CEO seeks startup

Foursquare conquers Amsterdam. Tell me why.

For reasons which remain mysterious, Amsterdam was the first city in Europe covered by Foursquare. The locals weren't backward in adopting it and pitched battles broke out all over the city over who was mayor of the scone shelf of De BakkersWinkel or boss of codiments in De Burgermeester. I'll be frank; I don't get it. I have a long history of not getting various apps, Twitter being one notable example, but normally that is before I actually use them. Foursquare I have tried. If you are out and about a lot (effectively this means students and the self-employed), the appeal of being informed about where your friends are in a small city like Amsterdam is obvious. For a start you can probably cycle there in less than 10 minutes. It could be even more useful to avoid people you don't want to see: ex-boyfriends, bosses, blood relations. How many social calamities could be avoided that way?

The part that puzzles me is the competition to be mayor. So far being the mayor of anywhere outside your own house has benefits which are at best nugatory, and yet checking in seems to be the first thing that people do when they arrive somewhere. Like smokers who have a cigarette first thing in the morning. This is like sending tweets about what a great time you are having instead of having too good a time to report on it. Unlike other games, there is no prize and no skill is involved. You just have to turn up a lot. If you do become the mayor of a particular venue what exactly does that say about you? That you have no home to go to? Please explain. Answers on a postcard....

TechCrunch Uncovered: Is TC just one big frat party?

UPDATE, Nov 1: Having seen the reaction to this post, I have been thinking. Do I think the point I am trying to make, that some content and comments on TC are just not appropriate, is valid? Yes. Did I go about making this point in the right way? Not entirely. I definitely should have contacted MG first to get his side of the story (I've done this now - no reply). In any case the point somehow seems to have gotten lost in a maze of personal attacks.

In a nutshell, my main concern is that the message being sent by some TC articles (see the links below and a here's another sent by a reader) is not friendly to women, regardless of the author's intention, and that when readers complain about this it seems to be discounted. The comments are also not moderated sufficiently so too much misogynist content makes it on to TC that way. Let's concentrate on that and see if it can be resolved. 

Confessions of a Wantrepreneur

They say those who can, do; those who can't, teach. In my case those who can't, write about those who can. When I started this blog six months ago, the objective was to document my attempt to found a startup. As readers may have noticed, the startup has singularly failed to materialise. Instead I have blogged about startup issues and spent a lot of time writing for TechCrunch Europe (not in the original plan).

The truth is that it is much easier to write about entrepreneurs than to be one.

The Brazen Careerist

This is an interview I did for TheNextWomen a while ago but it's one of my favourites so decided to reprint here. Since the interview Brazen Careerist launched a new site which has been covered on TechCrunch and elsewhere.

Penelope Trunk of the Brazen Careerist is a startling combination of entrepreneur, career guru and bare-to-the-bone personal blogger. Her writing does not draw a clear line between business and personal issues. For Penelope, it’s all just part of the messy business of life. I talked to her about “jet money”, bad career advice and why you should want to have sex with your business partner.

Why do you think everyone wants to be an entrepreneur these days?

You can make your own hours. It’s impossible, as a woman, to have a family and a good job in corporate America. This is why most small businesses are started by women. I notice a lull in email from 2:30pm to 8pm. That’s when people are spending time with their kids.

Women are actually very well constituted to run companies especially before they have children, e.g. they can do multiple projects at the same time. But it is a fact that only 8% of venture backed business are started by women. Venture-based startups are very high-pressure which may be part of the reason that fewer women do it.

Tech, lies and videotape: The future of TV

Every year Amsterdam hosts IBC, one of the biggest TV trade shows in the business. It's a bewildering terrain of flashy displays, obscure talk about multiplexers and no seating for miles. You wander around for hours cursing your high heels before collapsing from dehydration in the tiny booth of some hapless IPTV company. Or maybe that's just me.. My day job is in mobile TV so it takes a lot to get me excited about TV technology but here are a few things which caught my jaded eye this year.

