My name is Oli. I live in London where I train, study, and experiment with cool ideas. I am a Geographer, Athlete, Foodie, Tech Enthusiast and Idea Developer. Click here to find out more...
The first news program from RU:ON, Reading Universities TV station, featuring my new business and entrepreneurship segments came out yesterday. This is the first time I have done a shoot with RU:ON so it could definitely be improved but it’s a definite step in the right direction to making business and entrepreneurship more popular at universities.
You can see my segment from 5:45 in to the news. Also check out the other RU:ON shows at RUON.tv
Twitter the micro-bloging website has been a revolution in social networking and become the darling of the web world. Considering this very little is known about it’s founder Jack Dorsey. This is all about to change . The following is the first ever full length interview Jack Dorsey has ever conducted. Thanks to Vanity Fair for the article.
This is a fantastic interview.
Oli
Ps: If you want to hear more from Jack Dorsey check out Kevin Rose’s Foundat.io/n for another great video interview. Foundat.io/n Interview.
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The tale of Twitter begins in 1984, in the bedroom of an eight-year-old boy in downtown St. Louis.
Little Jack Dorsey was obsessed with maps of cities. He papered his walls with maps from magazines, transit maps, maps from gas stations. His parents had resisted joining the emigration to the suburbs, and their shy, skinny son supported them by becoming a passionate proponent of city life. He was mesmerized by locomotives, police cars, and taxis. He would drag his younger brother Danny to nearby rail yards, where they waited just to videotape a passing train.
When their father brought home the family’s first computer that year—an IBM PC Jr.—Jack immediately took to it. He had a talent for both math and art, and began to design his own maps using a graphics program. Soon, he taught himself programming to learn how to make little dots—representing trains and buses—scoot around the maps. He spent hours listening to police and ambulance radio frequencies, then plotted the emergency vehicles as they moved toward an accident or a hospital. As he evolved into a talented teenage programmer, he came to an oddly poetic view of this precise, orderly urban grid. “I wanted to play with how the city worked, so I could see it,” Dorsey recalls.
His obsession with cities—and with programming—never abated. By early 2006, having dropped out of N.Y.U. and bouncing between jobs, he found himself working for a San Francisco software start-up called Odeo, which was going nowhere. One day he proposed an idea to his boss based on a notion that Dorsey had been noodling over for years. He was fascinated by the haiku of taxicab communication—the way drivers and dispatchers succinctly convey locations by radio. Dorsey suggested that his company create a service that would allow anyone to write a line or two about himself, using a cell phone’s keypad, and then send that message to anyone who wanted to receive it. The short text alert, for him, was a way to add a missing human element to the digital picture of a pulsing, populated city.
Odeo’s Evan Williams embraced the idea, and named the 29-year-old Dorsey the founding C.E.O. of a new company, Twitter. The rest has become a peculiarly prominent part of Internet history. Twitter, celebrating its fifth anniversary, is now one of the signature social platforms of our day, drawing 200 million users. Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have all reportedly been vying to buy the company for more than $8 billion. And Twitter is so central to modern culture that when popular uprisings swept through the Middle East this year many of the protesters coordinated their movements by tweeting. Indeed, Dorsey’s invention is helping transform communication and political life across the globe.
So why have you heard so little about this man who is one of the visionaries of the Digital Age? Why don’t you know that in 2000 he dropped everything to pursue a career in botanical illustration? Or that he studied for a year to become a certified massage therapist, or more recently took classes in fashion design (making an impressive pencil skirt), or has already set his sights on his dream job: mayor of New York City?
Well, first off, Dorsey is reserved and modest and, until now, has avoided cooperating for a full-scale profile. Over the years, he has tended to view himself more as a craftsman than an entrepreneur. His was an idea for a service, not a company. He launched it from inside a somewhat disorganized corporate culture, owned by someone else. Plus, back then, Dorsey was not the greatest manager. Williams and the board pushed him out within two years. And although Dorsey remains chairman of the company, he was out the door by the time Twitter had become a cultural force. What’s more, Dorsey and Williams, to this day, rarely speak to each other beyond occasional exchanges at board meetings.
Jack Dorsey’s belief in the power of Twitter, however, has never waned. (One incentive: he’s the second-largest individual shareholder in the company.) Several months ago, Dorsey re-ignited his relationship with Twitter’s management, though only after Williams, 38, had agreed to step down as C.E.O., last October. That said, Dorsey has a lot on his plate. In 2009 he discovered something that excited him just as much as Twitter. That’s when he co-founded Square, where he is now C.E.O. Square is a service that allows any individual or small business to easily accept payment by credit card; users simply download an app, attach a plastic square to a tablet or a mobile phone, and then swipe a card through a slot. Just as Twitter made anyone a broadcaster or pundit or diarist, Square can make anyone a merchant.
Dorsey may belong to Gen X, but he is a throwback to a kind of heartland idealism we associate with earlier generations. His optimism flows mostly from a St. Louis-bred spirit about our common life, democracy, and human potential. He claims his inventions all aim at the same goal: a society that works more efficiently and humanely. “My role as an observer and as a technologist,” he says as he strides through a San Francisco rainstorm, holding a big blue umbrella, “is to show everything that’s happening in the world in real time and get us to that data immediately, so we can change our lives even faster, with better knowledge.” (Urban strolls are one of Dorsey’s favorite activities, and he has specifically asked to be interviewed while meandering around San Francisco and New York.)
The minimalism of Twitter—each tweet can be no longer than 140 characters—reflects Dorsey’s own terseness. “What makes Jack magic is his precision,” says his friend Ashton Kutcher, who spent a week with Dorsey on a State Department-sponsored trip to Russia. “When he speaks he makes every syllable count.” Dorsey is also close to actress (and avid Twitterer) Alyssa Milano, who, like Kutcher, is struck by what Dorsey doesn’t do. He can easily captivate a room full of celebrities, she says, but not because he seeks attention. “He never really says what he does for a living,” she explains. “I’m usually the one bragging about his achievements.”
Dorsey’s is the highly considered life of a purist. His ardent asceticism has only recently been leavened with a dollop of luxury. For years he gave away the software he wrote as shareware. His apartment in San Francisco’s Mint Plaza area is spacious but austere and immaculate. It wasn’t until a few months ago that he bought his first car—a BMW M3, whose design he admires. Lately, he has become partial to Prada suits, worn with a white shirt and dark tie. His iPad case is not the functional microfiber Apple model, but an envelope of hand-sewn gray felt. When he shops, he seeks the ne plus ultra in quality and durability because he expects to keep each item for life: a Filson leather-and-canvas shoulder bag; a Shaker bench; a Rolex, because its maker is one of the few watch companies, he says, that manufacture their own parts.
