Startup Stuff For Entrepreneurs

Here are articles I have written of interest to entrepreneurs.


Sept 7. 2005
Best Startup Advice I Have
Remember Mark Leslie's advice to plan for the Sales Learning Curve.



January 23, 2006
Practicing the Art of Pitchcraft
Crafting an effective elevator pitch for your startup.

Nov. 17, 2005
How to NOT Write a Business Plan
Entrepreneurs often ask me for a sample business plan they can use as a model for their fundraising efforts. They are surprised when I send them a powerpoint file.


August 23, 2008
My Internet Law
The time and money required to develop a secure, scalable e-commerce application drops in half every 18 months.

Escape to Maui

An original, short film documents the hope, critical thinking and determination of a 10-year-old entrepreneur.

July 11, 2005
Thank You, Henry Phipps
My first blog post ever, and how I got here.




November 26, 2006
Bubble Memory
Authentic conversation from 1998, when Silicon Valley service providers were starved for talent.




Aug. 12, 2005
Road Map Investing
A more proactive approach to venture capital that's a little harder to screw up.




Jan. 1, 2006
Control Roulette: A Bet on Red or Black
Crafting the right board of directors has nothing to do with legal structure, and everything to do with getting the right people in the room.







Nov. 12, 2006
Get Big Cheap
"Get Big Fast" didn't work so well, so here's my new motto.




Dec 1, 2005
The Secret of Success
According to one venture capital legend, what is the most common trait of successful investors?



Dec. 11, 2005
Limits of Rationality: Beware the Paralimbic Cortex
Harvard economist proves there is value to you in sharing control of your own board.





Sep 21, 2006
Finding Vimo
Naming internet startups is hard.

July 19, 2007
Three Sealed Envelopes
Serial CEO leaves secret, emergency instructions for his successor.

Feb 6, 2007
Lessons in Online Marketing, from Spago's

Startups gather and share stories from the battlefield.

Dec. 18, 2006
Festival of Light Spending
Santa Claus may have scale, but Judah Macabbee was one hell of an entrepreneur.

bessemer davidcowan entrepreneur luck roadmap getbigcheap saleslearningcurve elevatorpitch businessplan

Science, Scams and Superstition

These articles of mine address the poor state of science education, the persistent intellectual tyranny of religion, and the consequent lack of critical thinking in our country.

Aug. 27, 2006
They Stood at the Foot of the Mount
My family witnesses the ill effect of group-think on hundreds of Disneyland tourists.



Nov. 7, 2006
Silicon Valley Loves Richard Dawkins
Hear the evolutionary scientist's comments to a Who's Who gathering of techno-stars.

Oct 8, 2009
Praying with Richard to the Flying Spaghetti Monster
Richard Dawkins returns to the Valley to raise funds for Reason and Science, and to sign books at Keplers.


Aug. 5, 2006
Blink: The Nonsense of "Thinking Without Thinking"
A less-than-generous book review of the allegedly non-fiction bestseller, why Goerge Bush likely read this book, and suggested alternative reading.





April 19, 2006
CREATED BY A SCHOOL TEACHER!
Read how a scamming couple turns Airborne, a thoroughly untested medical remedy, into a $100m blockbuster product.

Dec 21, 2006
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: Airborne Baloney!
Science mag features my blog.

March 6, 2008

Airborne Losing Altitude!

Science prevails! Company loses $23 million verdict in deceptive advertising lawsuit.

March 21, 2008
Lighting Fires at the Dinner Table

A 16 year-old with ADHD busts myths about the mental health epidemic.

October 9, 2008
Militant Avamparists Are So Annoying!
How can you be so sure that vampires and easter bunnies don't exist? Are you really so dogmatic?

January 27, 2008

A Very Bad Book and a Very Good Book

Con man cashes in on bizarre consipracy theories, and another explains how.

March 26, 2006
Bullshit
Profile of magician Penn Jilette--prompted by my encounter with the celebrity atheist in Vegas--and his expose of bottled drinking water.

July 18, 2007
Dinner with Dawkins and Hitchens
Recap of Dawkins' encore visit to Kepler's and our dinner with Christopher Hitchens.




January 20, 2007
7-Year Old Critical Thinker
What happens when we encourage children to think for themselves?





Dec. 11, 2005
Limits of Rationality: Beware the Paralimbic Cortex
My college roommate, a behavioral economist at Harvard, illustrates how brain structure distorts human calculus of short term versus long term tradeoffs.