How to survive a breakup.. with your business partner

Some time ago I had my first experience of a business divorce. I was one of the founders of a networking event in Amsterdam and worked on it for nine months or so. While the event steadily increased in popularity, the working relationship within the organising team was degrading. Eventually, it broke down completely. This breakup was a mild version of what is must be like when a startup founding team disintegrates. It's not pretty. Here are some ideas for how to cope with the fallout.

It's not you, it's me 

However bad the behaviour of your business partner has been, examine your conscience to see how you contributed to the breakdown of the relationship. In my case my working partner suffered badly from the "Your ego is not your friend" syndrome. One of my faults is that I hate conflict and will placate and compromise rather than confronting a problem head on. As Tony Soprano has observed, certain behaviour you have to nip in the bud or it will get worse. The Sopranos is actually a goldmine of management wisdom. They should use it as a teaching tool it in business schools (possibly without the extreme violence).

The startup at the end of the Multiverse

Is your product lost in the multiverse? And how can you improve it by changing where it lives? These are the questions posed by Joseph Pine to entrepreneurs in a recent talk at Mobile Monday Amsterdam (which also featured speakers like Howard Rheingold on Smartmobs and the hilarious Robert Rice on Augmented Reality). One of the main themes of the day was how the scope of our experiences is continually being widened by technology and the impact this has on business.

Interview with Get Satisfaction Founder Amy Muller

Get Satisfaction is a "user powered" customer service company which applies social media techniques to customer service. Founder Amy Muller started off in the tech world as a project manager and web developer before starting Get Satisfaction (her 2nd startup) in 2007 with her husband Thor Muller and Lane Becker, co-founder of Adaptive Path.

Where did the idea for Get Satisfaction come from?

We had a fun and silly side project called Valleyschwag. You could sign up and get a monthly package containing free promotional tshirts, hats, pins, etc. branded with your favorite Web 2.0 company logos. We really thought it would just be something fun for our friends who didn't live in the (San Francisco) Bay area with easy access to all this free stuff. We had about 60 subscribers that first month. Then we got covered on TechCrunch and Boing Boing and by the second package, we had nearly 2000 subscribers! This meant that we now had customers. We instinctively felt the need to provide very personal, high-value customer service so we answered every email, we posted regularly to our blog and we commented on their Flickr photos of their schwag packages.

The Black Swan Startup

The Black Swan is author Nassim Nicholas Taleb's metaphor for highly improbable and unpredictable events. The main subject of the book is the cognitive biases which cause human beings to be bad at evaluating probability and among these is the fact that we expect the future to look similar to the recent past. We assume that if we follow the path of the latest superstar entrepreneur that we will arrive at the same result.

Who starts a startup?

What kind of people start high-tech companies? The popular image of the software entrepreneur is of an American wunderkind in the mould of Bill Gates (Microsoft), Larry Page (Google) or Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook). Companies like this created the "startup story". But it's a basic error of logic to think that because many high-profile tech companies have been started by American students (or drop-outs) that they are the only people who can start successful tech companies. As Dawn Douglass asks, why should only young white male geeks get to decide what the Web is?

Interview with Y Combinator Founder Jessica Livingston

Not so long ago high-tech startup funding came in only two flavours; flashy venture capital deals which were all about exit strategies and the "jet money" or the friends and family fund.  Enter seed capital fund Y Combinator. A Y combinator is a program which can run any other program. It's an appropriate metaphor for a company which specialises in getting other companies started. Y Combinator (which launched in 2005) was pioneering in a number of ways. It invested small "seed" amounts in batches of startups, put the selected startups through an intense 3-month program to develop a prototype and introduced the founders to an ecosystem of investors, experts and other startups. The emphasis was on letting developers do what they do best - make things - while helping them with all the other aspects of launching a company. Y Combinator has now funded about 145 startups and the funding model has been copied by firms such as TechStars in the US and Seedcamp in Europe. 

I talked to author and Y Combinator founder Jessica Livingston about founders and startups.