And how many tech nerds admire Balanchine and Diaghilev? “I’ve learned a lot from ballet,” reports Dorsey, whose most recent serious relationship was with Sofiane Sylve, a principal dancer with the San Francisco Ballet. “I appreciate the coordination and the discipline. Making something simple is very difficult.” (He is currently single and remains mum about his personal life, devoting most of his waking hours to his two companies.)
A black, nine-inch tattoo, in the shape of a thick S, runs down Jack Dorsey’s left forearm. But one can ignore the outlaw implications: this is a man whose first act each day is to text his mother. Dorsey intends the tattoo as a reference to his interests in math, music, and anatomy. First, it represents an integral. “It symbolizes integrating everything,” explains Dorsey, somewhat cryptically. He also sees it as the musical notation for F-sharp (“When I was small I played the violin,” he says) as well as a human clavicle (“the most graceful bone in the body”). Observes Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital, who just led an investment of $27.5 million in Square, “People who know what an integral is would generally not have tattoos. It sums up what makes Jack an interesting entrepreneur—his ability to blend ideas.”
One brisk December day, Dorsey, 34, is leaving Third Rail, an artisanal coffee shop he frequents in New York’s West Village. As he walks, he is unusually effusive. “I just had a meeting I’ve been wanting to have since I was 14,” he says gleefully, “with the taxi-and-limousine commissioner.” Their topic: “Technology in cabs. Making transactions faster and easier and more informational. I said, ‘Anything you guys need. This was my first passion. I’m happy to help.’ ” He thinks the city ought to rip out the intrusive, noisy, balky video screens in the backseats of cabs and instead install Apple iPads equipped with a credit-card reader from Square.
His interest in New York City government goes surprisingly deep. And although he currently lives in San Francisco, his ultimate aspiration is to become mayor of New York. He’s even spoken to Michael Bloomberg about it. (According to Dorsey, the current mayor’s advice—no surprise—was to make a lot of money first. Dorsey’s personal wealth may well exceed $300 million.) He knows this all sounds a bit ridiculous, but he’s not apologetic in the slightest. Dreaming of running America’s largest metropolis is a way of keeping himself focused on what matters to him. “What gets me really energized,” he says, sitting on a bench near the fountain in Washington Square, “is thinking about activity within a city. Like, even this intersection at the end of Fifth Avenue, seeing all the taxicabs turn. There’s such a rush of energy constantly coursing through.”
By the time Dorsey was in high school he was writing rudimentary software programs that could be used to dispatch taxis, ambulances, or delivery couriers. His mother, Marcia Dorsey, owned a small coffee shop in town. One day someone from a local software company came in and mentioned that he was desperate to hire new programmers. “My son loves computers,” she told him. Jack, then 15, was soon standing in the firm’s reception area.
Jim McKelvey, who owned the company (which archived documents onto CD-ROMs) and who today is Dorsey’s partner in Square, recalls that first meeting in 1992. “I was sitting at a terminal entering all this data, and this kid walks up behind me, with his arms straight at his sides. He was like [McKelvey speaks in a robotic voice], ‘Hi, I’m Jack.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll be with you in a minute,’ and I turned around and completely forgot about him until I had to get up to pee. Jack was in exactly the same position. He’d been motionless for 45 minutes.”
McKelvey took Dorsey on as an intern and learned that this awkward teenager could swiftly master most computing tasks. When McKelvey began to worry his company could get killed by an online competitor, he found that Dorsey was the only one on his small staff who agreed on the need to migrate the business onto the fledgling Internet. McKelvey hired several freelancers for the project. “One guy asked me, ‘What’s my job title going to be?’ I said, ‘Assistant to the summer intern.’ He was basically a stick figure. I said, ‘Just do everything this kid says.’ ”
Dorsey kept improving as a programmer. His parents didn’t want him too far from home, so he enrolled at the University of Missouri at Rolla and, as a hobby, wrote dispatch software for emergency vehicles and couriers. (Dorsey is unusually good at staying focused.) In his junior year he wandered through the Web site of DMS, a large courier-dispatch company. Burrowing into its computers, he found the e-mail of the C.E.O. and wrote to him. “I said, ‘You have a [security] hole in your Web site. Here’s how to fix it. And, by the way, I write dispatch software,’ ” recalls Dorsey.
Says Greg Kidd, the nonplussed C.E.O., “I had one conversation with him, and I said, ‘I don’t want to get you in trouble with your mother, but would you come to New York?’ It was pretty clear this was a guy I wanted to have working for me.” Dorsey wasn’t yet 21. He transferred to N.Y.U. and became one of the two lead programmers at DMS—in his spare time. Kidd, like McKelvey, has remained a Dorsey friend and ally ever since.
As the dot-com frenzy grew in 1998, Kidd and Dorsey moved to San Francisco. The businessman and his coder-sidekick launched dNet, for dispatching couriers online. They raised money, hired a C.E.O., and then the tech bubble burst. In a disagreement over strategy, the new boss kicked the co-founders out. It was the first but not the last time Dorsey would find himself ejected from a firm he’d helped start.
Dorsey had always kept a journal. For a while, he’d been considering the ways in which technology might streamline that process. With one of the earliest mobile e-mail devices from Research in Motion, he tapped out brief notes to himself wherever he went. He wrote software to categorize the e-mails as journal entries. He was also an early user of LiveJournal, which let you see friends’ posts in reverse chronological order. Then, one night in July 2000, Dorsey realized that by combining these tools he could do for himself what he had spent years helping taxis and couriers do: declare where he was and what he was doing. That evening, he wrote some code that enabled him to have an e-mail re-posted to as many people as he wanted. He entered the e-mail addresses of five friends into the software, and took a walk in Golden Gate Park. In an e-mail’s subject line he wrote, “I’m at the Bison Paddock watching the bison.”
His friends weren’t impressed. “I quickly learned that, first, no one else had a mobile e-mail device, so the system was kind of useless,” Dorsey says. “And secondly, no one really cared what I was doing in the park.” Dorsey kept refining the concept, however, and in 2001 sketched out a rudimentary template for a service called Stat.us.