Aug. 28, 2005
A "Natural Cure" for the Author's Debts
Confidence artist tops the bestseller list by playing on people's mistrust of corporations.



Oct. 7, 2008
Skeptics Sellout to Christians
Leonard Susskind, Mr. Deity, and a Christian walk into a bar... My notes from a Skepctics Society conference at CalTech.



Aug. 16, 2005
The United States of Almighty-God
What does it say about our country when Time Magazine ignores standards of journalism, pandering to Christians with alleged news on mythological characters?





Feb. 10, 2007
Alyssa Milano: Net Neutrality is Like So Cool
A storm of regulation brews, whipped up by vapid sound bites from anti-experts.

Jan. 14, 2007
Cheating Death
Geniuses in Singapore and Sirtris show God who's boss.

March 11, 2007

Reading Resources for Raising Children Without God

Reading lists for skeptical grownups and kids.

Oct 27, 2006
Religion: Even Stevphens
Rabbi sends me Daliy Show video featuring Islam v. Christinaity face-off.



Oct. 27, 2006
Richard Dawkins Coming to Kepler's
Profile of evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins, prior to his standing-room-only book signing at Kepler's Bookstore.



Sept 5, 2006
Shermer Coming to Kepler's
Profile of Skeptic/Professor/Author/Editor/Producer Michael Shermer, prior to his book signing of Why Darwin Matters.



June 20, 2006
China Pulls Ahead
While US Rep. Westmoreland campaigns on the Colbert Report to post the Ten Commandments in Congress, China invites Stephen Hawking to its Great Hall to lead a debate on physics.



Nov. 22, 2005
Kansas School Board More Religious Than Vatican
Vatican Astronomer rips intelligent design theory.


Nov. 2, 2005
Maybe Harriet Wasn't So Bad
Bush nominates devout Catholic Samuel Alito. Children, learn your prayers.

atheism science scams superstition prayer alternativemedicine airborne dawkins shermergoddelusion pennjilette bullshit groupthink blink rationality disneyland timemagazine colbert

I Told You So, Alyssa Milano!

According to the Wall Street Journal, now Google Wants Its Own Fast Track to the internet. So much for Eric Schmidt's public call for network neutrality.

While everyone's who anyone was jumping on the bandwagon (sorry, Alyssa Milano), remember the one maverick blog that called it egregious hypocrisy from the start.... WhoHasTimeForThis?

Blogged with Flock

Mardi Bas

Mazal Tov to my niece Valerie, who is celebrating her Bas Mitzva in New Orleans. We arrived last night in time to watch Kobe score 26 points as the Lakers trounced the Hornets. 

I'm obviously not a big fan of religious ceremonies, but Val's family has a funny way of celebrating that bucks the trend of over-the-top parties. Instead of congregating all week in synagogue to worship you-know-Who, we're spending the week repairing Katrina-damaged neighborhoods. Today we built and stocked a library for a local public school (I built the shelves in the photo below and my 6-year-old sanded them down). Tomorrow we're installing floors in a condemned home in the lower 9th Ward -- apparently we don't get the day off for either Christmas or Hanukah. Oy.

Blogged with Flock

Tilera: "The Startup To Watch"

This month the Global Semiconductor Alliance recognized Tilera as the Startup To Watch for 2009. Congratulations to founder Vijay Agarwal and his co-founders Devesh Garg (now a partner in Bessemer's Mumbai office) and MIT Professor Anant Agarwal! And kudos to my partner Rob Chandra, who funded and incubated the company in our Massachusetts office.

Tilera has transformed multicore computing by designing a truly distributed chip architecture where each processing core (or "tile") has its own resources such as caches and network nodes. This architecture solves major problems around performance (centralized resources are a bottleneck) and scalability (we're already running 64 tiles on a chip and we'll soon double that). We use industry standard programming tools, running C and C++ code on SMP Linux so it's easy to migrate an existing application to our fully parallel platform. Simply put, Tilera has extended the benefits of distributed computing from PCs down to the chip level.

I'm personally most excited about the impact Tilera will have on security appliances, which increasingly need to process large streams of packets in real time in order to prevent malware, identify predatory behavior, and combat terrorism. Replacing all the FPGAs, DSPs and ASICs in such an appliance, a single Tilera chip is perfect for high volume computational tasks like packet filtering that can be processed in parallel. (Devesh had first recognized this need when he was GM of Broadcom's Security Business Unit.) Tilera fits many other applications as well in processing communications and video (e.g. H.264 codecs) --in fact, we have nearly 50 customers in various stages of design.

