FlipKart: Owned 80% By Investors

I learned today that FlipKart is owned 80% by investors. That is a sad state of affairs. Investors should have the discipline to not own 35-40% of a tech startup, otherwise you are killing the hen that lays the golden egg. It is racism to think Indian tech startup founders can get by with little ownership because, well, they are Indian and they are in India.

I wish FlipKart all the best, but I can't see how a tech startup that is so weak at its foundation can be a trailblazer. It has been set to fall, if not now then later. The ownership structure is bull.

Rahul Yadav is another story that caught my attention months ago. The Indian media made it look like the guy sent out one wrong, arrogant email and that is why. That is missing the point. He had all the inklings of a tech startup founder. But the ownership structure there also was all messed up. And I gather Housing.com has bombed since. The hen got killed.

The Real Rahul Yadav Story
Rahul Yadav Has A Bright Future

I hope there will be a second coming of Rahul Yadav just like there was a second coming of Steve Jobs.

If FlipKart is owned 80% by investors, I am not sure it is the Indian Alibaba.

Saudi Arabia: SuperPower?

A tech startup founder is not a CEO. A tech startup founder has to be in a commanding position. Because you have to make drastic moves as you grow. And you need power to be able to make those moves. And the power comes from equity ownership. I don't know what the FlipKart investors are thinking.

A company owned 80% by investors, when it goes for its next round of funding, the investors will make the call. The founder CEO will not be at the negotiating table. That should never happen. An irrelevant founder CEO is not a founder CEO but an employee.



Tech Startup Equity Distribution
Zuck, Free Basics, India
Zuck, Free Basics, India (2)
Dorsey Ouster Was DNA Damage At Twitter

There is venture capital. And then there is vulture capital.

My New Startup

My new tech startup is in the mobile gaming space. I could call it the first tech startup of my life.

In 1999 I was a founding member - not the leader - of a tech startup that did really well for a few rounds until the nuclear winter hit and it was Gone With The Wind. We were trying to build the top South Asian online community. In early 2008 I met the stated goal and raised 100K for my startup whose vision was what the Chromebook is today. In early 2009 me and my Co-Founder gave the money back to the investors in the face of an extremely ugly economy: we did not see us raising round two money. This is my third attempt. Third time is the charm. When you have four borderline genius developers working towards a private beta product for equity, you know you got something.

There is a huge culture clash between the tech startup world and the rest of the economy. When you try to raise money from people who don't "get it," are not from this world, it is like you accidentally touched naked electric wires. Wow, what was that? You get all sorts of weird reactions.

The Angel List is a great starting point. Although I am in mind to pay Fred Wilson a surprise visit. Very likely I will show up and he will be "away" at one of his 100 Board meetings, either elsewhere in the city or on the Left Coast.

I feel like he owes me money for all the comments I have left at his blog over the years.

Fred, I have had your curiosity, now do I have your attention?



From The Angel List I have a short list of about 50 angels who have (1) listed themselves as interested in mobile gaming, (2) are in or near NYC, although not all are, and (3) who are not too far down in the ranks at the site. I am going through the list, and I am like, I'd want to know and hang out and converse with these people regardless of if they gave me money or not. They just come across as so very interesting people.

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StartUp Ideas

Image via CrunchBase

Paul Graham does not blog often. But when he does he churns out an instant classic.

