GetHundos Launched!

It's been a crazy month and things will continue to be crazy until mid August when I wrap up some of my heavy engagements which means I will continue to be bad at updating this blog. I apologize in advance for that. On that note, here's something that I felt was important enough to squeeze in amidst my crazy schedule:



After months of hard work by my good friends Leo, Adam, and their team plus a round of diligent alpha testing by their close friends and investors, gethundos.com beta has finally launched! =) I am very excited for them and the site has already gained quite a bit of traction with their first target audiences at the University of Washington. For now, only users with a u.washington.edu e-mail address can register through their site or any other .edu address if you are invited by a Washington friend. However, if any of you who don't have a .edu address and would still like to give this site a run for its money, just give me a shout and I'll hook you up with an account! ;)

So what's this site all about? Well, looks like someone has already beat me to announcing their launch and did a very good job of describing the site so here it is:

GetHundos Targets UW Students With Themed Contests

Congrats to the GetHundos team! Keep up the good work! =)

Update [10-12-2009]: GetHundos has evolved into Cheddr Media about half a year or so ago. You can also find them on Twitter: @cheddrmedia =)

Why I won't buy an iPhone 3G anymore...

A lot of publications have been covering the iPhone 3G's new terms with AT&T so I won't keep you long on what's already covered. Here are the bullet points on why I won't get an iPhone 3G anymore:

1. increase in data plan price by $10/mo and technically $20/mo for corporate use
2. No text messaging included with the data plan
3. I am currently an AT&T customer that's not yet eligible for an upgrade so it won't be just $199 for me.
4. No usb cable to charge while syncing

Here's a more in depth article about the iPhone 3G and its terms with AT&T from Venture Beat.

A Seattle Stealth Mode Startup Closing on Launch

According to insider information ;) , the alpha release of Leo Chen & Adam Schoenfeld's web application will launch within 2 weeks. Without violating my NDA with them, all I can reveal is that it will be a fun & competitive venue for consumers and an excellent marketing platform for businesses. By "excellent marketing platform," I mean it will have a truly viable marketing mechanism. (ie. not your avg target advertising BS =P) They are currently busy putting in finishing touches in preparation to give it a run for its money. I have been lucky enough to catch a glimpse of what the site looks like and I must say that I am excited to see it work its magic when it comes time. It definitely has a lot of potential.

I have known Leo personally since the early 90's and he has always been impressively intelligent. I don't remember one thing that he failed in given his whole hearted attempt. This will be yet another challenge that I am sure I will witness him conquer.

With that said, good luck to the whole team on the upcoming launch!

Firefox 3 Release Fumble

What an infrastructure bust! This is a prime example of why an awesome piece of software with great developers alone can't bring success to a product. Without proper attention to IT and operations, you loose market share and sometimes, customer confidence (not so much in this case for the latter).

For those who aren't aware of what I am talking about, here's a post by VentureBeat.com that describes today's mishap for Mozilla.

I am not saying it's easy to manage an infrastructure that is capable of facilitating a world wide simultaneous download nor do I necessarily think that a world wide simultaneous download is a good idea but if a company decides to hype up the world about it, it better follow through with diligent planning and implementation that will yield better results than what was seen by us today. I am personally a huge fan of Mozilla but this event was definitely a disappointment. If I was the director in-charge of delivering this release, I would think long and hard about how I ensure this never happens again.

On another note, Firefox 3.0 is great! I am seeing a lot of improvements and have been a happy FF3 user all morning. =) Good job on that Mozilla and volunteers! Keep up the good work! I am as always extremely appreciative of all your hard work! =)

Why I think Twitter is a must have in an Entrepreneur's tool box...

There has been a lot of noise going around about Twitter's downtime and such. Although it is annoying to be using an application that's sometimes unstable, I am going to focus on the positives of this product instead.

For those of you who are not familiar with Twitter, it is a micro-blogging web application that has social networking features built-in. Each entry has a limit of 140 characters. The contents of these entries are usually about what the author is doing at the moment or links of articles and blogs that he/she feels is worthy of sharing. You can also reply to authors and have short conversation through this micro-blogging scheme. Your feed consists of your own entries as well as other authors who you friend or in Twitter terms, "follow."

Or as Twitter's homepage puts it:

"Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?"