The distributed architecture also leads to a greener power profile. By replicating and distributing the circuits, the electron pathways are much shorter, which consumes less power and generates less heat.

Blogged with Flock

Ocarina: World's Bestselling Mobile App

Congrats to the Smule team, whose Ocarina has topped the charts for two weeks now (and especially to CTO Ge Wang who is currently profiled on apple.com/pro).

Anyone can quickly learn to play the Ocarina -- hundreds of song sheets for the Ocarina are now available on Smule.com, thanks to users who have composed and uploaded their scores.

Click on the image to hear my son jamming at the Sonic Mule headquarters...

Blogged with Flock

Nov 29: A Capella Holiday Concert

I discovered last winter that the Bay Area is home to one of the world's premier A Capella choruses. Voices in Harmony sings jazz, pop, contemporary, barbershop, and traditional choral music under the direction of Dr. Greg Lyne, a professor from Arizona State and the St Petersburg Conservatory, and guest conductor for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Oddly, the group isn't well known locally, but they've been collecting international accolades and acclaim -- most recently winning the bronze medal at the BHS World Championship in July (BHS has 34,000 members worldwide).



Next Saturday afternoon at 3pm on Nov. 29 Voices in Harmony (joined by the Late Show quartet and Pride of the Pacific women's chorus) will perform a holiday concert at the California Theatre in San Jose. There are still a few tickets available, and my friends at the chorus have offered to invite the first group of 4+ people who buy tickets through my blog to a pre-concert VIP wine and cheese reception. (Just leave a comment with your email and name if you think you qualify.)

I have no affiliate code or any other financial interest in this event or the group (it's actually non-profit). I'm just sharing my love for their music. You have to hear them to understand, but if you go, you'll thank me.

Blogged with Flock

Why I Just Invested in Goodmail

How many letters have you snail mailed lately? I think I send about 10,000 emails for every letter I write. So why do enterprises who communicate with millions of customers continue to cut down trees and pay to print letters and envelopes have them physically carried around the world with hundreds of times the cost and latency of email?

The reason for this financial, environmental and logistical absurdity is that you'd have to be nuts to open an email from Bank of America, since most emails that are purportedly from Bank of America are not from Bank of America. They're actually from The I-Need-A-New-Mercedes Bank of Leningrad (or Budapest, or Tel Aviv, or Shanghai...). Furthermore, the ISP who delivers consumer email has no idea which hyperlinks and images are safe, and so as a policy the ISP strips all links, media and scripts from the email, rendering the medium rather useless to you and Bank of America.

The textbook solution to this problem is nearly impossible. You'd have to set up auditing procedures to authenticate all legitimate senders, and monitor the senders' behavior to ensure that they never engage in bad practices like spreading malware or spam. You'd have to examine every script and media object they wish to transmit. You'd have to set up and operate cryptographic infrastructure to establish the integrity of the message from the sender's computer all the way to the inbox (i.e. no added viruses or such). You'd have to convince the ISP's who provide web interfaces to change the way they process their email streams based on the cryptographic tokens attached to the messages. The ISP's would then have to explicitly distinguish for users in their web UI which messages are trusted. And then you'd have to convince businesses that they should pay a transaction fee per email to fund all this infrastructure.

Only one startup was crazy enough to try this. With some amusement, I watched Daniel Dreymann's team for three years trying to line up all these ducks. Suddenly, in September, I heard quacking. Mountain View-based Goodmail had actually signed up ISP's representing over 300 million users (including most of the consumer ISP inboxes in the US and Europe), deployed the necessary cryptographic infrastructure, and delivered over three billion CertifiedEmail messages that month on behalf of Time, StubHub and other commercial and non-profit senders.

That's what I call an industry standard solution to a big problem. So last week I invested in Goodmail and joined the board, alongside Scott Kurnit, Don Hutchison, VCs from DCM, Emergence and Softbank, and GoodMail's new CEO Peter Horan (former CEO of About.com).

It was a pretty easy decision for me, having done okay funding email security companies in the past. Worldtalk, Tumbleweed and ON developed email security and each went public before being acquired. Cyota and Postini developed anti-phishing and anti-spam services, and they sold for great prices to RSA and Google, respectively. And in 1995 I started a little company in our offices called Digital Certificate Inc. to build a similarly ambitious cryptographic infrastructure and ecosystem for securing web sessions (we later changed the name to Verisign).