How To Get StartUp Ideas

The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself....... The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way. ...... the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has. ..... you can either build something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter. ...... Microsoft was a well when they made Altair Basic. There were only a couple thousand Altair owners, but without this software they were programming in machine language. Thirty years later Facebook had the same shape. Their first site was exclusively for Harvard students, of which there are only a few thousand, but those few thousand users wanted it a lot. ....... The founders of Airbnb didn't realize at first how big a market they were tapping. Initially they had a much narrower idea. They were going to let hosts rent out space on their floors during conventions. They didn't foresee the expansion of this idea; it forced itself upon them gradually. All they knew at first is that they were onto something. That's probably as much as Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg knew at first. ....... You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. .......... It was not so much because he was a programmer that Facebook seemed a good idea to Mark Zuckerberg as because he used computers so much. If you'd asked most 40 year olds in 2004 whether they'd like to publish their lives semi-publicly on the Internet, they'd have been horrified at the idea. But Mark already lived online; to him it seemed natural. ....... Live in the future, then build what's missing. ....... Drew Houston realizes he's forgotten his USB stick and thinks "I really need to make my files live online." Lots of people heard about the Altair. Lots forgot USB sticks. The reason those stimuli caused those founders to start companies was that their experiences had prepared them to notice the opportunities they represented. ...... anyone reasonably smart can probably get to an edge of programming (e.g. building mobile apps) in a year. Since a successful startup will consume at least 3-5 years of your life, a year's preparation would be a reasonable investment. ..... software is eating the world, and this trend has decades left to run. ..... not absolutely necessary (Jeff Bezos couldn't) .... The Facebook was just a way for undergrads to stalk one another. ..... Live in the future and build what seems interesting. ...... It's no coincidence that Microsoft and Facebook both got started in January. At Harvard that is (or was) Reading Period, when students have no classes to attend because they're supposed to be studying for finals. ...... Worrying that you're late is one of the signs of a good idea. ...... Whether you succeed depends far more on you than on your competitors. ...... The search engines that preceded them shied away from the most radical implications of what they were doing—particularly that the better a job they did, the faster users would leave. ...... Most programmers wish they could start a startup by just writing some brilliant code, pushing it to a server, and having users pay them lots of money. They'd prefer not to deal with tedious problems or get involved in messy ways with the real world. ...... The unsexy filter is similar to the schlep filter, except it keeps you from working on problems you despise rather than ones you fear. ..... Hotmail began as something its founders wrote to talk about their previous startup idea while they were working at their day jobs. ...... The next best thing to an unmet need of your own is an unmet need of someone else. ..... When Rajat Suri of E la Carte decided to write software for restaurants, he got a job as a waiter to learn how restaurants worked. ...... Traditional journalism, for example, is a way for readers to get information and to kill time, a way for writers to make money and to get attention, and a vehicle for several different types of advertising. It could be replaced on any of these axes (it has already started to be on most). ....... after Steve Wozniak built the computer that became the Apple I, he felt obliged to give his then-employer Hewlett-Packard the option to produce it. Fortunately for him, they turned it down, and one of the reasons they did was that it used a TV for a monitor, which seemed intolerably déclassé to a high-end hardware company like HP was at the time .. And the reason it used a TV for a monitor is that Steve Wozniak started out by solving his own problems. He, like most of his peers, couldn't afford a monitor. .... ..... The prices of gene sequencing and 3D printing are both experiencing Moore's Law-like declines. ..... Live in the future and build what seems interesting.

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Hartej Says Hello From Chile

Hartej popped up in my Gchat asking for a small favor.

Will I upvote something he just posted on Y Combinator? After getting them to send me a new password, I did.

Scott Weiss: The Path To Starting A Startup

it’s just that the most valuable lessons for successfully running a startup come from actually working at a well-run startup. I’d go even further to assert that the startup should be based in Silicon Valley and backed by venture capital..... If you’re trying to prepare yourself for entrepreneurship — the same two to four years at a startup isn’t even comparable to the equivalent time spent in school or a large company. There are probably five to ten times more lessons and relevance at the startup.

The Evolving Path To Starting A Startup

It has become cheaper than ever to start your own company, but scaling a startup is still extremely expensive..... It’s hard to launch your startup, when you’re too focused working at a VC funded startup in Silicon Valley while $100k in debt from Business School..... It’s far easier to raise capital if you have successfully exited a startup in the past. But, thanks to startup incubators and accelerators run by some of the top experts in the industry, entrepreneurs have multiple ways to build successful businesses ....... Being an entrepreneur is often about walking the unbeaten path. I dont think it’s by any means necessary to follow a strict regimented and strategized approach the way Weiss suggests. ....... You need three things to create a successful startup according to Paul Graham: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible..... As Naval Ravikant says, “Venture Capital is open to attack by disruptive new business models and technology”.

Scott Weiss needs to know Hartej Singh pinged me from Chile. I met him in New York. He flew over to take advantage of some of what the Chilean government has been offering to help create a local tech ecosystem. The wild west of tech innovation is not copyrighted by Silicon Valley, that's for sure.

How Start-Up Chile Is Attracting Startups From Singapore, London, and San Francisco

Socialance is a startup out of London that has moved to Santiago, Chile, for six months. The reason for the move is pretty straightforward: Start-Up Chile is giving the company $40,000 without taking any equity stake. And the rent is relatively cheap..... has attracted about 500 companies to its startup program since 2010. The program ends its first phase in 2014. By then, it will have provided grants to 1,000 companies for a total of $40 million. ..... the ease with which international companies are able to go to Chile for the six-month experience. The Chilean government manages all the paperwork to settle there. .... And if the company decides to stay, all they have to do is get a new visa after one year there. The cost? $100. ...... For Socialance, a freelance service, the move has given the company a chance to get free office space, some mentoring and a two-bedroom apartment for $500 a month. In London, Vigil said they paid about $4,000 for a three-bedroom house that was shared by five people....... And labor costs far less. Engineering talent can cost as little as $1,500 per month. In San Francisco, it can cost a minimum of $6,000 per month to hire an engineer.