After the dNet disaster, Dorsey returned to St. Louis and began studying botanical illustration at the Missouri Botanical Garden. As a teenager, he had spent hours in gardens, drawing with a graphite pencil. Suddenly, he considered this hobby a possible career path. He indulged his fascination with the challenge of precisely rendering a flower’s intricate details. “I fell in love with flora of all types, especially ferns. Loved the sparse structure and repetition of shape—almost fractal.” Illustrating flowers, like programming, was a “perfect intersection of art and science.”
But shortly thereafter, deciding that illustration really wasn’t for him, his wrist started hurting. He went to a massage therapist for treatment and, in short order, became consumed by the field. After a thousand hours of training he was certified and returned to San Francisco, where he moved into a shed in Kidd’s backyard. He quickly learned, to his dismay, that the city had a surfeit of massage therapists. So, while working as a nanny for Kidd’s daughter, Dorsey started thinking again about software—and that message he’d sent from Golden Gate Park.
He did some freelance coding for a harbor-ferry service. He almost got fired for having a nose ring. He wore his hair in dreadlocks; he had earrings in both ears. When he heard that a start-up called Odeo might be hiring programmers, he e-mailed a résumé. It was a typical Dorsey exercise in minimalism. Evan Williams, Odeo’s boss, remembers it reading “Jack,” with no last name. “It had just a few words—a list of companies where he’d worked,” says Williams, who signed him to a three-week trial contract. Dorsey, however, wasn’t too enthused. “It was a podcasting company,” he says. “I had no interest in podcasting. It turns out no one in the company did, either.”
Having second thoughts about programming once again, he enrolled in a fashion class at Apparel Arts, a trade school in San Francisco, and began designing and sewing clothing. “I was fascinated with jeans,” Dorsey explains, “because you can impress your life upon the jeans you wear. The way you sit imprints on the jeans.” It was another nod to the idea of maps. In the same way, botanical illustration, he points out, is the best method for rendering the details of a flower—nuances that even the best cameras can’t capture. And to properly do massage, Dorsey says, one has to map the contours of the body.
Williams had expected his business to be a directory of podcasts. But when Apple incorporated one into iTunes, Odeo’s plans went out the window. In full reset mode, Williams asked his staff for new ideas, and Dorsey laid out his vision for Stat.us. SMS texting had just begun to take off in the U.S., so the time felt right. “Meanwhile, I was still doing this fashion thing,” remembers Dorsey. “I had about 10 classes where we built, from drawings to construction, skirts. Pencil, asymmetrical, mini. I wanted to make jeans, but you start with skirts because they’re easy. Then Twitter started taking off—and I never got to pants.”
Inside Odeo, Dorsey worked closely with several others on the project, then called “twttr.” Biz Stone, Dorsey’s close friend, did the design and user interface. Stone, aged 32 at the time, had written books on blogging and worked on projects that enabled extra-short posts. Like all great ideas, Twitter had many cooks, but no one disputes that the initial brainstorm grew out of Dorsey’s singular obsession. Shortly, they had a working product, and Dorsey authored the first tweet, cogent and Dorsey-esque: “Inviting co-workers.”
Odeo launched Twitter in July 2006, but it wasn’t until the following March that the world took notice. That’s when thousands of participants at the annual South by Southwest Interactive conference, in Austin, spontaneously began using it to swarm. The best parties that year were the ones people learned about on Twitter. The Twitter feeds defined the event for tech cognoscenti, and at Odeo it became apparent that Twitter ought to be spun off as its own company.
Williams had been struggling with Odeo’s investors and eventually bought the company back from them. Twitter seemed promising, but the firm was drifting. Employees were grumbling. Williams didn’t want to run Twitter, but instead to turn Odeo into an incubator for multiple businesses. He needed a C.E.O. But Dorsey, who had headed the venture so far, was just an engineer initially hired as a contractor. “I thought, It’s a risk, because he’d never even been a manager,” says Williams. “But Twitter wasn’t a huge deal at the time, and I thought, He has the vision. He’s got the technical chops. Let’s put him in charge.”
Dorsey got serious. “I took my nose ring out after our first round of financing,” he says, matter-of-factly. Twitter raised $5 million, largely from a single V.C. firm, Union Square Ventures. But managing a new company from Odeo’s wreckage was daunting. “Suddenly I became the boss of all my peers in a very damaged culture,” says Dorsey. “The morale was low.”
Twitter usage continued growing quickly—too quickly. Dorsey and his staff struggled to keep the service from going down. Looking back, Dorsey admits he was a flawed manager: “I let myself be in a weird position because it always felt like Ev’s company. He funded it. He was the chairman. And I was this new guy who was a programmer, who had a good idea. I would not be strong in my convictions, basically, because he was the older, wiser one.” Dorsey did a poor job explaining where he wanted the company to go.
“It just got a lot bigger a lot faster than anyone expected,” says Williams. “A year and a half later we’d raised $20 million, and the servers were crashing every day It wasn’t so much that the ship was sinking, but more ‘Great job, Jack—we’ve got to up our level of experience and lay some foundation for a much bigger organization.’ ” Others say the two were barely speaking by then, and in October 2008, Williams took the C.E.O. job for himself. Dorsey became chairman, but was no longer an employee.
He was devastated to be ejected again from a company that was building a product he’d conceived. “It was like being punched in the stomach,” he says in a rare moment of candor on the subject. Fred Wilson, who had joined Twitter’s board, puts a more benign spin on the breakup: “Ev and Jack are a little like John and Paul. They made great music together for a while, but then they both kind of got ambitious about things and didn’t see eye to eye anymore.”
Dorsey no longer wanted to make pants or draw flowers. He now thought of himself as an entrepreneur. And Twitter’s impact loomed large. “Twitter held all my desires in the world,” says Dorsey. He began talking with his old pal McKelvey, trying to come up with a monster concept to build a company around. “I would go, ‘That’s a great idea, Twitter should do that one,’ ” says Dorsey. “Jim was getting frustrated.” Then one day McKelvey, something of a Renaissance man, had a bad experience in his St. Louis glassblowing studio. Having handed over the reins of his software firm, he had begun to make things like hand-blown colored-glass bathroom-sink handles—for $2,000 a pair. A customer, however, had to abandon a purchase because McKelvey wasn’t equipped to accept an American Express card.
He was telling Dorsey about the botched sale as they talked on their iPhones. “I was struck with the irony,” says McKelvey. “I’m talking to my business partner on this device that has all the technology I need to solve the problem I just had.” He suddenly proposed that they build a system that would let people make and accept credit-card payments on smartphones. “I’m like, ‘Wow—this is pretty interesting,’ ” says Dorsey. “This is actually another dot that is more activity on the map.”
