http://nabeelhyatt.com/

Jinha Lee at the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Bits and...

Fri, 18 May 2012 23:28:44 -0400

Jinha Lee at the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Bits and Atoms is taking first steps on an intriguing human-computer interface. Eerie and awesome.

“Hallway Chat”, #6 - Opengraph, HTC One S, Wunderlist, and...

Tue, 15 May 2012 11:07:00 -0400

“Hallway Chat”, #6 - Opengraph, HTC One S, Wunderlist, and Picturelife

We missed a week of the podcast but we’re back (thanks to the one guy that noticed, we’re doing it for you :). This week we discussed Facebook Opengraph and the perils & opportunity of hypergrowth, Bijan’s new Android phone, and an update on previous conversations around Flickr alternatives.

Click here for previous episodes.

The story behind the story on all the hyper-growth

Mon, 14 May 2012 21:38:27 -0400

Why is it that Viddy, Socialcam, Pinterest, and others have suddenly accelerated their growth in such a short timeframe? The surface answer is, of course, the integration with Facebook’s open graph.

But that’s the symptom, not the cause.

The New Platform Wars: Facebook vs Apple vs Android

What’s really happening is that Facebook has woken up to the fact that it was not a major player in the latest platform wars, and it is coming back with a vengeance. The extent of its efforts, as I’ve gathered from conversations over the last month combined with the company’s public actions, have become crystal clear. It is sparing no expense or action to preserve its future as users’ default graph.

For context on what would cause Facebook to get aggressive, let’s rewind just a few months back and remember what growth was happening at that time. The headlines back in March were about “App Store Payola,” not about Facebook at all. Everyone knew ….continued at Pando Daily

"Investing in the things that make our collective lives better—the very things we think of as..."

Sat, 12 May 2012 13:37:47 -0400

“Investing in the things that make our collective lives better—the very things we think of as progress—should be the only good investments. Venture capital is a means to an end, that end being the commercialization of innovation that makes our lives better.”

- I don’t agree with everything in this post, but I certainly agree with that. (via Reaction Wheel)

Hackathons, pitch days, and the value of practice

Fri, 11 May 2012 18:36:00 -0400

At Conduit, every once and a while we would have a Pitch Day. A pitch day, usually a Friday, was one where anyone on the team could pitch a new game that we would consider building in the future.

We continued this practice at Zynga and there were always small groups of the team that became obsessed with putting something great out there. Others, however, thought this was a useless exercise since despite the effort many of the ideas were unfeasible or of poor quality. To detractors it felt like a sloppy waste of time, and only exposed how not everyone on the team was an A player.

But I never saw it that way. While I was always open to the idea that an amazing game would be pitched or would inspire a feature for our current games, that was not my criteria for success.

For me the largest value was the exercise itself. For most of the team, they don’t get the chance to think about the whole product the way I would have to on a daily basis. Thinking about the long term vision and the near term goals simultaneously is not easy and most (including me) start out very bad at it. From our Pitch Days, to Dropbox’s Hack Week, to Google’s 20% time - they all empower folks to get practice at thinking holistically.

Fareed, who took over my former job as GM at Zynga Boston, made a spot-on analogy to professional athletes. No one expects a star basketball player to never practice, then show up on Saturday for the big game and play perfectly. These activities are an opportunity for the next generation of leaders to try their hand and practice. Success will show itself not just in the potential of a good idea to come up, but in the long term well rounded growth of your team.

In defense of hype

Wed, 02 May 2012 16:10:00 -0400

For a startup ecosystem that is all about optimism, it’s ridiculous how much petty backstabbing and general negativity there is when new stuff comes along.

To pick only one topic area, here is a random assortment of negativity on the general funding environment I’ve heard just in the last week:

AngelList is overhyped. It’s adverse selection for people that either cant raise money elsewhere or are more concerned with their follower count by celebrity-valley types than actually building a business.
YCombinator is overhyped and generates mostly trivial businesses (with the odd exception and those haven’t exited). Worse, it means everyone is too busy starting a company to be part of the frat instead of helping build a great company.
Super Angels / MicroVCs are overhyped and are going to cause the bust. They are simply pricing up the market past a realistic valuation, hurting a companies’ chance to raise their next round. And they won’t have the dry powder to support those same businesses because of their fund size. This will cause a collapse in the whole market.

I’m not even talking about the general skepticism of whatever company happens to be a “hot” company right now. From Highlight, to Pinterest, to Voxer, to Socialcam there’s all kinds of naysaying.

I remember this same skepticism about Zynga (“I heard they make all their money on scammy offers!”), Twitter, and countless others. To be sure, some of this skepticism might actually be true. But in a world where we bank on the exceptional happening, it seems incredibly small minded to constantly assume the exceptional won’t happen.