The cost of sending CertifiedEmail is 0.1% that of sending a paper statement, invoice or brochure, not to mention the environmental imperative. Thanks to Goodmail, businesses can now send CertifiedEmails, and we can all safely open them without wearing rubber gloves.

Blogged with Flock

My Halloween Treat: OpenCandy

Despite rumors to the contrary, venture investors are still funding innovative and disruptive startups. My latest Series A investment, announced today, is OpenCandy, which I co-funded with Tim O'Reilly and Reid Hoffman.

Not every (any?) great software application comes from Redmond. Today more than ever individuals and small teams of programmers in every country of the world develop great applications that wither on the vine for lack of visibility and a business model. OpenCandy's technology promises revenue, cheap distribution and free analytics to programmers who may not have their own big marketing departments.

OpenCandy's first product is a recommendations engine that operates in the install wizard of downloaded software. While working for their prior employer DivX, the OpenCandy team discovered that users are far more likely to consider downloading new software while they're in the middle of downloading something else. This observation led them to embed software offers in DivX downloads that now generate $20 million annually for their former employer.

"OpenCandy is taking a proven Web 2.0 model--the ad network--and applying it to software installation. It's very clever. And it will probably work." -- CNET

OpenCandy's recommendations include a mix of free and paid recommendations, depending upon the preferences of the publisher. They do not interfere with the original download, commencing only after the current installation has completed. Here's an example of OpenCandy at work for Miro (a BitTorrent player for RSS video) and Audacity (by far the the best sound recording/mixing tool I've ever used):


Software developers who wish to participate as either a recommender or recommendee should contact co-founder Chester Ng at OpenCandy. He and OpenCandy CEO Darrius Thompson started the company earlier this year. They run a talented but scrappy team in the true tradition of Get Big Cheap. And I'm betting they'll prove that great software is like Halloween candy: you can't eat just one!

Blogged with Flock Browser

It's a Smule World After All

Having realized a 30X gain on my 1997 investment in Tumbleweed, I'm delighted to be incubating Jeff Smith's next venture, Sonic Mule. After taking Tumbleweed public, Jeff retreated to Stanford in pursuit of his doctorate in classical music; he then joined Bessemer as an EIR, where he conceived Sonic Mule (aka Smule). Jeff recruited Ge Wang (Stanford) and Perry Cook (Princeton) -- two of the world's the most prominent professors in computer-music integration and the inventors of Chuck, an open source language that processes and renders sound in real time.

When Jeff's team isn't cleaning out Bessemer's kitchen, they're churning out ass-kicking Chuck-on-iPhone (CHiP) apps. Sonic Lighter (now in the Campaign edition), Sonic Vox (read Apple's review), and Sonic Boom all exceeded our sales projections -- check out the Sonic Lighter's adoption curve in the video below (this is the coolest board update I've ever gotten).



Today Sonic Mule is releasing their latest and greatest app yet-- the Ocarrina. This is the first fully functional and expressive iPhone musical instrument. A true Occarina, it responds to breath, fingerings, and position. It is easy to learn but allows for nuance and mastery. And you can navigate the globe to listen in on Occarina performances around the world. Check out the video and then buy Ocarina for 99 cents.



And this one's for Legend of Zelda fans...


Update: "Smule has done it again," according to This Is How You Build a Great iPhone App at TechCrunch.

Blogged with Flock Browser

The Prospects for SaaS

On Thursday night Bessemer's SaaS practice team Byron Deeter and Philippe Botteri hosted a CFO dinner at John Bentley's in Redwood City, where we discussed the prospects for SaaS in the context of a global recession. My squash gnocchi was delectable, but the portion size was stingy (a sign of the times). Fifteen CFO's participated, about half of whom work at Bessemer portfolio SaaS companies (Cornerstone On Demand, Intacct. Lifelock, LinkedIn, OneStop, Perimeter and Retail Solutions).

The mood could best be described as cautiously pessimistic. Despite hypergrowth in the SaaS industry, the outlook for 2009 is sobering. Among the 13 public SaaS companies, the multiple of enterprise value over current year sales has dropped from 6.6 one year ago to 2.2 today, shaving 60% off market caps year to date. Obviously the market expects growth rates to fall dramatically. SaaS companies grew on average 48% in 2008 but in 2009 Omniture will lead the pack with only 14% growth, according to Goldman Sachs uber analyst Sasa Zorovic, who joined us for the dinner. (Yes, Goldman's SaaS analyst is really named Sasa.)