In time, they conceived of a business around a free device that would be dispensed to anyone who signed up: a tiny, square-shaped credit-card reader that could be plugged into the headphone jack of an iPhone, Android phone, or electronic tablet. Unlike more complex and pricier plans set up between storeowners and credit-card companies, Square would charge the same fee to everyone (from flea-market merchants to dog-walkers to kids at lemonade stands): it’s now 2.75 percent. Says Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook and a buddy of Dorsey’s, “Maybe Square can become for Craigslist what PayPal is for eBay.”
Dorsey takes his design inspiration from Apple’s Steve Jobs, whom he reveres. And he sees himself, like Jobs, producing an integrated system in a business where others have assembled kludgy agglomerations. “Payment is another form of communication,” he says, “but it’s never been treated as such. It’s never been designed. It’s never felt magical. About 90 percent of Americans carry cards, but almost nobody can accept them. We want to balance that out and just make payments feel amazing.” Dorsey talks about how Square must be “pixel-perfect,” and staffers tell stories about him agonizing over the exact location and thickness of a line on e-mailed receipts.
Dorsey’s ambitions for Square are suitably grand. “I think Twitter is the future of communications,” he says, “and Square will be the payment network. We’re going big.”
“Jack’s biggest insights have nothing to do with technology,” says Greg Kidd. “His insights are always social first. It’s always a democratization machine. Why should you have to ask permission to take a payment? That’s how the banks treat you now.” Cory Booker, Newark’s aggressively innovative mayor, is another Dorsey fan. “Even the way he talks about Square is about social justice,” the mayor says. “Frankly, I’m in awe of him.” (Square helped Newark build a system to accept matching donations after Dorsey’s leading business rival, Facebook C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg, gave the city’s schools $100 million.)
“We dream about backing people who have that kind of character—purity, authenticity, but just deep optimism,” says Peter Fenton, a partner at Benchmark Capital, who invested in Twitter in 2009 and has helped lure Dorsey back as a day-a-week product adviser and strategist. “This is a guy who doesn’t have a negative bone in his body.” Adds philanthropist Ray Chambers, a mentor of Dorsey’s who is the U.N. secretary-general’s special envoy for malaria, “At the core of his being, he really wants to make the world a better place.”
Jack Dorsey has spent a lot of time thinking about what went wrong at Twitter. And as Square’s C.E.O., he bends over backward to be explicit, to communicate, to guide. He hosts a “town square” company meeting every Friday, where he talks about aspirations and values. To help his 78-person staff better understand why he considers design so important, he organizes trips to visit “beautiful things.” Recently—in an inadvertent echo of an episode of Mad Men (in which employees sneak into the boss’s office to gawk at his confounding new Mark Rothko painting)—Dorsey took a group to SFMoMA, where he asked them to meet at a designated time in front of a massive Rothko, its image the shape of a square.
One recent town-square meeting, in fact, was devoted to the aesthetic virtues of the Golden Gate Bridge. “We’re the only payments company in the world that’s concerned with design,” the Prada-clad Dorsey begins. He shows a dramatic photo of the bridge taken from atop one of its towers. “This is what I want to build. This is classy. This is inspiring. This is limitless. Every single aspect of this is gorgeous. . . . So your homework this weekend is to cross this bridge, think about that, and also think about how we take those lessons into doing what we do, which is carry every single transaction in the world.”
For Dorsey, it’s all one big integrated system. Transactions are like traffic. Traffic flows over the beautiful bridge. The bridge is a point on the map. The map is an expression of the scheme, the stream, the grand flow of interactions. And he’s been thinking about this stuff since he was eight.
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About SStartup
SStartup is a business society focusing on technology enterprise. Our aim is to bring individuals with tech business ideas together and to provide a group working environment to build their individual businesses. We also aim to educate those who have yet to develop their business idea in technology based tools that can help build a successful business.
About the SStartup Newsletter
Our newsletter is compiled in a collaborative fashion by as many writers, researchers and industry pundits as we can get our hands on. Our conflicts are many, but our insights and facts are always well-researched, honest and to the point. We’re blunt to a fault–by design. If you would like to write for SStartup email oli@sstartup.com.
#004.1: UK Tech News
#004.2: Student Startup
#004.3: Ask SStartup
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Hey Guys,
Before you get into this week’s newsletter I just want to mention SStartup’s new Facebook page. It’s had a redesign over the last week and we’re looking to get as many people as possible to support us there so please check us out!
As always please let me know what you think of the newsletter and if you have any suggestions for things you’d like to see from SStartup drop me an email oli@sstartup.com
All the best,
Oli
UK Court Rules Assange to be Extradited
A London court has ruled that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange should to be extradited to Sweden to face further questioning on allegations of sexual offences. He has seven days to appeal. The judge said: “I’m satisfied that if a decision is taken to hold the Swedish trial in private that will not breach Article 6 or any human rights.”
He added: “None of the points raised by the Assange defence establishes an abuse of process,” and that if there have been abuses in the legal process in Sweden, that “the right place for these to be examined and remedied is in the Swedish trial system”.
He also said: “I have no doubt this defendant is wanted for prosecution in Sweden …the boundary between suspicion and prosecution has been crossed.”
Assange can make bail as he has “£200,00 in security, four personal “sureties” and five famous celebrities acting as sureties, according to his legal counsel Geoffrey Roberston QC.
Throughout the hearing Assange – who arrived late to court – remained stony-faced in the dock and appeared to be unmoved by the verdict, which perhaps indicates that he expected to be extradited.
So, the story continues.
Blottr Brings Citizen Journalism to the UK
Arguably, in the age of Facebook and, to a greater degree, Twitter, the early excitement around so-called Citizen Journalism has been surpassed by social media. But that isn’t stopping London-based Blottr, founded by Adam Baker, which thinks it’s found the right formula – a mix of collaborative publishing, ‘authentication algorithm’ and revenue sharing – to give the idea a new lease of life.
That’s not to say that social media is absent, sharing of articles via Facebook and Twitter is actively encouraged and tweets are automatically incorporated into stories, but otherwise this is more akin to a traditional online news publication, only one that is written by non-professional “journalists”.
Anyone can sign-up and begin writing a news story or making revisions to an existing one, including adding photos or video. Stories are categorised and users are asked to pinpoint the location relevant to the story on a map. Wiki-style, each story has a revision history (to cover the full cycle of an event) and a list of contributors but it’s the ‘authentication algorithm’ that Blottr says make it stand out from other Citizen Journalism offerings. It attributes credibility to each story based on factors like how “influential” the author is on Blottr, how many other people have contributed to the story and how many times its been shared on Facebook and Twitter or been bookmarked.
