Bulldog Financial’s Bullblog

I met Chris Schultz of Voodoo Ventures at BarCampHouston back in June.  Even though I’d never knew that he existed until I met him, he was the sole reason I got involved with BarCamp in the first place. I wanted to meet bright, energetic, entrepreneurial people who “got it” in the online space. We hit it off immediately and have traded emails and blog comments for the last few weeks. As I’ve gotten to know him a bit better, I realized that my initial assessment was spot on for once - he’s proven to me to be a stand up guy. It takes someone who possesses great character “to know when to fold em”.

In light of the Kiko affair, he just sent me a personal email that explains why he is putting one of his first ventures up for sale. I am copying an excerpt from that email here with the hope that it will generate some interest in the auction. His thoughts and feelings about the decision are extremely insightful and are absolutely worth a read on his blog below.

Speaking of which, we actually have put Huckabuck.com up for sale on eBay.  We have several other projects in the works that are coming up fast this fall, and after examining our resources, opportunities and opportunity costs, we’ve made the decision to try to see if we can spin of Huckabuck to a team that can take it to the next level.   All that being said, we are pretty unsure of how this will turn out, we’re kind of taking a flyer with it.  I know eBay is not the traditional liquidity event that incubators use for their projects, but we want to test the market a little bit with it, and if nothing else it might give interesting insight into how the market values it (right now its $10.50). 

The eBay auction is here: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ih=008&item=180023313880
Huckabucks thoughts on the subject are here: http://www.huckabuck.com/blog/show/57
And my personal musings on the matter are here: http://blogalicio.us/2006/08/30/get-a-huckabuck-on-ebay

The ubiquitous office phones is due for the Web 2.0 treatment. I have an ancient (ok, about 10 years old) AT&T Partner 18D system at my office. The only reason I know the model number is because it’s essentially obsolete and finding add-on cards for multiple extensions and voicemail (4 meg PCMCIA cards!) is very difficult. The only problem in replacing it is that it works for what I need it for - high quality, reliable voice calls. The features for everything else are lacking and show clear signs that they were created and designed long before the Internet changed the way business is done. The guys at 37signals are asking what can be done to fix and enhance the “office phone” and my response is below:

Some UI design and features I’d like to see on “office” phones that are existing cell phone applications:

*Dynamic, In-Context Visual Icons for Hold, 3-Way, Call Transfers, and Forward to Voicemail - my old analog copy machine has in context menus this (it know to use the legal size tray when I put legal size paper on the glass), why can’t my phone?

*Send Button - this is a love it or hate it feature, but I enjoy being able to go back or edit a long strign string of numbers when I make a mistake and basically press ‘enter’ on my cell before it dials.

*Skype and Outlook integration is a given. Skip the middleman (the phone itself) and use http://www.skylook.com

*Bluetooth Application to automatically forward my cell phone to my more reliable, more ergonomic landline handset as soon as I’m in range. This would also allow for seamless switching between VOIP and cell minutes. I also want the same for my home lines. They have some of this technology now, but it’s not wireless or seamless.

*Cellphone/PDA docking station built in to the phone itself. This is not only for recharging, but also to use the existing contact names in my cell phone as my contact list. If the office phone is connected to the network via CAT5, this can obviously be used for sync. The Bluetooth in the item above would cover the data portion of this, but not the physical recharging.

*Array mic speakerphone - this is getting better, but many speakerphone calls still sound like they did in the late 80’s - like shouting at each other through a tunnel.

*USB Hub integration  - The phone can and should be another computer peripheral. I still want my phone to be a separate device, because I don’t want my computer crash to affect my phone call, but it can easily act as another USB hub, or multi-card reading device.

*Automatic Recording/Transcribing - Forget the wiretapping and privacy issues for a second and think how great it would be for your voice conversations to be voice-recognized text that can easily be attached to email threads and work projects. Imagine how this feature would affect professionals that bill by the hour. A clear record that could be used by accounting software (QuickBooks, Great Plains, etc.) and compliance programs (think stock brokers and Sarbanes-Oxley) would be a very useful feature.

*Real-Time Translation - this is a very specialized feature, but with “good enough” voice recognition, languages can be translated as scrolling text on the screen while you are on the call. This would also be very helpful for those awkward situations where you can’t understand the same language that is heavily accented as is the case where the English is not the native tongue for one of the speakers, but the conversation is held in English.

I’d like to know what other features you’d like to see in a office phone in my comments.

