gnipping off to melbourne, funding the aussie social graph + why australia should copy colorado.
It seems to have been blow'n 70km-90kms'n'hour icy winds for the last week, which is easy to motivate u to stay inside (and exercise @gym with foxsports rather than down the beach :) Anyway I'm off to Melbourne today, my week seems to consist of 4 single meetings on different days, which makes about 6 hours of meeting for 16 hours of driving. Almost a 3:1 drive to meet ratio, with my goal for it to be the opposite.
Anyway, my real goal is within 6 weeks to get a place closer to the cauldron (docklands or aspendale, there needs to be water and fast internet) And on the law of averages/meetings, we've got multiple office offers, a solid number of new and existing investors, a % of which will close - so i just need to CLOSE + pull out my part from it. Separating yourself from the company in the abstract, and ensuring u have yourself setup, vs the company being perfect for due diligence etc is a challenge. Namely, u have to put the company first. Pay others before yourself. Pay others before you get paid, all that. The grass is always greener and this is where u envy contractors invoicing for $100-$150 per hour and taking no project risk. Or employees that would bitchnmoan if there pay went in a day late as it would mess up mortgage repayments. But been there dont that and professional services business models are hard to build an asset on, well a web2 asset anyway! So u need to know what asset u r building...
Oops I think all that was meant to go in my moleskine*... all I was going to say in my post is I'm impressed by gnip, I almost assumed it was a foundry investment, being the colorado based rss meets implicit web expert vc's (their early investments in technorati, feedburner and newsgator motivated me to start my company feedcorp) - And I cant help but ponder what would happen when you have a gnip type service/backend, with the ability to ping and filter content by location (and other intelligence data points such as company names mentioned on twitter).. what some of the applications could be. My second Santa Claus wish while I'm stargazing is for more foundry type investors outside colorado. Or for local investors to become more Colorado'n. Altho I guess the techstars/ycombinator argument is that entrepreneurs should be ready to move locations to be nearer investments. I dont disagree with this for 22 yr olds, but also when a large part of your business is local and in localisation, u need to be where u r. Not to say its the right place tho!
Excuse the obtuse post, lack of caffeine, go gnip. Im gnipping off to Melbourne and go past the Motel on Eastlink which saved me 15mins on Monday as I didnt realise the Frankston Freeway now becomes Eastlink becomes the Monash. Schweet, no more Springvale Road. More Road Toll$ gnip on Foundry Blog : "Data sharing between two services is no big deal. It happens every day using RSS, Atom, XMPP, and open APIs. Two years ago this was still a novel idea and the power of an API could project a company like Twitter into geek mainstream overnight.. A ping server was really helpful here.. Everyone realized how important it was to have an API and allow for data portability. The many-to-one problem morphed into a many-to-many problem. With this, things started to get hairy. In addition to having to deal with performance and scale, every web service has its own special API format. If you were a new web service and wanted to talk to a bunch of other web services, you had to write a bunch of code.. Scale the number of web services linearly. Scale the number of users linearly. Scale the number of daily interactions linearly. You get a nice steep upward sloping geometric curve (the kind that VCs love).. Imagine Flickr, Digg, and Plaxo all trying to “talk” with each of the other’s services on behalf of each of their millions of users with no intermediary and you begin to understand the magnitude of the problem. Gnip plans to sit in the middle of this and transform all of these interactions back to many-to-one where there are many web services talking to one centralized service - Gnip"
* What scares me when I read some of the debate going on in the commentline on marketingmag blog about the value of #pubcamp type conference, is that even though its great there are conferences like these (overall think they did really well generating their 15 minutes into at least 17!), and that post conference debate is going on (people care, tick) the two sides of the debate are arguing a redundant at best 2004 debate. Really its a 1997 about the role of newspapers, and the difference between bloggers and journalists, who in reality are often the same people. Now compare this Australian pubcamp debate to what problems the gnips of this world, being backed by foundry in colorado are doing. Providing the glue between all these social networks' API's.
Eleven years ago when i started at ninemsn the business was started by a $25m each party capital injection (someone correct me if my memory/numbers are wrong) by Microsoft and PBL. Basically Daniel Petre convinced James Packer that these future online businesses were going to be significant businesses : And so in the second half of the 90's alot of building happened in Australia in the web space. Alot of mistakes but also the survivors and winners : Hitwise, Seek, Realestate, Carsales, ninemsn (even now with its challenges) and so on. Ones that burnt strong for awhile such as dstore, looksmart, wishlist were important companies none the less.
While we have a very similar, if much too late trend where Australia is where US was in 2004 - what is lacking which I seem to crap on about continually is no placing the large bets, or even the "sufficient" bets, where enough capital is provided to explore/attack the designated opportunities (relative to their size) - to paraphrase a masters entrepreneurial finance class I did. For example how much would it cost to fund the infrastructure building blocks around the Australian Social Graph ? To be able index the Australian Social Graph, rank it, partition, slicendice it? To provide open API's so nighttime pro developers, university hacks could create new products out of The Graph ? There could be alot of innovation, it's (only) a $1m-$2m funding requirement. In the US, you'd say it's almost an overfunded sector. "Oh you are pitching the social graph." Here if you are startup generating $200k a quarter, it's "still too early" and "Come back to me when u have 20 customers, rather than 5, for what u r talking about."
The compounding factor is lack of companies funded in the space, and Australian being 4 years behind, means our teams, experiences and people are suitably illequipped to build an Aussie Social Graph company/collective/public asset. So investors can easily say the team or company isnt world class enough to compete against the Colorado/Mountain View Co's. (who lets face it, wont be indexing the Aussie social graph anytime soon)
Ok ill be running late soon ill leave this 2 streams of consciousness posts in one, mid stream. My summary is the Australian wannabe 2.0 investor scene (if there is one, heck if there one person even) could do worse than follow Colorado, and the model they have working there ! A starting point would be indexing the Aussie Social Graph....