Users also have a chance to get paid for their contributions in the form of a kick back per thousand page views. This is obviously kept below Blottr’s CPM ad rate but at around £1 per thousand views – for now at least – seems quite high. Blottr says it’s seen a 20% increase in registrations since launching it revenue sharing scheme.
To that end, the site, which has been operating “under the radar”, is seeing an average of 4,500 uniques per-day (growing over 100% month-on-month over the last 3 months), while registered users currently sit at around 2,500. In terms of exposure, Baker says Blottr has been punching above its weight for organic search terms on Google for things like “Latest London news” and “Breaking London news” and that the site has been able to break stories before other media organisations and often remains the sole provider of local stories, which is also where the business model comes in. Blottr says that it plans to license its technology to 3rd parties and that they are in talks with two large media companies.
The company is privately funded by Baker but is said to be in “fairly advanced discussions” with two unnamed angel investors.
MTV Co-Founder Joins Shazam
Shazam, which now calls itself a mobile discovery company after broadening out beyond just music to also target the living room, has announced that co-founder of MTV Networks, John Sykes, has joined its board.
Sykes was instrumental in creating MTV some 25 years ago as well as serving as President of VH1, which he rebranded and “lead to record audience ratings and profits, from 1994-2002″, according to the press release. He also spent time as Chairman and CEO of Infinity Broadcasting before returning to MTV Networks in 2005 as President Network Development. In 2008 Sykes left Viacom to join former MTV colleagues Bob Pittman and Tom Freston at the Pilot Group.
On the face of it, Sykes would seem a good fit for Shazam, which is trying hard to expand its appeal beyond music recognition and recommendation to become a sort-of audio barcode service for all sorts of content discovery but particularly via the television.
As an example, the company has partnered with Syfy for a series-long “TV tagging initiative” for the cable channel’s new U.S. show Being Human in which the Shazam logo will be ‘embedded’ into the program ready for users to tag the show. This entails them holding their phone up so that it can listen to and recognise the episode in question from which Shazam will provide links to exclusive video and previews of upcoming episodes, access to playlists from the series, downloads and competitions.
Shazam is also putting the concept to work with other broadcasters and advertisers too. Aside from Syfy (NBC Universal), TV partners include HBO, as well as major brands, such as Levi’s Dockers and Lynx.
Company Name: Climate Cars
Founder: Nicko Williamson
Age: 22
Based: London
While most of his 13-year-old peers had their heads stuck in the Harry Potter series, Nicko Williamson was working from an alternative reading list. His author of choice was Richard Branson and as a result, his business education started early. “I looked at the Virgins of the world who go into an existing market and provide something else,” he explains. A few years later, still at the tender age of 22, he began his own efforts to disrupt an existing market, launching carbon neutral cab company Climatecars in 2007.
Making cabs greener sounds relatively straightforward. However, with a taxi giant like Addison Lee on your doorstep, a London based cab hire start-up needs something extra. Climatecars appears to have found that competitive edge, as the company celebrated its third birthday last year, replaced its 60-car Toyota Prius fleet with an updated hybrid model and became a Growing Business Young Gun.
According to Nicko, Climatecars is more than just a carbon neutral chauffeured car hire service. “We are the greenest possible car company you can use, but alongside that offer one of the highest levels of service.” Complimentary mineral water, newspapers and smartly suited drivers are all part of the standard package.
University inspiration
The inspiration for the business came when Nicko was still a student. “I was studying at Bristol University and kept driving past a gas convergence station that was advertising itself as a green fuel business. The idea was that you could convert a normal car to run on LPG (liquefied petroleum gas), which was much greener and the emissions much lower.
“It was at that point I suddenly thought of taxis, as I had been in and out of London where everybody was using this company called Addison Lee, the biggest in the market, and I just thought ‘why can’t I make this greener?’”
Realising he needed experience in the industry, Nicko got a job at a rival car company which allowed him “to get a finger on how the business really worked”. However, he was soon itching to get his own business up and running. “I spent a few months working for the company until I felt I understood the model enough, which was probably naive as I could have done it for longer, but I was eager to start.”
Nicko raised initial funds of £150,000 from friends and family, before contributing £50,000 of his own savings, giving an initial seed round of £200,000. Luckily Climatecars managed to secure further investment of £300,000 before the recession hit. “We went into the recession very well capitalised and in a cash rich position. At that point we expanded our operation and grew by aggressively selling. We had to be a bit more competitive on our rates, which I don’t think has changed, as all companies have been looking to save.”
Understated branding
Climatecars stands out in the market predominately as a discreet cab firm, which offers the type of high-end service corporate clients expect, albeit in a more environmentally friendly way. However, while having green credentials is a bonus, Nicko understood that businesses weren’t necessarily willing to pay extra to be green. Climatecars closest competitor in the green space is Green Tomato, a brightly branded car service that uses noticeable eco logos on their vehicles, which Nicko explains corporate customers are put off by. This according to Nicko, is one of the draw-cards of Climatecars for large corporate firms, along with a competitive fixed rate fee. “When I started I was determined that we weren’t going to price ourselves out of the market. We need to be cost-competitive. While the green angle is great I am very much of the view that people are not going to be pay more for a green service or product. I didn’t want environmentally friendly cars where people say ‘oh great idea but we can’t afford it.’”
The majority of business (90%) comes from corporate clients, ranging from investment banks and private equity firms to radio stations. “We have great core customers who spend a decent amount of money every month, and we have built good relationships with them as we try to deliver a decent level of customer service.”
While the average journey in a Climatecar is only around five miles, with clients travelling from one side of the city to the other, many large companies require cars for up to 100 trips a day, which has helped drive up profits.
Competitive edge
Nicko anticipates turnover to fly past the £2m mark this year as the company continues its trend of year-on-year growth, and expects to be fully profitable within the next 12 months. “Our growth has been very driven by the green agenda companies now have”, notes Nicko.
However, competition for Climatecars has become tougher. “There isn’t a multi-national company that doesn’t have a green policy out,” says Nicko. “When I started, the green thing was coming into prominence and it was a relatively easy sell. But we are not alone in the market anymore as other companies have cottoned on and included the Prius cars in their fleet.”