Personally, when I feel the hype coming on I try and remember two things:

1. I am not a short seller.
It isn’t my job as an entrepreneur, and it’s not my job when investing, to pick the losers. So it’s not worth spending a lot of energy trying to prove that a particular company isn’t going to make it, most aren’t. Much more important is trying to figure out those rare few companies and few individuals that might break through, and the ripple effects if they succeed. I try and focus my effort spending time there.

2. Hype is often necessary, it’s just not sufficient.
Just because an entrepreneur is starting to speak at a lot of conferences or is becoming a quasi celebrity doesn’t mean they are all hype. Yes, many of those people are hopelessly useless. But the ability to generate hype is not a bad thing, it’s really important to commanding thought leadership and shaping a market. Building something isn’t enough, if you want to grow really fast, and fight off competition, you often also have to make people believe in your future.

It matters that Square is not just growing revenue-wise but commands thought leadership to potentially change payments. It matters that AngelList is materially effecting how some people are fundraising, and worth planning how that could possibly effect everything else. It matters that the YCombinator alumni could get large enough, and wealthy enough, to completely self fund each class internally and separate from the early stage ecosystem altogether.

Combining those two ideals I’d rather focus on what could happen if the hype comes true, and spend my time planning for the few situations where I believe it will.

"Good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose."

Wed, 02 May 2012 07:09:16 -0400

““Good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.””

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Not about bubbles - Hallway Chat - Episode #5 In this weeks 10...

Tue, 01 May 2012 17:20:00 -0400

Not about bubbles - Hallway Chat - Episode #5

In this weeks 10 minutes of chatter @bijan and I discuss some thoughts on being a new VC, Pebble v Apple, the B&N/microsoft deal and the Nike FuelBand

We’d also welcome any thoughts on subjects or questions we should cover in next weeks podcast, just comment away.

"Silicon Valley’s math is getting fuzzy again."

Tue, 01 May 2012 12:41:00 -0400

I will not be exposing on the bubble talk. But I will reblog when it’s something worth reading. And MG nails it (props to Josh K as well) in a post worth every entrepreneur reading.

parislemon:

In my last post, I linked to something that First Round Capital’s Josh Kopelman wrote in 2007. His post was prompted by — wait for it — a New York Times piece declaring that “Silicon Valley’s math is getting fuzzy again.” We were in a BUBBLE! Ahhhhh!!!!

Reading over that post now, it’s pretty awesome.

As Brad Stone and Matt Richtel reported in October of 2007:

Internet companies with funny names, little revenue and few customers are commanding high prices. And investors, having seemingly forgotten the pain of the first dot-com bust, are displaying symptoms of the disorder known as irrational exuberance.

No, that wasn’t written yesterday — but it sure reads like it was.

Read More

The New SparkCapital.com

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 23:28:00 -0400

The New SparkCapital.com:

The new site is live.

We tried to keep it simple, straightforward, and let the pictures do the talking. It’s still evolving, and we plan to add a lot more photos of our portfolio companies, a few less of us. That is, as soon as we get around to their offices and take some shots. Other suggestions welcome (iterate iterate iterate!)

mokoyfman:

You’ll notice that the site revolves around photos — personal photos that capture a sense of our team, the entrepreneurs we partner with and the lives we live both personally and professionally. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. We couldn’t think of a better way to represent Spark Capital. Hopefully this approach has the desired effect of demystifying and humanizing our firm, so you can get a true sense of who we are and what we do.

“Hallway Chat”, #4 Today @bijan and I recorded our fourth...

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 15:09:00 -0400

“Hallway Chat”, #4

Today @bijan and I recorded our fourth edition of “Hallway Chat”

We discussed an interesting tweet from Dharmesh on being CTO for a day over at Kayak, the new Google Drive, a quote by Feynman found on Hacker News and some of the magic behind Square and geofencing.

Hope you enjoy it, we’re still new at this so we’d love feedback.

Instagram is worth 1%, not $1b

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 11:38:00 -0400

The best way to think about the value of Instagram is not to think about $1 billion or $30/user, it’s this: 1%

The value of Instagram is tied up in Facebook being valued at an unprecedented $100 billion valuation. To use the case that Paul Graham makes for YC: do you believe that Instragram adds an incremental value of 1% to Facebook?

So before you as an entrepreneur start naively making the case that your startup is worth $30 a user like Instagram, or that a top-down view of the photo market is x so that means your video startup is worth y, consider the logic of the buyer.

There is no market more strategically valuable to Facebook than mobile, and there is almost no product more valuable than photos for them. But also, they have incredible buying power at $100b that virtually no one but Apple has. It was a very unique situation where a $100b company made a 1% bet.

“Hallway Chat”, #3 This week @bijan and i talk about the...

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 10:23:03 -0400

“Hallway Chat”, #3

This week @bijan and i talk about the facebook/instagram deal, work/life balance, the copenhagen wheel project and a bit on picturelife

"This is not an EBay auction where top price wins."