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"Insuring" Angel Investors

Image via WikipediaThe idea behind insurance is that you pay for auto insurance, I pay for auto insurance, and so do a million other people. Not a million get into accidents. When a few do, it is paid for by all collectively.

Angel investors get screwed by established venture capitalists routinely. In the later rounds the VCs hog the negotiations in ways that people who believed in you early end up getting the short shift. You end up not making money even when the startup does well.

And then there is the no small matter of losing your money entirely because the startup you invested in went down.

It is a numbers game. Startups are known to go down. The best VCs expect at least one third of their startups to go down. And at the outset they have no idea which one third.

Idiots From The Future

Here's a quote from an idiotic article in The Boston Globe. If they had called it comedy, I might have let them go. But this dude is peddling the piece as punditry.

The Boston Globe: Bubble? What bubble? Things are great. Unless ...: November 2011: Y Combinator, a “finishing school’’ for promising start-ups in Silicon Valley, announces a partnership with Wendy’s. Every Wendy’s restaurant will designate two booths near the bathrooms for tech start-ups. Y Combinator will supply $30,000 to each start-up, with Wendy’s providing unlimited baked potatoes and Frosties, in exchange for a 5 percent equity stake. ....... At the end of the program, Nigerian investor Dr. Hassan Dagogo promises (via a polite-but-urgent e-mail) to support each start-up with a follow-on investment of $500,000, wired directly to their bank accounts. Things go awry, and most entrepreneurs in the program end up living in Wendy’s parking lots.

Doing Two Tech Startups

What is better than doing one tech startup? Doing two tech startups.

So I am doing two tech startups. And the newer startup is actually moving faster. But there is symbiosis.

That 10X Return Thing

Image via WikipediaWhen VCs invest in your startup, they want a 10X return. So if they invest a million, they want you to turn that into 10 million dollars.

Why? Because they are greedy bastards? Maybe.

It's a numbers game. Say nine out of all 10 startups fail. That is pretty close to the actual numbers, by the way. So money was lost on nine out of 10 deals. One million turned into zero dollars. That stunt is still a lot of hard work on the part of many people, believe it or not.

But one makes it, and gives a 10X return. So 10 million dollars were invested in 10 different startups. Nine of them went down. One turned that one million into 10 million. That is a break even situation. The VCs started with 10 million dollars, they ended up with 10 million dollars. Where's the game?

Monetizing A Startup

Image via WikipediaI am a huge fan of the freemium model. Keep the basic product free, get lots and lots of deeply engaged users, and monetization will happen. But that is not the only way. Some great services charge right away. Whatever floats your boat. You can delay making money, but not forever. Shorter the delay, better it is.

How To Monetize Your Social Web Startup there really is no secret sauce to making money on the social web: you’re either selling ads or selling a product. ..... While it’s possible to generate revenue through a number of models, there are really only a few core monetization models. ..... Since ownership of mass distribution channels is becoming fragmented, advertisers are looking for targeted audiences that are most likely to purchase their product. ...... Whether it’s an information product or a physical good, there are massive opportunities to generate revenue from selling things. ..... Brand advocacy in the world of social media is something that has many marketers drooling but rather than spending all your time monitoring the conversation, try developing a high quality product or service. .... many internet entrepreneurs pretend as though there is a secret monetization model that they’ll release in the near future. There isn’t one.

Patrick Chen's Entrepreneur Exchange Summit

I met Patrick Chen at this Hackers And Founders MeetUp. He is a great guy. He said he was a MBA student at NYU, and he had teamed up with a techie friend, who was a full timer with a hedge fund, to form a gaming startup. I paid him the ultimate compliment. I suggested the two of them should team up with me on my startup. He said we can talk. We did talk. We became Facebook friends. We exchanged a few tweets. A few days later he said it is best he stuck to his gaming startup.

Long story short I am going to Patrick's conference on Friday. I tried to suggest they should waive the $45 fee for me since "I will be blogging about the event extensively before and after." Let's put it this way. I ended up having to pay.

Idea to Initial Execution

Image via Wikipedia"If you're investing in a startup at a $10 million valuation, you're not saying it's actually worth $10 million … You're saying it has a 1% chance of being worth a billion."
- Paul Graham

March 25: Stern: Entrepreneurs Exchange Summit

TechCrunch: If Execution Is What Matters, Where Does That Leave Ideas?: the process of getting a great product out there is a vital part of what constitutes innovation in the first place.

The saying that it is not the idea, it is the execution is cliche in the industry. I am going to argue to the contrary. Ideas matter. Big, unsexy companies execute all the time. When a Marco leave a Tumblr to launch an Instapaper, that is not to say he got dissatisfied with Tumblr's execution, and decided he could do a better job at it, and so he left. It was not about the execution. Tumblr's execution is the most sophisticated it has ever been. He left for the idea.

