full body to trump the ant. It is true big companies have more resources, both financial and human. But they are not aligned well. Employees in small companies have much stronger incites to perform well than employees in large companies. Right?

The best part of the conference is the fast pitch. However, the judges are not very entertaining. I really wish Guy could be on the panel.
All the presentation are very good. They cover value proposition competition, and others. However, some of them didn't mention their financial model like how much money would like to raise? where those money are gonna to be used on? cash flow? when to breakeven? and what's the exit strategy? I guess 5 minutes might be short. Also VC panelist also focused their questions on value validation and marketing strategy.
I would rather suggest a good presentation should start with storytelling, especially for a consumer oriented business. Describe how your service or produce improve the consumer experience. Tell a story, which is much more appealing than starting the presentation with a simple slogan. I honestly admit, I almost feel some presentation is very bored.

How is elevator pitch looks like?

what type of seacher are you?

We all know AOL screws up recently by releasing the search data it collects from its users. EU has a law to prohibit ISP collecting data from customer. But unfortunately USA doesn't have this law yet. I hope AOL could push the American people to consider a similar law.
But anyway, if you are data digger like the Freakonomics author. You could find the raw data here. You might be able to dig one of seachers 's real identity.

walk along right or left?

I was walking along right side along the hall way and clashed with a friend from Hong Kong. This makes me wonder, along which side people in the British culture walk. We know they drive on the left side, but which side do they walk? Isn't interesting?

automatically tagging photos

I read article from Technology Review about a new software helping people tagging pictures automatically rather than like Flickr, human must tag by themselves. It's cool. Left is my test result.
People have read my blog before could recognize this picture. Those are USB devices. Ok, this might be too hard for the software since even people can not recognize it. But it turns out the software does give some interesting tags like man-made, people, art, and antique.
Wait a minute, are those words very common everywhere like people always say that we can link every word to sex. Isn't the beauty of human mind? Ok, my bad, even as a blogger, an anonymous blogger, I should stay away from sexual content. But my point is shared with the other CMU professor, who comments out that the testing set,Flickr photos, which ALIPR used, are mostly likely sharing common things. They are mostly related to people. He says. "So just using the word 'people' already tags a large percentage of the images correctly." I personally think his comment is very harsh to two students behind ALIPR. And, he says the research is a "step in the right direction".
I really can't agree both of his points. I stand with the inventor of tagging, Joshua Schachter, who deliberately avoided imposing any rules about how people could use tags. He knew it wouldn't work: "If I went in there and said, Hey, you're using that tag wrong, people would just tell me to fuck off,"
I would tag using any word I want, but this software still can help.

a detail article on why Friendster fails?

NY Time has a good detail article on why Friendster fails. It is not really inspiring though. The author believes the performance issue is the major reason of the fail. I can't agree on that. A Silicon Valley engineer, founder of Friendster coded in PHP, has a edge over two LA boys, founders of MySpace coded in CodeFusion. We all know MySpace goes down frequently but doesn't bother its users much.

I believe the major reasons are:
1) Friendster talked about adding new features but didn't do it quickly;
2) MySpace music band is an important factor;
3) MySpace provides a platform to link YouTube video, flickr photo, and others; it's more a open platform.

Jeff Nolan nodes, Silicon Valley is tech Mecca.

I have a previous post on why I think Silicon Valley is still the tech Mecca. Here Jeff has experienced in Boston.