While Nicko remains confident Climatecars still has considerable miles left in the tank he is not opposed to a change in direction and the rise in competition is one of the reasons he’s determined to grow the business by considering courier delivery services for corporate clients. He says: “Our clients often use those kinds of services so it’s a natural fit for us. However, it is a very technical and competitive market – the electric vans are very expensive so we have got to do a lot of work on that one.”
Nicko says an exit isn’t on the cards anytime soon – he’s still far too concerned with all the market disruption left to do. Green cabs are just the start according to the young entrepreneur. “We certainly have bigger ambitions, put it that way!”
Tammam asks: What do we do if a bigger, more experienced company starts competing in the same space as our company?
The best companies don’t worry to much about the competition, they focus on creating great products or services. Your panicking about being beaten already but you haven’t even made it onto the pitch yet. No matter what the situation there are always a million or more reasons why your business might fail but that is part of being an entrepreneur. You have to remember that if your in the game your one step closer to winning.
That being said you don’t want to jump in front of a train. It’s not productive.
You as entrepreneurs need to innovate and experiment to make your product unique. In a way you want to zig where they zag. If you create something that is better than your competition people will use your service, simple as that. Look at your product from a different angle and the other directions you can go will stand out. You could also try to make your product more niche and aim to serve a smaller market better than your larger competitor, many companies have won the game by taking that approach.
My last point on this is that sometimes businesses do fail. If you get your arse kicked by a company that has more experience and more money than you it sucks but you will have learnt so much from the experience that you can take to the next thing. Come back strong, harder, faster and you will have greatly improved your odds of succeeding with your next venture.
#4 “I’ve missed over 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot . . . and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” Michael Jordan
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About SStartup
SStartup is a business society focusing on technology enterprise. Our aim is to bring individuals with tech business ideas together and to provide a group working environment to build their individual businesses. We also aim to educate those who have yet to develop their business idea in technology based tools that can help build a successful business.
About the SStartup Newsletter
Our newsletter is compiled in a collaborative fashion by as many writers, researchers and industry pundits as we can get our hands on. Our conflicts are many, but our insights and facts are always well-researched, honest and to the point. We’re blunt to a fault–by design. If you would like to write for SStartup email oli@sstartup.com.
Many tech startups I have heard from have the belief that they have to move to Silicon Valley for their company to stand a chance of success but surely this isn’t the case?
The following is a guest post by Mark Suster a 2x entrepreneur from the US who is now a venture capitalist based in LA. While his comments are based on the US market his comments can clearly be applied to UK startups too and will hopefully dispel the idea we all need to up sticks and move to sunny San Francisco!
Keep crushing it people.
Oli x
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Last year I was on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley meeting with one of the most prominent venture capital firms in the country. We were talking about a company, Factual (disclosure my firm is an investor), which was founded by one of LA’s most talented Internet entrepreneurs, Gil Elbaz, who as co-founder of Applied Semantics (purchased by pre-IPO Google for $102 million and now Google AdSense) is responsible for a large portion of the Internet’s monetization.
The VC partner, somebody I greatly respect said, “Yeah, we like Gil and what they’re doing. I’m just not sure you can build a great technology firm outside of Bay Area.”
And this Silicon Valley bias isn’t limited to any single meeting – it has been a recurring theme in my time as a VC. I’ve heard it many founders of VC backed companies in LA who tell me that in their NorCal VC meetings they are told, “we might be interested but we’d want you to relocate to the Bay Area if we funded you.”
So can you really build a great tech firm outside of Silicon Valley? Sure, but it will be different than the Bay Area ones. Let me use LA as an example.
Los Angeles
I live in the city of Santa Monica. My daily coffee meetings are not surrounded by the Hollywood elite with discussions of scripts, scenes and casting. In my LA I often see computer screens open with entrepreneurs talking about digital media. I grant you, it’s not like Coupa Cafe in Palo Alto – but there is a burgeoning tech community much as you’d find in NYC these days.
It is the second largest city in the country with (18 million inhabitants) (vs. 7.5 million in SF Bay Area). In my mind, Randy Newman said it best, “I love LA” – idyllic weather, a mélange of cultures and big industry. We have world-class universities like Caltech, UCLA, USC and more.
But LA is not Silicon Valley and we don’t need to aspire to be so.
1. Funding is different outside of Silicon Valley
There is no region in the country that comes close to having the sheer number of angels & VCs that Silicon Valley has as well as the dollars that flow into the region (40% of all dollars, PwC Moneytree report). So it would be unwise to say that funding outside of Silicon Valley will be easier. If you are talented, of course, you can get funded in any region with enough venture capital and obviously in markets outside of the Valley it is easier to get noticed and get access.
In Silicon Valley you have mega venture capital funds who have a history of giving $20 million to early-stage technology companies hoping to swing for the fences and become the next Google, Facebook or Twitter. The funds not only have gotten bigger but they have an amazing track record of funding the biggest names in the sector: Cisco, Apple, Google, Facebook. As a result many funds are OK with big bets.
When you’re one fund and have $600 million to invest it’s easier to take that kind of risk. There are no $600 million funds in Los Angeles. My fund – at $200 million – is the largest in Southern California.
LA generally doesn’t have an appetite for this kind of ‘swing-for-the-fences’ investment at early stages – and neither does your town. LA investors are more pragmatic. We tend to do more $2-3 million “A” rounds and we look for companies that have an early monetization strategy. Once we see proof of performance then raising $10-15 million is achievable.
2. “Necessity is the mother of all invention” and drives business outside the Valley
I like to repeat this phrase, which means that because investors have different expectations you find entrepreneurs that focus on nearer term monetization. You have no choice.
The result is that we’ve had a lot of innovation coming from LA and other regions outside Silicon Valley in terms of making money on the Internet. Many of the Valley tech firms saw advertising as “beneath them” and many VCs in the first boom encouraged people to focus on eyeballs rather than dollars. That’s convenience when your VC is hoping to write the next $20 million check. In our regions? Fuggetaboutit – show me the money!
So as a region we created sponsored search (Overture), affiliate search (Applied Semantics, now AdSense), lead generation (LowerMyBills, ShopZilla, PriceGrabber), affiliate networking (Commission Junction, ValueClick, Fast Click), local merchant portals (CitySearch), Social Media advertising (MySpace), mobile games (JAMDAT), local Internet advertising (ReachLocal), and content generation (DemandMedia). Each of these companies exited for more than $500 million and several north of $1 billion.
Look beyond California and you have group purchasing (Groupon in Chicago, LivingSocial in Washington DC), private sales (Gilt Groupe in NY, HauteLook in LA), artisan marketplaces (Etsy in NY), eCommerce (Amazon in Seattle) and on and on.