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 15:27:00 -0400

Some absolutely top shelf advice for entrepreneurs from the CEO at 42Floors (YC’12). I’ve always tried to treat getting an investor as both a financing event and a *hiring* event. Especially for an A round you are hiring a board member, an additional team member with a lot of hard and soft influence on the future of your business. What process would you use to evaluate adding a senior executive to the team? Try using that. Every time I have forgotten that (every fucking time) I got screwed. (via 42Floors)

Just say no to testing red vs blue

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:59:25 -0400

Just say no to testing red vs blue:

The problem with A/B testing is not the testing, it’s the inputs. If you are an early stage company and you need 2x returns you need to be swinging big.

I personally found this hilarious, tested these 2 ads for the sake of curiosity 15k impressions each:

- Nice picture of actual in-game content
- Green call to action button w/ “free”, “free online racing”
- Trust symbol (EA = reputable, Need For Speed = huge reputable franchise)

VS

- Some shit ad I made in 5 mins in Microsoft Paint.

Results? 0.049% CTR vs. 0.137 CTR in favor of the shit ad in Microsoft Paint. I also tested speed lines vs. no speed lines behind the car and speed lines won LOL. So what does this prove? Every idea that you have is worth testing, no matter how crappy you think it is.

A startup is not a small business

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 11:46:00 -0400

A startup might be small, even tiny, but the experience of running a small business has very little comparison to a startup.

A small business is an understandable, sustainable, repeatable company looking for ways to optimize, improve, and grow.

A startup is more like an unstable particle, a set of questions and theories of answers. It is a temporary state, a search for a repeatable, massively scalable, profitable business.

You don’t have to know what you are when you start. There are plenty of products that start with no idea of their future path. Twitter started that way.

But you should know before you build a team, because there are different people, with different motivations that help build a startup. And they often aren’t actually very good at being small (or big) business team members.

“Hallway Chat” Here is our second podcast that @bijan and I...

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 17:52:00 -0400

“Hallway Chat”

Here is our second podcast that @bijan and I recorded a few moments ago.

We discussed @fredwilson’s post, “Coming of Age”, does the ipad need the home button, iOS app “Pair” and the search for replacing flickr.

As always, we would love to hear your feedback! Thanks for listening.

The Pinterest opportunity

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 10:48:00 -0400

You can tell a company is more than hype when the spammers start making real money. They only care about cash, not the hot thing on Techcrunch, and they are clearly on to Pinterest’s amazing engagement. There is an opportunity in Pinterest today for both legitimate startups and sleazy folks like Steve just like there was in Google SEO, Digg, and Facebook virality.

While Pinterest needs to crack down on spammers, what about the legitimate opportunities this signals for startups? Who is really going to focus on Pinterest and capitalize the most? I believe the people that will have sustained success are those that don’t approach Pinterest as something to be exploited, but build it into the natural flows of using their product. The kind of all in bet where you almost have to use Pinterest when you use your product.

I know a dozen startups that are “focusing on Pinterest as a channel.” But that’s right after they tell me about the four other channels they are focusing on. That’s not focus, that’s treating it as another input into the system, not the engine of the system itself.

As an example, back in early 2008 there was the first panel discussion on social games at GDC (actually I think it was the first panel anywhere on social games). The space already had a lot of buzz, with Zynga’s Poker and SGN’s Warbook accumulating millions of users. Up on the stage were Mark Pincus of Zynga, TJ Murphy of Social Gaming Network, and me.

What I remember the most was that every time I asked questions about opportunities, Mark had total conviction and focus. Virtual goods or advertising? TJ (and later Shervin) talked about a balance of both - Mark called bullshit, “its all about virtual goods.” MySpace and mobile? “it’s all about Facebook.” He smelled something good and he was going to be single minded about it until something proved him wrong.

I don’t think boiling down to one priority is always the right thing to do. But if you have found some real traction at last, remember to stop looking for it elsewhere! Pinterest clearly represents that opportunity for someone, I wonder who.

Loving the new Paper app, so I made this. :) I’ve used a...

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 22:34:00 -0400

Loving the new Paper app, so I made this. :)

I’ve used a LOT of sketchpad apps and this is easily the most well considered one. Start by sketching in pencil and then going over in marker. So many subtle things that they got right in the way the lines draw and how it feels. Very subtle, but these guys are good.

Podcast #1, Week of 3/26 (cross posted from Bijan’s...

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 15:49:00 -0400

Podcast #1, Week of 3/26 (cross posted from Bijan’s blog)

Nabeel and I have been kicking around the idea of doing a podcast. Basically the idea is to record the stuff we talk about over lunch on any given day.

So earlier today we fired up Soundcloud on the iPad and hit record with zero editing. It’s about 12 minutes long and we talk about things like the Job Act, YCombinator’s “No Idea required”, a to do list app that we’ve been playing around with called Wunderlist, and what’s next after Flickr.

Let us know what you think about our first try.