Mark Fletcher spoke about his experience starting ONElist and Bloglines at this month’s SDForum Startup SIG in Palo Alto. Mark has given a similar presentation at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and at Startup School, but if you are not in California you might have missed his advice for starting your own company while moonlighting and being super-cheap. Mark’s last corporate job was with set-top box maker Diba which was eventually acquired by Sun Microsystems in July 1997. He started working on a new company, ONElist, on the side, funded by a $5,000 bonus check for its first six…
Category Archives: Business
iPod, the rejected startup
Tony Fadell helped develop handheld devices for General Magic and Philips. Tony had a vision of a portable MP3 player complemented by an online music store. His startup, Fuse, couldn’t get VC financing to build the product. He shopped the idea around to big companies such as Real Networks and only one company decided to experiment with his idea, hiring Tony as a contractor to build a prototype in two months. The first review on Slashdot in October 2001 called the product “lame” and “not very exciting” for lacking wireless and a bigger hard drive. The product idea became the…
PodSession: Startup School
Want to found a startup! First you should go to school and learn a few things. Last Saturday’s Startup School at Stanford brought together about 600 people from across the country and in some cases the world to learn what it takes to take a business from zero to profit without going broke. Om and I both attended and talked about the event and the current environment for new startups in this week’s PodSession. The event was organized by Y Combinator, a venture firm focused on seed funding for geeky projects. Students in the Y Combinator program can try startup…
Big companies and Lawrence of Arabia
One of my favorite scenes in Lawrence of Arabia is “Chaos in Damascus.” The Arabs have just captured Damascus from the Turks and various civil tasks are divided between multiple tribes. Damascus in the hands of Turks was a pie-in-the-sky dream they never thought was possible, yet they are now all in the great hall trying to organize. There is infighting among the tribes, civil tasks break down, and tribal leaders point fingers blaming other tribes or things they do not understand. The telephones do not work because they have no electricity. There is no electricity because no one will…
PodSession: eBay shopping for partners
According to The Wall Street Journal eBay is talking to Microsoft and Yahoo! about partnerships that could help the auction giant better compete against Google and its expanding offerings. EBay is a large advertising spender but sees Google’s moves into e-commerce as a threat to its main businesses in auctions, PayPal, and Skype. Should eBay and other companies be afraid of Google as the search company expands to new areas? Is it fair to eBay sellers to exclude a large referral source such as Google? I think eBay is just asserting itself in the marketplace and shopping around for some…
Application-specific WiFi for free
I’ve read some chatter lately about free WiFi offerings by Yahoo! and others tied to a specific application. Connecting a product to an established network of connection points makes a lot of sense for companies with established branding power, and I think there will be many new partnerships to help users of specific applications stay connected on the road. While there is a lot of talk about companies building their own WiFi networks for specific purposes I think we will instead see partnerships with existing restricted access networks with some advertising and branding swap to offset costs. Yahoo! Messenger On-the-Road…
Back from vacation
I spent the last week in Maui visiting a friend and having some rest and relaxation before I start at Microsoft on Monday. I spent my time scuba diving, hiking, eating BBQ, climbing volcanos, and watching movies and a few European soccer matches. It was a relaxing trip and a fun adventure but it’s good to be back in the Bay area and around familiar people and places. I was impressed my the number of enterprising small businesses in Maui made possible by tourism. Individuals would set up a photo area with a few tropical birds and charge for postcards…
Creating a feed syndication platform at Microsoft
Starting next week I will join Microsoft’s Windows Live division to create a new product team around syndication technologies such as RSS and Atom. I will help build a feed syndication platform leveraged by Microsoft products and developers all around the world. I am excited to construct a team and product from scratch focused on scalability and connecting syndication clients and their users wherever they may exist: desktop, mobile, media center, gaming console, widget, gadget, and more. Live.com is the new default home page for users of the Internet Explorer 7 and the Windows Vista operating system. Live.com will be…
The cost of commuting to Silicon Valley
Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft employ tens thousands of people in the San Francisco Bay area including many talented people driving close to 100 miles round-trip every day to work for these big companies. AAA released today their 2006 driving costs report and I decided to run the numbers to associate a conservative cost with a commute to these companies. How much would it cost to drive a Toyota Camry to work every day from the city centers of San Francisco, Berkeley, or Alameda? Prices below include conservative costs from AAA for average fuel consumption, maintenance, tires, insurance, license and registration,…
theOffice, creating the ideal workplace for indie writers
I am in west Los Angeles today and dropped by theOffice, a community workspace serving the professional writing community of Santa Monica and surrounding areas. They have put a lot of thought and effort into creating an ideal creative work environment combining elements of a cafe, library, and Feng Shui garden into a place creative professionals feel inspired and focused. Background information The workspace was founded by writer and director Aleks Horvat in 2004 with charter members such as J.J. Abrams, Jim Uhls, and Mara Brock Akil. A wall-of-fame tracks successful works written in the space. Aleks was working…