Two AVC MeetUps Two Days In A Row

Image by placenamehere via FlickrAVC MeetUp Tomorrow

I thought I was headed to an AVC MeetUp tonight. I thought so yesterday. I still think so. But then I have an email this morning about an AVC MeetUp that is scheduled for a different day - tomorrow - and a different venue, although still near Union Square.

I did some digging. I have come to find out there are two AVC MeetUps two days in a row, and I don't think Fred Wilson is coming to either of them, which I believe is fine. The guy puts plenty of time churning out blog posts, and reading every single comment left at his blog.

So here's the update.

Tuesday, March 8, 2011 7:00 PM

Olives @ W Hotel - Union Square
201 Park Ave. South
(@ 17th St.)
Gramercy

Wednesday, March 9, 2011 8:00 PM

Smyth Tribeca
85 W Broadway (Chambers St 1/2/3)
New York, NY 10007

Alexa's PaperlessPost

Image via CrunchBaseI first met Alexa Hirschfeld when she was sitting on a panel during Social Media Week 2010. We have met here and there, stayed in touch, an email here, an email there. I brought this idea months ago. I said let me do a few blog posts about your startup. Finally looks like I get to do it. We are meeting Friday. She says they just moved to a new office. It is near Union Square. Most tech startups in Manhattan are near Union Square for some reason.

This is not going to be an act of journalism. I am not a journalist. This is not a professional blogger out to gather material either. This is one tech entrepreneur reaching out to another. But this is the age of social media, so it is not just going to be a let's-catch-up kind of conversation. The conversation will happen and then it will spill over to my blog, which is just fine by Alexa.

The Google/Facebook Of Microfinance

Image via WikipediaThere are five broad categories on the cutting edge: web tech, clean tech, bio tech, nano tech, fin tech.

Validation From Fred Wilson: Froth
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Google and Facebook fall within the web tech domain. Google is the next Google. There is no next Google. Facebook is the next Facebook. There is no next Facebook.

But there remains a Google/Facebook size opportunity in mobile tech, which is a sub category of web tech.

2015: A Mobile Tech Company Will Storm The Room

The Entrepreneur Does Have A Boss

Image via WikipediaA lot of people have this misconception that people who don't like to have to answer to bosses start their own companies. Entrepreneurs don't have bosses.

Perhaps it is the case that the entrepreneur does not have a boss. What the entrepreneur has is a goddess: the market. As an entrepreneur you have to meet your numbers. As long as you meet your numbers, you are in good shape.

Entrepreneurs do get fired. All the time. The entrepreneur version is to go out of business. The goddess can get mad at you and wipe you out.

There is a reason most people are not entrepreneurs. Someone once said being an entrepreneur is like being gay, it is not like you have a choice. I think there is some truth to that. It is a personality type thing. Some people are just more bent on doing the entrepreneur thing.

Immensely Excited

Image via WikipediaI am so very immensely excited with my startup.

Some people complain of the work environment of a big corporation, start a company, and their behavior will tell you they long for the big corporation.

You have to be excited, you have to stay excited. You have to get excited when you hit a wall, you have to stay excited when you get over it. Why would you get excited when you hit a wall? Because, well, what were you expecting? If you did not expect to hit walls, you were not expecting right.

At this stage with my startup it feels like I am getting to watch the formation of the DNA. It is an amazing feeling. I have a small team. We are making steady progress.

Soon I expect to speed things up.

I am really liking it that we could launch for very little. I am really liking it that we will start generating revenues almost right away. I am really liking that. I am liking the immense human component of my business model. Suddenly I will get to party with a purpose. The more people you talk to, the better you get at it.

Jack Dorsey Also Has A FinTech StartUp

Image by Joi via FlickrGreat minds think alike. I have a FinTech startup. Jack Dorsey also has a FinTech startup. Square is a FinTech startup. But my FinTech startup is going to be bigger than Jack Dorsey's. I am giving Jack Dorsey five years to prove otherwise.

I am not making this up, but I thought of something like Twitter about six years before it actually showed up. I was thinking, there has to be a way for celebrities to interact directly with the fans. But I was not thinking 140 characters.

A FinTech StartUp With An Edge

Image via WikipediaWhat I have is a FinTech startup. It is a tech startup. But it is not a tech startup that is trying to come up with the next big thing in tech. That we will leave to the companies that are first and foremost web tech companies.

But we a-r-e going to stay on a constant lookout for developments in tech to see what new developments we can put to the use of microfinance. So we are going to keep our antenna up. But then that is not true only of web tech. We are also interested in the developments in clean tech, bio tech, nano tech. If there will be developments in those sectors that we can possibly put to the service of our microfinance efforts, we will go in with both hands.