To be clear – nobody builds bigger “pure tech” firms than Silicon Valley. I don’t see this changing much like I don’t see you building blockbuster movies outside LA or shift the media buying center of gravity out of NY. But you can build valuable Internet businesses outside of Silicon Valley.
3. Recruiting & retention will be different outside the Valley
I meet with Bay Area entrepreneurs all the time and am actively looking to make investments there. But one common theme I’m hearing from there in 2011 is that it’s impossible to recruit. You have huge hiring volume coming from the new growth firms (Twitter, Zynga, Facebook) and huge retention battles & hiring from Google, Apple, Cisco, Yahoo!, eBay and others.
I talked to one startup CEO who told me, “you have young engineers who want to make $200,000 or more to work for me. It’s hard to get people to take a risk at a startup or for a reasonable salary with all this competition. And many of the ones that do want to do startups are plotting their YCombinator company. It’s fucking hard hiring right now.”
And this is a prominent company that raised nearly $10 million and a CEO who is an ex Googler. Imagine your company hiring in the Valley.
Now let’s think about retention. In the beautiful creative destruction that is produced in Silicon Valley (as a capitalist I admire this as a system), imagine what it does to staff retention. Every developer, biz dev person, marketeer or sales rep on your team will be surrounded by scores of companies calling them like Sirens to switch teams. Hit some bumps in the road? Good luck.
Outside the Valley we have struggles, too. In LA you can attract a great team to build out your first 30-50 employees. If you hit a groove on funding and customer growth it does become a challenge to ramp quickly. Let’s be honest – we’re not Silicon Valley. Great companies like BeachMint that are growing at a rapid clip have to dig deep into their networks to meet hiring needs.
You don’t have a pool of thousands of Google engineers to hire when they’re ready to leave the mother ship. You don’t have the founders of eBay, LinkedIn, Salesforce.com and Yahoo!. You just don’t. Get over it. I’ve talked with many great NYC startups facing the same problem.
But we do have great technology developers. You can build a team of 100+ people in LA without needing to hire outside of LA. If you want to scale to become a “huge” company you will find it difficult to scale to the level of the Valley sized companies. But if you grow to be that big it would be a very nice problem to deal with.
And as I’ve argued many times, if we can manage to build a “patron” company – one which grows large and build an ecosystem around it – it will have the ability to attract all of the best university talent graduating from Southern California. As an investor, this is a focus area for me.
What you do have here – and in many regions around the country – is more loyalty. You’re not in the grind of your staff being constantly approached by every other start-up within 10 miles. So it’s always a trade-off.
4. There are many strategic assets outside of Silicon Valley
In New York you have access to fashion, media, art and of course, financial services. You also have the headquarters of many of the countries largest companies. In Washington DC you have government & defense. In San Diego you have Qualcomm so an entire mobile industry has been spawned. In Los Angeles you have large industries in garment industry, defense, games (both physical like Mattel and virtual like Activision) and music. And of course you have Hollywood.
That sets us up nicely for the next phase of the web. Everybody knows about the leaked memo of AOL’s Tim Armstrong saying he wants to up his content from 4% video to 70% video. The Internet is now faster, more dynamic and less about text. That sets LA & NY up nicely for a number of emerging content creation industries.
While nobody has yet “cracked the code” on production quality video over the Internet (YouTube won UGC video), there is a lot of innovation happening in LA from places like Eqal, Deca.TV, ThisWeekIn, Machinima & Maker Studios. These last two companies between them produce more than 500 million video views per month. That’s million, with an “M”. LA is producing content at scale. So if you’re out to create content businesses there is no better time and no better place than here.
And despite what I keep hearing from others – these are not content “hit businesses” they are “content production platforms” that are producing scale like I’ve never seen and at a cost structure that is astounding.
Who is going to produce all the videos that we want to watch in the future about travel, cooking, film, culture, music and the like? Some of it will be UGC. Most of the good stuff will be produced in LA & NY just like the tech firms of the past came from Silicon Valley. We have the actors, directors, producers, lighting specialists, writers, agents, post-production editors, etc.
I’m “all in” on the future of TV and the longer it takes other investors to get on board the better.
5. Communities outside the Valley have matured
The LA / Southern California market has many people who are now on their second and third companies. It’s true that MySpace didn’t become Facebook, but it did spawn 7 or 8 great LA companies run by founders with experience. Zorik Gordon built & IPO’s ReachLocal. Douglas Merrill, the former CIO of Google, is building his next company, ZestCash in LA. Scott Painter, founder of CarsDirect has created TrueCar (backed by GRP Partners).
Brett Brewer has AdKnowledge. There is Adconian, Intelligent Beauty, LegalZoom, Burstly, ShoeDazzle and so many more I can barely name them all. All second or third time entrepreneurs. Hautelook, Gogii, Magento. My point is – great companies are being built here like they are in in New York, Boston and elsewhere.
There is a lot of talent here. We’re not all about the beach and sun – although we enjoy that, too. We have started to build initiatives like Launchpad LA to help bring this community together and make it easier for first time entrepreneurs. For those that are here – it’s time to stop comparing ourselves to Silicon Valley. We have much to be proud of in our own right. And there is still much work to be done. Now go build your patron company.
SStartup Coda
#3: “It takes a strong man to swim against the current; any dead fish will float with it”
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About SStartup
SStartup is a business society focusing on technology enterprise. Our aim is to bring individuals with tech business ideas together and to provide a group working environment to build their individual businesses. We also aim to educate those who have yet to develop their business idea in technology based tools that can help build a successful business.
About the SStartup Newsletter
Our newsletter is compiled in a collaborative fashion by as many writers, researchers and industry pundits as we can get our hands on. Our conflicts are many, but our insights and facts are always well-researched, honest and to the point. We’re blunt to a fault–by design. If you would like to write for SStartup email oli@sstartup.com.
#002.1: UK Tech News
#002.2: Student Startup
#002.3: Ask SStartup
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Friends,
This is the first full format SStartup newsletter, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. If you do like what you read please drop me an email or call us out of Facebook or Twitter.
SStartup is moving forward at a fast rate. I am looking to get as many people on the newsletter as I can at the moment and then we will start to run more workshops and events if people are interested. We are also looking for people to submit business questions for SStartup, write for us and to speak at any of our workshops. If you feel you have value to add or would just like to help out drop me an email oli@sstartup.com.
Show your support!
