by tomnora | Apr 18, 2012 | Angel Investor, Business Development, CEO Succession, early stage, founder, Revenue Growth, Scalability, startup, startup CEO, Tom Nora, venture
Southern California is going to reach the tipping point. A year ago I wasn’t so sure but now it’s getting crazy. Craig Page @CraigDPage hosted a party 2 weeks ago in Santa Monica that celebrated 500 startups in the SM/Venice ecosystem known as Silicon Beach these days, and he may not be far off.
Then last week there was a Venice Town Hall where you could see that locals are in awe of the influx of startups in their (my) little town by the beach. They’re calling it a Venissaince.
Orange County is growing some amazing companies like @signnow who is attracting Tier 1 VC funding @vkhosla.
Coworking spaces, Incubators, etc. Santa Barbara, Ventura, San Diego, Downtown L.A., on and on. C++ meetups where 100 people show up. Jason Nazar @jasonnazar meetings where 400 people show up! Jason Calacanis @jason Startup interview show @TWIstartups with some of the top startup people in the world, who seem to visit L.A. a lot these days. Google has 500 people here now and is building bike paths in Venice. Startup USC. Startup UCLA. Factual! SpaceX.
I love it. I guess it could happen, So Cal could surpass Silicon Valley some day. Never thought I’d say that. My home town.
Oh well…. 5000 could easily happen. @tomnora
by tomnora | Mar 7, 2012 | Angel Investor, Business Development, early stage, Launch, photography, Revenue Growth, Scalability, Tom Nora, venture
Shout Out to Seth Levine – Seth Levine’s VC Adventure – “I’m getting sick of the bull$%!^”
Seth Levine, a successful VC with the Foundry Group, wrote a great blog entry about all the hype going on currently in the startup world. Worth the read. His focus is on people bragging about how amazing they and their startup are when they usually have close to n o t h i n g, which goes against the karma good business and screw it up for those really trying to build strong long lasting companies. If more people like Seth step up with their qualified voice, they could help save us from or lessen the big crash coming.
I’ve been harping about this a lot (too much?) for over a year:
http://j.mp/yyqNQc
http://wp.me/pKMex-1m
http://wp.me/pKMex-2e
Currently Los Angeles is in what could be a startup renaissance or an apocalypse, dependent on how long the hype goes on. Based on Seth’s article, I realize it must be happening everywhere. The signal to noise ratio continues to degrade, but it’s actually moving into the next phase. Investor groups are cutting out the management, bus dev, sales, and marketing professionals, trying to get raw, young engineering teams that have never negotiated a term sheet to give away their IP rights and equity for next to nothing.
Some of these projects will produce amazing companies. But most participants (young developers) will raise their hopes, fail and get spit back out into the cruel world within 2-3 months(!) and become a jaded unemployed 25 year old. Or realize down the road that they gave away a lot for a little. Many investors now advertise that want only developers, they will cover all business/marketing/etc. needs. Don’t put real business people on the actual team. To reuse an overused term – Wait what? They offer them zero to a few thousand dollars and office space. I call it harvesting youth.
Recently there was a developer only coding party where, in a few hours, you form a team, think of an idea, then design, develop, deploy a website. The compensation? All the alcohol you could drink and In-N-Out burgers. Now don’t get me wrong, I love In-N-Out burgers, some of the best in the world. My favorite is the Double Double animal style (see photo). But the sad thing here is that after that party many of the participants think they have a startup.
The word startup used to be about very unique technologies being deployed in very unique ways, creating new markets and capabilities in the world. Having knowledge and experience had value and a balanced team was required. Balance, humility, hard work. Facebook and Google had plenty of business people deeply involved. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg is a great salesman, and a pretty mediocre programmer. Now almost anything is a “startup”, and almost everyone is “doing” a startup. And bragging about it before it happens. We’re spreading resources over way too many businesses, knowing most have no change. I know it’s a risk game, I’ve been in it 25 years, but there should be some intelligence invested in the outset. One VC recently told me that his investors don’t care if he does no due diligence, as long as he “brings them another Facebook”.
Real startup successes are measured by growth, revenue, shareholder value, making something from nothing, ROI, longevity. Not just this weeks buzz or a $25,000 seed round. They devised with strategy, ingenuity, an ecosystem. Long term employment, new jobs.
The good news is that this hype period will end, probably soon. Then the remaining companies will be much easier to watch and enhance and benefit from. @tomnora
by tomnora | Feb 16, 2012 | Angel Investor, Business Development, CEO Succession, early stage, founder, Launch, Scalability, startup CEO
http://j.mp/y7qE0u
by tomnora | Feb 10, 2012 | Business Development, early stage, Launch, Revenue Growth, startup
Big Revenues vs. little revenues – a strategy question that startups often struggle with. Should we focus on a business model that supports small payments, subscriptions, etc., or look for major large chunks of money from partnerships or strategic investors? There are strong arguments for both types of incoming dollars for a startup, but the correct answer is have both coming in simultaneously; it will balance your cash flow get you through valleys and help you avoid raising expensive equity capital. And will get you more respect all around.
