Entrepreneurial schizophrenia

Among the many surprises I am coming across as an ex-VC trying his hand as a start-up CEO, the one of schizophrenia is the latest. I think good entrepreneurs are shizophrenic: they can listen to criticism, some scorching, and assimilate its essence in their thinking without becoming discouraged and dropping the ball.

Criticism feels an order of magnitude stronger when it is targeted at your project, yet you need to listen to it and understand if it is valuable, again without letting it discourage you too much. I’ll call this ability,entrepreneurial schizophrenia. I hope I will develop it quickly.

The State of the Nation

Tough post from a discharged US soldier who lost his brother in Irak.  As an americanophile European (French to boot!), I find what is happening in the US and Irak absolutely appaling.  I can only hope the boys can go home and Irakis can start to put their country together soon.

Some of us here in Europe have never forgotten what the GIs did for us in WWII and during the Cold War (my Russian’s pretty rusty, but it’d be a lot better if the Americans hadn’t kep watch over Western Europe for decades) and it drives us crazy to see so much valour and courage wasted on Iraki sand for nothing.

(Through Feld Thoughts).

Social Networking as a context

I have been thinking about social networking a lot these past few days.  I feel there is quite a disconnect between what many start-ups are trying to do in the space and what users actually want out of social networking.

To make it short, social networks are a context for a lot of our on-line activities, not a destination in and by themselves.  LinkedIn is a great place to recruit people, but is it the top site you visit every day?  The succesful social sites help you do something in connection witbh your friends, your acquiaintances or just people you trust.  In that regards, Yelp may be the ultimate “social” site (in terms of potential audience) and they seem to be leaving in the dust all olf their direct competitors.

There also seems to be a huge difference between online networks and the group of people you mingle with off-line: online networks seem to work in a much looser fashion.  You accept way more people in an on-line network, and don’t have to work quiteb as much on the connection.  I think it is the reason for the relative failure of companies like Friendster and Small World: they might have tried to replicate off-line networks too closely and there is no point to that.

The problem, I believe, becomes: what is the on-line activity for which there is the greatest pay-off for users so they do invest time in the creation of the network (enter their friends’ email address, post reviews, etc.)?  MySpace seems to have found one activity for a niche: music discussion and sharing.  Facebook I don’t know too much about but is it to help people stay connected to their schoolmates?

Once the network is in place, the value is pretty massive (provided you can monetize it) and fairly defensible, which explains why so many companies are trying to get there.

Is there value in a meta-network, a place where you would enter your sdocial context once and for all, and then syndicate it to all of the specific networks you may want to apply to?  Not likely, as there is no pay-off for users there, except for the management value, which I think is really a barrier to entry not a pay-off.

Are the largest social-enabled activities picked yet?  I really don’t think so and that is what I am trying to do with my start-up…

Logitech still sucks, but Microsoft is even worse

Bought a Microsoft keyboard/mouse combo: good software, great design; i loved it until the keyboard stopped working and no, I had not dropped it on the floor. Impossible to restart it, I now have to deal with Microsoft support to get it returned.

Bought a Logitech in the meanwhile: cheapest USB keyboard at FNAC, tiny, wrong keys, I have more typos than ever before with this piece of shit.

The lesson: Microsoft creates great product but can’t be bothered to make them well enough to be used by regular people for any length of time where as Logitech can’t make a piece of hardware (and software) to save its life. Thanks fellas!

My tiny little start-up

I am seriously considering launching yet another start-up in the consumer Internet space. It will be based in France and will be local at first, although with European ambitions, once I have established the model. I will keep posting my progress (or lack thereof) on this blog.

One thing I have noticed already: giving a start-up the inital momentum it needs is hard. You have to push against lots of skepticism and plenty of lack of interest. It is easier being a VC, as you can simply operate in stimulus-response mode, whereas entrepreneurs have to push for things. Alright, I get no points for originality, but this is what surprised me most up to this point.

Another Long Tail?

Good post over at VentureBlog, discussing the Economy of Abundance.

David Hornik writes that “the idea of the Economy of Abundance is not prescriptive. It does not tell you how to run your business”.  It does suggest the winning strategies, though: in an economy of abundance, the winner is the company who can gain control of the *new* bottleneck: Google is worth so much because they “control” access by the consumers to whatever on-line resource they are searching for, whether on-line of off-line (as I have argued before).