With slower growth and expensive capital, SaaS companies need to adjust expenses to optimize for cash efficiency, not growth. It's especially important now to assess the profitability of new business, which is tricky in SaaS companies. For each customer, the inflows are the time-discounted billings including expected upsells to the point of expected churn. The outflows equal the sum of upfront sales costs and the time-discounted cost of service delivery and any sales cost for renewals and upsells.

Although we're planning for the worst,  we at Bessemer still believe that the shift to SaaS represents the most important secular shift in enterprise computing since the advent of client-server. The SaaS value proposition of reducing capital expenses as well as total cost of ownership should ring even louder as corporate budgets come under pressure. That's why we predict the downfall of software companies whose addiction to license revenue discourage them from embracing SaaS...

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Take Back the Web!

When Tim Berners-Lee conceived the web, he dreamed of inter-connected documents, of surfing along from one person's page to the next, following a fluid path rich with information and discovery.

Instead what we we got is a big honkin' billboard, as commercial interests hijacked Tim's vision. Just look at any popular web site today and you'll find only two kinds of hyperlinks -- paid ones and self-referential ones (that keep traffic from leaving the domain). The only relevant links come from portals like Google that monetize search. So instead of deeply browsing the web, we search and click, search and click, search and click... So much for friction-free information and serendipitous discovery.

The web will remain captive to publishers until users exercise control over the hyperlinks that define the web's structure. GreaseMonkey, an open source platform for Firefox scripts, promised some relief to users who want control of their web content and links, but it proved far too esoteric and insecure for mainstream use. The startup Hyperwords also provides some relief to users who wish to right-click on words in web pages to perform an operation like search, blog or email, but Hyperwords requires new user behavior, and does not provide any element of discovery.

So 18 months ago my partner Justin Label and I started cooking up a startup to save the web. We conceived of a platform for creating and distributing mash-ups transparently and securely so that you can pick the news sources, e-commerce vendors, reference materials, social networks, media stores, etc. to which your web pages link. We even hoped to mash your web content with personalized objects (e.g. how closely are you LinkedIn to people you read about?), in-page media (e.g. streaming music) and fewer ads. We called it MashLogic.

Bessemer funded the newco, and we recruited search jock Ranjit Padmanabhan (right) and GreaseMonkey scripter Johan Sundstrom as co-founders. After 15 months in development, we're very excited to release a Beta product today, with 100 invites available here. Beta invites are also available on TechCrunch, where just this morning Arrington reviewed the product quite favorably:

"It's a frickin' swiss army knife for hyperlinks... So far in my testing, they've nailed it... I'm putting this on my must-have list of Firefox add-ons."

Obviously there are still wrinkles to iron out. Today we support both major browsers -- Firefox and Flock :-) -- but of course we'll import the plug-in to IE and Chrome.

To be clear, Mashlogic is NOT like Snap, Flyswat, Adaptive Blue, or any of the other startups who try to convince publishers to embed their javascript. We 're not in this to help publishers by giving them better pages full of ads and self-referential links. We're here for users. Which means that we never inject ads or sponsored links into our callouts, and we never add or remove hyperlinks to suit a publisher. We even let users prioritize sources of information, so that a Wikipedia link might trump TechCrunch, or vica versa. The publisher's original links are kept on by default, but you can subordinate them to the other mashes or turn them off altogether. We don't expect mercenary publishers to like us much.

So how do we plan to make money? Once we restore benevolent hyperlinking to the web, many of the links people choose to embed will relate to e-commerce that pays us affiliate revenue for enabling those links. For example, if you like the Expedia mash that displays and links you to the best fares from your location to any destination you read about on the web, we'll get affiliate consideration. So we're motivated to offer up mashes that you'll want to activate.

We know it's unconventional for big VC's to start with an idea and money and then find the team, but every once in a while the opportunity is important enough to warrant the work. As a plus, this approach means that we get to pick the best team in the world to execute the concept, rather than the team that happened to think of it. (This worked for me once before, when I started VeriSign the same way.)

I could show you screen shots but you really have to try it to get a sense for how MashLogic changes the web (you can partially preview the experience here but today our web site may be super busy). Please do comment with your feedback on the product, and let us know how else you might like to mash the web. Not only will we add lots of new mashes, but we're going to open the platform so that even non-programmers can create and share their own mashes in 5 minutes.

I hope you enjoy the new web on MashLogic, and if you see Tim Berners-Lee, tell him that we've got his back.

Blogged with the Flock Browser