With BarCampEarth coming up this weekend I thought that I’d post about what I learned from my experiences. I recently had both the pleasure and headache of co-hosting BarCampHouston and I’d like to relay a few tips to future “unconference” organizers. First off, Scott Lake of JadedPixel, the creators of Web 2.0 shopping cart Shopify said it best in this blog post:

“An unconference is a conference where the content of the meeting is driven and created by the particpants rather than by a single organizer. The cool thing about BarCamp is that generally all attendees must give a demo, a session, or help with one. In short, BarCamp is a way for those of us in Ottawa’s high-tech community to get together, meet each other, swap stories and experiences, and discuss all the great things that we are doing.”

You will need the following things to successfully create and host an unconference:

• Theme or Idea
• People
• Co-Hosts
• Volunteers
• VIP Attendees
• The “Masses”
• Location
• Time and Date 
• Space
• Seating
• Amenities
• Food
• WiFi
• Projectors and Screens
• Nametags
• Communication and Promotion
• Website
• wiki
• forum
• Logo
• Flyers 
• T-Shirts
• Stickers
• Follow Up

The word “Incubator” is a holdover concept from the dotcom bubble days and has been a four letter word to investors after Idealabs spectacular implosion, it makes sense to rethink the idea in terms of the new Web 2.0 landscape. The idea is that you collect talented people, and give them the time and resources to create businesses, while they in turn give you a percentage of the company. VC’s used to call this their “entrepreneur-in-residence” programs. A lot of these incubators looked more like executive suites in that they provided the resources like desks, phones, net access and secretarial support for a fee. Times have certainly changed.

What if instead of the classic scenario of a small group of founding programmers starting up a company, and then looking for money, the investors themselves get into the game directly? The costs of bootstrapping a web company have been drastically reduced – to the point where almost any cash strapped student can do it nowadays. This is of course based on cheap hardware and web hosting hosting, simplified programming languages and tools like Ruby on Rails and most importantly the maturing market where 55% of the US has broadband access and more and more people are figuring it out what to do with it.

Instead of waiting around for entrepreneurs to come to investors with ideas, some forward thinking investors are taking a proactive approach by creating the foundation to do projects “in-house” themselves. This is the exact opposite of what a true startup should be - discovering an existing problem and then solving it. Its more like starting up a tool factory -we build the hammers, you find the nails. Sites like elance and programmermeetdesigner along with job boards on Web 2.0 sites like alarm:clock, Techcrunch, Good Experience and 37signals makes it exceedingly easy for investors and entrepreneurs to find the talent that they’ll need.

Some groups I know personally who are doing this right now are:

http://spur.weblogswork.com/
http://www.cambrianhouse.com/
http://www.voodooventures.com/
http://www.ycombinator.com/
http://www.juntopartners.com/
http://www.creeris.com/

I have one friend of mine who after hearing me rant about how great Web 2.0 companies are, put an ad on Craigslist asking for entrepreneurial minded programmers to work on start up ideas. I wasn’t surprised when he told me he had 40 responses in a day, and 10 of them being good enough to pursue. The temptation is too strong to resist for me and I’m very seriously considering this myself.

Two friends of mine and occasional poker buddies have done extremely well with their company, IREIT and I just happened upon an feauture article about them in a major trade journal. Bob Martin and Marc Ostrofsky even mentioned that they met at a Houston Angel Network meeting, which makes me doubly proud of them.

The company buys domain names in bulk and at last count they were just shy of 500,000 that they then aggregate the traffic for Google and Yahoo. Great business model - and clearly successful, I’m just sorry I didn’t jump on board when they gave me the opportunity a few months back.

This is a brilliant post about user interface versus end results - Are your users stuck in “P” mode? by Kathy Sierra of the Creating Passionate Users blog who hits the nail on the head with the basic premise that consumer technology has focused almost exclusively on features (what you could do) and not results (what you should do). One lesson I learned while studying film (the other two were “If you work from home, get dressed like you’re going to work and basic three-point lighting) was “you must learn the rules before you learn how to break them”. This is exactly what most consumers or worse “pro-sumers” are missing - a basic understanding of the “Rules”. A prime example of this is a good friend of mine who bought an outrageously expensive digital camera, but didn’t know the “Rule of Threes” (Which I guess is one more lesson I picked up in film school) . It basically says you have to visualize youre subject in a nine-section box (think tic-tac-toe) and shoot your subject in one adjacent section of three to visually balance the shot. I’ll guarantee that in the multi-hundred page manual that talked about f-stops and low light compensation – it doesn’t once mention this fundamental guideline for taking “good” pictures. This is why I don’t think that true experts will ever go away and continue to make money on “Missing Manual”- type books, even if the tools become point-and-shoot simple, which they obviously have in the digital camera arena. There will always be an aesthetic to things which will need a trained eye to discern and no amount of gee-whiz technology will ever compensate for that.