Anyway, my real goal is within 6 weeks to get a place closer to the cauldron (docklands or aspendale, there needs to be water and fast internet) And on the law of averages/meetings, we've got multiple office offers, a solid number of new and existing investors, a % of which will close - so i just need to CLOSE + pull out my part from it. Separating yourself from the company in the abstract, and ensuring u have yourself setup, vs the company being perfect for due diligence etc is a challenge. Namely, u have to put the company first. Pay others before yourself. Pay others before you get paid, all that. The grass is always greener and this is where u envy contractors invoicing for $100-$150 per hour and taking no project risk. Or employees that would bitchnmoan if there pay went in a day late as it would mess up mortgage repayments. But been there dont that and professional services business models are hard to build an asset on, well a web2 asset anyway! So u need to know what asset u r building...
Oops I think all that was meant to go in my moleskine*... all I was going to say in my post is I'm impressed by gnip, I almost assumed it was a foundry investment, being the colorado based rss meets implicit web expert vc's (their early investments in technorati, feedburner and newsgator motivated me to start my company feedcorp) - And I cant help but ponder what would happen when you have a gnip type service/backend, with the ability to ping and filter content by location (and other intelligence data points such as company names mentioned on twitter).. what some of the applications could be. My second Santa Claus wish while I'm stargazing is for more foundry type investors outside colorado. Or for local investors to become more Colorado'n. Altho I guess the techstars/ycombinator argument is that entrepreneurs should be ready to move locations to be nearer investments. I dont disagree with this for 22 yr olds, but also when a large part of your business is local and in localisation, u need to be where u r. Not to say its the right place tho!
Excuse the obtuse post, lack of caffeine, go gnip. Im gnipping off to Melbourne and go past the Motel on Eastlink which saved me 15mins on Monday as I didnt realise the Frankston Freeway now becomes Eastlink becomes the Monash. Schweet, no more Springvale Road. More Road Toll$ gnip on Foundry Blog : "Data sharing between two services is no big deal. It happens every day using RSS, Atom, XMPP, and open APIs. Two years ago this was still a novel idea and the power of an API could project a company like Twitter into geek mainstream overnight.. A ping server was really helpful here.. Everyone realized how important it was to have an API and allow for data portability. The many-to-one problem morphed into a many-to-many problem. With this, things started to get hairy. In addition to having to deal with performance and scale, every web service has its own special API format. If you were a new web service and wanted to talk to a bunch of other web services, you had to write a bunch of code.. Scale the number of web services linearly. Scale the number of users linearly. Scale the number of daily interactions linearly. You get a nice steep upward sloping geometric curve (the kind that VCs love).. Imagine Flickr, Digg, and Plaxo all trying to “talk” with each of the other’s services on behalf of each of their millions of users with no intermediary and you begin to understand the magnitude of the problem. Gnip plans to sit in the middle of this and transform all of these interactions back to many-to-one where there are many web services talking to one centralized service - Gnip"
* What scares me when I read some of the debate going on in the commentline on marketingmag blog about the value of #pubcamp type conference, is that even though its great there are conferences like these (overall think they did really well generating their 15 minutes into at least 17!), and that post conference debate is going on (people care, tick) the two sides of the debate are arguing a redundant at best 2004 debate. Really its a 1997 about the role of newspapers, and the difference between bloggers and journalists, who in reality are often the same people. Now compare this Australian pubcamp debate to what problems the gnips of this world, being backed by foundry in colorado are doing. Providing the glue between all these social networks' API's.
Eleven years ago when i started at ninemsn the business was started by a $25m each party capital injection (someone correct me if my memory/numbers are wrong) by Microsoft and PBL. Basically Daniel Petre convinced James Packer that these future online businesses were going to be significant businesses : And so in the second half of the 90's alot of building happened in Australia in the web space. Alot of mistakes but also the survivors and winners : Hitwise, Seek, Realestate, Carsales, ninemsn (even now with its challenges) and so on. Ones that burnt strong for awhile such as dstore, looksmart, wishlist were important companies none the less.
While we have a very similar, if much too late trend where Australia is where US was in 2004 - what is lacking which I seem to crap on about continually is no placing the large bets, or even the "sufficient" bets, where enough capital is provided to explore/attack the designated opportunities (relative to their size) - to paraphrase a masters entrepreneurial finance class I did. For example how much would it cost to fund the infrastructure building blocks around the Australian Social Graph ? To be able index the Australian Social Graph, rank it, partition, slicendice it? To provide open API's so nighttime pro developers, university hacks could create new products out of The Graph ? There could be alot of innovation, it's (only) a $1m-$2m funding requirement. In the US, you'd say it's almost an overfunded sector. "Oh you are pitching the social graph." Here if you are startup generating $200k a quarter, it's "still too early" and "Come back to me when u have 20 customers, rather than 5, for what u r talking about."
The compounding factor is lack of companies funded in the space, and Australian being 4 years behind, means our teams, experiences and people are suitably illequipped to build an Aussie Social Graph company/collective/public asset. So investors can easily say the team or company isnt world class enough to compete against the Colorado/Mountain View Co's. (who lets face it, wont be indexing the Aussie social graph anytime soon)
Ok ill be running late soon ill leave this 2 streams of consciousness posts in one, mid stream. My summary is the Australian wannabe 2.0 investor scene (if there is one, heck if there one person even) could do worse than follow Colorado, and the model they have working there ! A starting point would be indexing the Aussie Social Graph....
posted by redbarren at 10:40 AM
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