Almost every company with long term success has used this dual revenue plan, throughout history.
little revenues
Many easy-to-set-up payment systems and business models on the Internet have recently popularized little revenues – micro-payments, price per transaction, low cost, SaaS, freemium, monthly payments. Easy to use systems like PayPal, Square, and several other new online cash acceptance systems are hen there are the thousands of derivative companies that are thriving from commissions from larger companies – Google ads, Facebook ads, and the all encompassing affiliate market industry.
I went to an affiliate marketing meetup recently (kind of by accident) and was knocked out of my chair by the size and sophistication of this world. The speaker (Shoemoney) told a great rags to riches story of making tens of millions from affiliate marketing tricks, getting ~$1 to 50 per referral. That’s a machine, maybe one that only produces for a bit, but still and semi-automatic mechanism for short term scalable revenue. He’s been at it for 10 years, so I guess he’s got the long term figured out, too.
Little revenue systems have vastly lowered the barriers to entry to starting a business, no longer must you have bricks and mortar, a merchant account, office equipment or even a staff to do business. It hasn’t decreased the need for innovation, salesmanship or marketing prowess. Many 2.0/3.0 startups are learning this the hard way.
Big Revenues
As a product company, very large injections of cash are always a nice add on to any business as long as they don’t disrupt your business strategy, kill margins or cause you to customize your offering too much. I was with a startup once where we sold our software products for average $500 each generating about $1 million per year, running as fast as we could. I was lucky enough to close 2 large contracts for $900K each within a month, and while we were negotiating a funding round. They were volume sales of standard product so caused no disruption to our processes. Those 2 deals changed our company forever, put us on the map for long term.
In the Shoemoney example above, the ultimate in trickle revenue, he has actually had several Big Revenue transactions, selling entire websites or business models, or taking on expert consultant gigs, all these for high six figure injections to compliment his $20 per click businesses.
In the auto industry, most large companies augment their car unit sales with $ multi-million R&D contracts – Ford, Cadillac, and Porsche get over 20% in extra revenues doing this.
Back to early stage startups. No matter how early, the most sophisticated startups are looking for these Big Revenues from the beginning. They bring on the expertise required to make this happen. It’s often called OEM, white labeling, or strategic partnership, but it’s big chunks of money when you need them most.
I recently met with a respectable high growth early stage startup – increasing revenues, retained all of their equity so far, thousands of customers, even made the Inc 500 recently. But they totally depend on one revenue model for 100% of their revenue, and it’s breaking down. They desperately need the Big Revenue injections before it’s too late.
If you’ve built something compelling enough, there are always larger companies that will welcome you to take their money. Current vs future revenue is very dynamic, two different businesses can leverage each other when their needs compliment each other. Connect or contact me on twitter: @tomnora
by tomnora | Jan 10, 2012 | Business Development, early stage, founder, photography, startup, startup CEO
The other day I met with a startup in Santa Monica, and noticed a giant etch of the word d e s i g n on the ceo’s glass office wall. Their company isn’t about design per say, but it was refreshing to see the discipline given such prominence. The word design is being kicked around in the startup world a lot more these days, and I think this is a good thing.
Design is the exercise of creating or adding elements of appearance to something. It is defined as “The shape or appearance given to an object, especially one that is intended to make it more attractive”. In the startup world it can make the difference between success or failure if combined properly with great business strategies. There are many examples of great design alone in a failing startup, but great design plus great engineering and business strategies often win. Also, many startups with bad/weak design but great strategies and engineering have been winners. But that seems to be changing.
To say that someone is a visual person is a little silly – everyone is visual. Colors and Shapes and beautiful Movement attract any human, often on a subconscious level. A simple attractive Design for a website or product will change its fate from yet another to the best in a category.
Beautiful design exudes success and confidence, care about details. And most importantly – originality. great design comes from within a person or organization, not copied from outside and implemented. It’s more difficult, but imperative for long term success. Simple beautiful design is proliferating on the web – lots of white space, a small number of large font words, big open boxes for interactivity, cool icons. All of these things enhance the user experience and make them want more.
A recent great experience for me was trying out Codecademy. It has quite thoughtful design elements, many of them not actually visible, but so important to its almost seamless usability.
Style, similar but different than design, is more the process of following great designs, using existing aesthetics. Sometimes this works fine, but it’s not the same as amazing original design. Just look at the continuous march of Apple over the past 34 years. Great design plus engineering plus strategy. Accessibility, simplicity, completeness. They created the template for many other products’ style and design.
UX/IA is also an important part of all digital design now. First introduced in the late 1990s, it’s replaced and expanded on UI as the critical relationship people have when using products. Often it’s a pre-design process, trying to guess how people are going to use things, then use design to optimize the experience.
The new biography on Steve Jobs is a must read for any startup founder. It has the added benefit for readers of discussing in great detail Apple and NeXT design processes, justifications and investments. It also reveals that most of the design ideas were not Steve Jobs, but rather came from several design and marketing gurus he surrounded himself with.
Like I said, it’s great that Design is becoming central to the engineering-heavy world of tech startups, because ugly design sucks. @tomnora
by tomnora | Jan 3, 2012 | Business Development, early stage
5 LinkedIn Apps For Power Networking | Fast Company.