Forty Media is a boutique web design and development firm in Arizona. I found them from their CEO who posted a panel proposal for SXSW. They are so confident in their abilities that they proclaim “we only build beautiful products” and even have a full page of links to their competitors, daring you to shop around. I respect the heck out of those who value themselves highly and don’t mind shouting it from the rooftops.

The SXSW INTERACTIVE FESTIVAL is the premier internet technology conference in Texas, which I highly recommend you attend in March. I would be very grateful if you would take a few moments to vote for the panel discussions proposed by me and some of my friends that are very active in the Texas technology communities. Thank You.

Please Vote Here in the following order: http://2007.sxsw.com/interactive/panel_picker/
 
1.       Angel Investment: The New Black in Startup Financing
2.       How to Shoestring Your Startup
3.       Web 2.0 Business Models, or If You Build It Will They Pay?
4.       Podcasting - What’s it going to Take to Mainstream the Technology?
5.       What’s Next for Podcasting
6.       The A List vs. the Pay List
7.       Unstructured: Why Free Form Conferences and Groups work - and Don’t
8.       Building the 3D Web: Real Companies Discover Virtual Worlds
9.       ValleySpeak for the Rest of Us: Developing Apps Outside InternetVille
10.     United We Stand, Divided We Fall: Alternatives to RSS

I’m tracking votes if you’d like to leave a comment in my blog here: http://bulldogfinancial.com/bullblog/?p=16

Kelsey Ruger’s blog post here: http://www.themoleskin.com/archives/sxsw-interactive-panel-picker/

SXSW Interactive: An incubator of new, cutting-edge technology, the SXSW INTERACTIVE FESTIVAL is ground zero for the world’s most creative web developers, designers, bloggers, wireless innovators and new media entrepreneurs. Four days of captivating keynote presentations and scintillating panel sessions provide hands-on training as well as big-picture analysis of the future of this industry. In addition to the numerous business opportunities at the three-day Trade Show & Exhibition, SXSW Interactive provides a full array of exciting evening events to entertain attendees. SXSW Interactive 2007 will take place March 9 - 13, 2007.

This link was completely inspired by Dharmesh Shah’s truly excellent post.

I am a proud and active member of a number of investor oriented groups - the two most prominent local ones are the Houston Angel Network (HAN) and the Rice Technology and Entrepreneurs Alliance.

As a member of these groups and others, I’ve had the opportunity to participate in dozens, if not hundreds of group pitches over the last few years. No matter which group event you are attending, the audience tends to have the same regulars as they are usually the most active angels in town. As these people are my peers and potential co-investors, I’ve gotten to know their some of their quirks and habits over time. Most angels are very quiet during the pitches, whether that’s from BAD (Blackberry Addiction Disorder) or out of polite respect,  I don’t know. They don’t ask questions and certainly don’t interrupt. Some angels, especially those that are involved with the deals or know the principals ask softball questions that they already know the answers to beforehand. This is designed to look like the Pitcher is handling a tough question in a high pressure situation and sometimes it makes them look great. However, it can backfire if the audience knows about the relationship between that asker and the askee. The third type is the investor who actively tries to discredit the entreprenuer. This can take the form of balking at adoption rates or pointing out competing technologies or dismissing the company be saying “it’s been tried before”. This is most common with people who are engineers by background - they sometimes have “Not Invented Here” syndrome. I don’t understand this mentality and one of these guys once told me he did it to see if the CEO can think on his feet. This test is not only unecessary, it is harmful to the deal and the investor. One negative comment hanging in the air can kill a deal faster than a hockey stick revenue growth curve can make a deal.

A few rules that I’d like investors to adopt when listening to pitches in a group setting are in no particular order:

• Ask informed questions - there are no stupid questions, but there are irrelevant and ignorant ones.
• Encourage the entreprenuer - remember that they’re nervous and they think that you hold their dreams in your hands.
• Be polite - to the entrepreuer, the audience and the venue.
• Don’t monopolize the conversation - you don’t always need to speak or have the last word.
• Don’t interrupt - typically there is a set time for the pitches, and by interrupting you break the rhythm and flow of even the most practiced pitch.
• Keep complex questions for follow up meetings
• Don’t stink up the room - They only have one bite at the apple, and your negative question could very well stop all conversation.
• Ask a question - don’t ever make a statement - it’s not about your opinion or how smart you think you are.
• Don’t argue - disagree without being disagreeable
• Treat entreprenuers like they could be the next Bill Gates - that’s why you’re all there right?