Even in the economy of abundance, the question remains: where is the scarcity?  If it is not storage or bandwidth, consumer attention will probably be the first wall technology web plays à la Netvibes hit and brands will make the difference.  In content plays, it will probably be some sort of network externalities, a la eBay, and critical mass will carry the day (think YouTube with people posting videos because they know more people go to YouTube for user-posted videos).

I do agree technology is not quite the bottleneck it used to be so we can’t count on that scarcity making us rich, but I would argue bottlenecks are still great competitive advantages, if you can make them work for you.

Where are the Italians?

I am getting the hang of this blogging thing and, for me, it means writing mostly about technology.  This is where I am getting the biggest bang for the buck.  But it does not mean I am not going to slip a note about music of film once in a while.

There has been quite a revival of horror (survival, zombie, etc.) and thrillers recently.  The Americans are leading it, with the Koreans, the Brits and a few French filmmakers following suit and putting out quality movies.  All of a sudden, the 70s are all the rage and all sorts of people are going out of their way to praise the grittiness of the cinema of that period.  OK,  so far, so good.

What keeps frustrating me is the relative absence of Italian movies: where are the new Fulcis,  the new Argentos, the new Castellaris? These guys were a major force in the 60s and 70s and put out some of the most outrageous films ever to grace the silver screen: where are they now that the public wants new TCMs and DoTDs?

I will venture one explanation: the money is gone.  There are no producers left to pursue those juicy filoni and finance these movies, hence the trouble that even a Soavi seem to have to put together one nü-Giallo like Arriverderci Amore, Ciao.  The Italian movie industry of yesteryear was not built on art, but on (little) money, and these movies were pushing the envelope because that was the only way to get buns in seats, even if it meant in sleazy, second-rate theaters.

SlimDevices acquired by Logitech

Just through GigaOm: http://gigaom.com/2006/10/18/slim-devices/

I have owned a Squeezebox for about a year now and it is one of the few pieces of electronics that have actually changed my life and the life of my family: we listen to a lot of music and this little apparatus just made the whole experience so much easier for everyone. No changing the CDs anymore, no need to swap CDs in and out of the car reader, etc.

Like a lot of the other users on Slim’s forums, I hope they do keep churning out great open source software like their SlimServer and SoftSqueeze and do not go dozn Logitech’s path of absolutely dreadful bloatware (several megabyte mouse drivers? Give me a f***g break). If they don’t, I am sure somebody will fork the code and I, for one, will be ready to donate something to keep the spirit alive.

In the case of Mirra, I was relieved when Seagate acquired them as it was pretty clear that the company wasn’t cutting it as an independent business and I was likely to find myself the proud owner of the back-up equivalent of the dodo (no GPL software here). I am not quite as enthusiastic here, but it does show that open source can be a great enbaler for small businesses and lead to good outcomes for shareholders.

When is Microsoft going to divest Microsoft Dynamics?

I don’t get it: Microsoft bought Navision and Great Plains a few years ago (adding Axpeta a bit later, if my memory serves me right), on the premise they could do to the mid-market ERP market what they hade done to OSs, PC Software, development tools and more recently, databases and EAI platforms: commoditize the hell out of the market, use their extraordinary distribution power to bury potential customers and embrace/extend where there were islands of resistance.

It turns out the going has been a bit tougher than they had assumed: ERPs are a different beast with a need for lots of direct sales people and plenty of integration after the sale, not exactly MSFT’s cup of tea I believe, especially as Ballmer’s attention is increasingly being drawn to toe fight with Google in the consumer Internet space.

Why not give up and simply divest the whole division to financial buyers out there?

Switching to English

As a native French speaker, it pains me to notice that my posts in English get read a lot more than my posts in French. It is all relative, we are not talking about the WSJ readership here, but it is fairly clear. It could be that my technology and VC posts get read more and they happen to be written in English, but I somehow doubt that is the right explanation.

I do not believe my prose is better in English and I do feel that my thinking is clearer in French but I also do not mind the extra eyeballs and will be blogging in English from now on.

As a side comment, I do have a deep love of the French language, but I am starting to think it just might be possible that in a few decades, it will be a dead language. This has happened before, as my grand-parents can attest, having had to give up Brezhoneg and start speaking French even at home, so:

1. It happens and can be fairly speedy a process;

2. There would be a part of me which would feel some schadenfreude at seeing the French language get treated in the same way so many regional languages (Corsican, Provencal, Basque, etc.) were treated less than a century ago.