All the best,
Oli x
Has Tweetdeck Been Sold for $30m?
While TechCrunch has reported a rumour that UberMedia has just acquired TweetDeck, the company itself is staying tight-lipped. CEO Iain Dodsworth told TechCrunch “We’re not going to comment on acquisition rumours.” Heck, that’s his prerogative. That being said, we have very good sources that told us today that the deal was for $30 million, UberMedia’s largest deal yet. Bill Gross’ company, after buying EchoFon, another popular Twitter client, now controls 20% of the userbase of Twitter.
TweetDeck had raised a little over $5 million in funding. But it started from humble roots.
Tweetdeck had largely started out as a hobby project. But it was clear that many, many Twitter users loved his interface onto Twitter. Suddenly you could filter people you followed into manageable groups. It was a God-send for journalists like me wanting to track the market.
Not long after, in January 2009, Tweetdeck won $500,000 in Angel backing from Betaworks.
Tweetdeck was now on a roll. Even Mark Zuckerberg admitted to using it that March.
An iPhone app continued the traction, and the desktop air app just got better and better. A Chrome app and further improvement confirmed it as the most powerful Twitter client out there.
Last word from Dodsworth? He had no further comment, but he did say “The timing of GeeknRolla is perfect…”
Read that how you will. But it looks like he will reveal all there…
SStartup Comment: It seems a little early to bow out considering the success of Tweetdeck but $30m is an extremely high valuation and opens many doors.
London Startup Songkick Raises $2 Million
Songkick, the London based concert database, is in the process of raising $2 million, an SEC filing reveals. Songkick indexes a host of ticket vendors, venue websites as well as local newspapers to create a database of concerts happening around the world.
This provides people with a centralized way of keeping track of live performances by their favorite bands and artists. In addition, Songkick is trying to build an extensive online catalog of live concert recordings.
Songkick was founded in 2007 by three friends – Ian Hogarth, Pete Smith, and Michelle You – and has raised $6.52 million to date. Its investor roster includes Y Combinator, SoftTech VC, The Accelerator Group and Index Ventures.
SStartup Comment: Songkick is in a busy market place but with investors like YC and Index Ventures there is obviously a good team in place, hopefully developing into a London startup to be proud of.
Company name: The App Factory
Founder: David Carter
Age: 18
Based: Manchester
Tell us what your business does:
The App Factory is a mobile application development business. Along with building applications for our clients we also have our own portfolio of applications. Worldwide we are a well-known developer on the Android platform, having brought over 70 of our own applications to that platform alone. We build applications for the following platforms and devices: iPhone, iPad, Google Android, Blackberry, Nokia, Palm, Samsung, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Amazon Kindle.
Where did the idea for your business come from?
I had heard of applications on the iPhone that had downloads in the thousands for $0.99 per download. When you do the maths you can tell it is a way to make money and in the long term a business based around that. At the start it was simply a way to make some money, as things grew I began to build a business around it.
What were you doing before starting up?
I’m currently a student at Manchester College, coming to the end of my course. I have, in the past, worked at a waiter, cleaner, and office temp. From these jobs I acquired the money needed to start the business.
Have you always wanted to run your own business?
The ownership attached to running my own business appealed to me greatly. I have a greater choice of what I should spend my time doing, which is obviously an appealing factor to anyone.
What planning did you do before you started up?
I spent some time looking through the most popular applications on all mobile platforms. This gave me an idea as to what would sell well, and generally what appealed to people the most. I think it is very important however to just get started. Too many people spend all their time saying ‘I’m going to….’ or ‘once we do this….’ without ever actually getting down to it. Planning is vital but it is only the preview to the main event, which is actually doing something.
How have you promoted your business?
Thus far I have done little promotion. Companies such as Apple and Google who carry our apps on their devices tend to do great jobs of advertising our apps themselves. However as the business has now developed, we are looking at new promotional methods which look positive.
What about staff?
I initially employed college students, however as the complexity of the applications increased I had to seek out professional developers. I enjoy working with others in my business. I learn a great deal from those who work with me. Without their help my business, without a shadow of doubt, would not exist today.
What has your growth been like?
I started 2 months ago with no development experience or knowledge of the area. All I knew was people download applications and paid per download. From this I have created, to my knowledge, the second largest portfolio of applications on Google Android powered phones – the number one company is a large software organisation based in Los Angeles. I now have client work from very well established companies within the UK and abroad. Growth has been amazing, especially considering I have done this while in full-time education.
What was your first big breakthrough?
The day a senior manager at a FTSE 100 company invited me to lunch to talk about my business was a turning point for me. I realised I must have grown this into something fairly impressive if it was catching that kind of attention.
Where do you want to be in five years’ time?
For anyone reading this they may think I’m a technology person, but really I have no attachment to a particular industry. In the future I’ll probably try things in other sectors. I’m always keen to learn about new business models and therefore it is hard to say where I’ll be in five years’ time. In terms of an exit for The App Factory I currently have nothing planned as I’m very much still building it.
Brent asks: I have more than one idea at the moment for mobile applications, should I build a few at a time to a basic standard or focus on making one great?
It really depends on what your like and what you enjoy more. Some people are very ADD and always have a number of projects going on at around 60% effort where as others have a laser like focus on one project and try to make it perfect. There’s no real right way, it really depends on how you work best. Most importantly you have to enjoy what your doing if you don’t you will fail. If you don’t think you could focus on just one thing at a time it’s clear what choice to make.
More interestingly though is that you have one of the most sort after ideas in the market right now. The mobile apps market is out of control and there are so many people looking for co-founders or people to work with building apps. If I were you I would look for someone else who is interested in the same space and work together to build a business. Clearly two or more people working together would help you develop more than one of your ideas and all to a high standard than on your own.
Build a prototype or at least a wireframe and show it to people to try and get a co-founder. Then if together you build something successful you know that other big mobile app companies like BUMP or ClickGamer.
#2 “If winning isn’t everyone, why does it feel that way?”
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About SStartup
SStartup is a business society focusing on technology enterprise. Our aim is to bring individuals with tech business ideas together and to provide a group working environment to build their individual businesses. We also aim to educate those who have yet to develop their business idea in technology based tools that can help build a successful business.
http://www.sstartup.com
About the SStartup Newsletter
Our newsletter is compiled in a collaborative fashion by as many writers, researchers and industry pundits as we can get our hands on. Our conflicts are many, but our insights and facts are always well-researched, honest and to the point. We’re blunt to a fault–by design. If you would like to write for SStartup email oli@sstartup.com.
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