These are a few reasons why I think Twitter is important for me as an entrepreneur:

1. I meet interesting people that are experts in all different fields to fill in on what I lack in knowledge.
2. I get a feed of interesting reads that were filtered by people that I think highly of.
3. I get an aggregated view of my friend's and business contact's activities in a much more efficient way than to keep in constant contact with them individually.
4. It drives traffic to my blog. ;)

All in all, it's just a great way for information exchange which helps you stay on top of the latest and greatest; something that every entrepreneur should thrive for. So if you haven't given Twitter a chance yet, maybe you should. =)

The 2 most important yet neglected positions...

I was having a conversation with a co-worker earlier this morning and somehow, it led to me talking about my rule of always hiring a DBA and a IT guy at very early stages of a startup. Those two roles may not necessarily be worthy of FTE positions but the work is there regardless how much people mistakenly think it's unimportant or better yet, "not important enough yet." More often than not, developers are not the best sys admins nor are they good DBAs. Code can be re-written and deployed relatively easy but restructuring databases or IT infrastructures bring a lot of unnecessary downtime and headaches in even the medium-run. So why not start right from the beginning? Of course, you might be thinking, the answer is quite simple: "cost". That's only a common misconception though because the ROI is much greater than the cost of doing things right from the start. With that said, yes, it does cost money but it doesn't have to be a FT salary. It can be trusted outsourced entities that only charge by the hours of work they do. With just maybe a few hundred dollars a month, you can most likely notice a huge difference in the results delivered that will be felt through out your company's existence.

Here's the value it brings:

1. Expertise in product evaluation and purchases which saves on overall costs
2. Ensures a reliable IT infrastructure & optimized database
3. Lessens downtime and labor on problem solving
4. Optimizes scalability
5. Stabilizes expense patterns

Think about it... I am absolutely confident about my theory and stand behind it with all my heart. However, I would love to hear any opposing opinions to see why my theory might be flawed.

Start! ~ Let's start a company

A co-worker pointed out this conference to me today: Start!



It seems pretty interesting and the cost is very affordable. I am thinking about going myself to see what it's like and to find out how useful it might be for both people with great ideas that don't have a lot of experience and also for those who are seasoned veterans.

Anyone else interested? ;)

“20 Ideas To Relentlessly Self Promote You and Your Business”

An older but great blog post that summarized Ann Tardy's “Driving Revenue in 2008 with Asking + Relentless Self-Promotion” presentation @ SF's chapter of Women in Consulting.

What great guidelines to follow for those who want to bring their business ideas to life or just simply drive additional revenue for their existing company.

As a side note, this is what led me to the above blog post: From Incoherent to High Concept Pitch

Yet another good read courtesy of Joey Lo. @Aronado referred to this blog post as a "A Gift from the Startup Gods..." I must say though, I wasn't entirely impressed w/ the "Facebook for Brands" tagline.

Earthlink Followup & Qwest's FTTN...

So Earthlink promised a trial for me but never came through. There goes my high hopes. =P

On another note, I found out from Leo today that Qwest is offering fiber optic 12mbps high speed internet in Newcastle, WA?! Time to investigate them instead. Maybe they will offer it in my area too. =)



Though I must say, their prices seem a bit higher than what Verizon is offering the areas that they cover. Without much of a choice though, Qwest's fiber services seems like the best deal in town. Here's more about it.

Good bye Earthlink!

All about funding...

Here are a couple more short articles recommended by Joey Lo that I really liked myself as well.

Angel Financing

When to Raise Money

Of course, I am absolutely not saying that you will learn everything about funding through these two articles but they are nonetheless very informative sources that summarize what I had to learn "the hard way" from working with startups and pitching for funding over time.

China rising: If you know Mandarin and management, you're in

Thanks to my friend Dave for this great article. It really points out an incredible opportunity for those of us who are bi-lingual or intend to become bi-lingual. I have always been an advocate for seeing the world and leaving a trail across all 7 continents. So how about China as your next stop? =)

5 Quick Tips on Pitching Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists

Great short article on simple/obvious things to keep in mind when pitching your idea to potential investors courtesy of Joey Lo. I think I should write a script to auto repost all her links on Twitter. She comes up with the best articles. =)

Google Docs Sharing Security

For those of you who are fans of Google Docs or use it to collaborate in your startup environment, here's a very useful article to read before you go start sharing all your docs left and right on it. ;)

Why Microsoft buying Facebook is not as silly as you think...

Joey Lo pointed out this Alley Insider article on Twitter approximately 5 hours ago. Very interesting bullet points on why it makes sense for MS to really buy FB contrary to some of the other critics' believe.

The tech geek side of me is wondering if MS does end up successfully acquire Facebook, will Facebook have to port all its code to .NET? ;) That would be an interesting migration project.

New Alternative DSL/Phone Service in Seattle

"Atlanta, April 15, 2008 – Seattle has been selected as the market for the re-introduction of EarthLink’s (Nasdaq: ELNK) DSL and Home Phone Service, which combines convenient, low-cost telephone service and ultra-fast high-speed Internet access all on one bill."

- Earthlink Official Press Release

I am going to give it a try and see how well it works. If it covers all my needs like my current setup does, it may mean cost savings for a lot of small businesses in the area like mine without compromising quality of service. I have high hopes. =)

Here are their prices:

"With a basic plan starting at $49.95 a month, including 500 minutes of long-distance and local calling, DSL and Home Phone Service offers deep savings over most competitors. The premium plan, at $69.95 a month, offers unlimited long-distance and local calling and the fastest DSL Internet access in the Seattle area."

Find out more here.

I will keep everyone posted once I have had a chance to see this service in action!

Facebook Chat Part 2

Looks like Facebook has fully launched chat and I have been hearing a lot of feedback from FB users around me. Although a lot of them were negative like I suspected, there were still some good feedback and I personally thought that the new bar that chat sits in is pretty nice. I can now check the latest notifications through this little AJAX bar without having to navigate away from the homepage. That's something that I think is a good improvement in FB's usability. I am also not as opposed to having chat around anymore since it's not obtrusive at all. All in all, I think it's nicely done. However, with all that said, I am still skeptical on how successful this feature will be. I guess we'll just have to let time do its magic.

I would love to hear more on what everyone thinks of this new feature. =)

A True International Traveler's Phone?

There has been a lot of noise coming from my Asia contacts lately about a new Skype based phone that will allow a fixed cost plan for making and receiving calls from anywhere in the world. This means that roaming charges may no longer apply or so I was told anyway. I am thinking this might be it?



It sounds like a very interesting solution for international businesses or even the retired who's traveling all over the world. With that said, I have a few questions about this new phone if any of my HK readers are familiar with this product in an attempt to clear up some confusion:

1. Besides the "3 Skype phone," are there any other similar products in HK right now that fits the description?

2. Does this phone's creator or carrier have contracts with carriers in each country they don't have coverage in so that there won't be any extra charges for roaming on their data networks when used outside of the country it was purchased from and hence making it a true international mobile phone solution? Or is this stuck to only certain areas that the carrier has coverage in as most of the news coverage I have read suggested?

3. How does it perform compared to the traditional cell phones? (speed of msg delivery, voice quality, video functionality?, etc)

I am personally quite excited about this product even though it might not meet all of my requirements. The reason why I say this is because this product is a sign of progression towards a product that I will most likely eventually love. I think what would even kick it up yet another notch is if you can get up to 3 Skype-in numbers from the countries that you visit most as part of the package. Maybe I am too idealistic though. Here's a TechCrunch article about the Skype phone which makes me think that we are far from a truly international low/fixed-cost mobile solution as I had initially hoped for after briefly hearing about it from my contacts. With all that said, the looks of the "3 Skype Phone" is not all that impressive either which is kind of disappointing. =/ Regardless, I will definitely follow up on this later.

Startup Recruitment

My friend Leo recently wrote a pretty good post on recruitment and gave a few tips that I thought was valuable to share. My favorite tip was "Don’t stop recruiting until you have someone on board." That is such good piece of advice in my opinion because it's often too easy for hiring managers to get excited too early on and loose sight of potential fall-outs and better fitting candidates that might be out there. Like the book "Good to Great" by Jim Collins suggests, you always want the best of the best on the bus and should never settle for just good enough.



In any case, here are my additional thoughts that I left as a comment to his post:

START of QUOTE

One thing I would like to add is that prior to interviewing a candidate, it’s always a good idea to first formulate some relevant questions and then evaluate the questions’ alignment with what you want to find out about your candidates either on your own or if possible, with your team. Keep in mind that these questions will serve as a framework rather than something to read off to a candidate. The idea is to have high level questions that will facilitate a more focused free-flow conversation between the interviewer and the candidate during the interview.

I have in the past managed a good number of hiring managers that make the mistake of walking into interviews without any well thought out framework resulting in a hire based on a falsely positive feeling of the candidate. More often than not, they soon realize that he/she is not a good match only a few weeks to a month after the candidate was hired. What a costly mistake that is. When you think about it, between energy spent managing him/her, employee benefits, sign on paid vacation or bonus, and salary, you have just lost a good chunk of money over close to zero ROI.

Lastly, I want to point out that although it’s important to have a pitch. It’s even more important that it’s short and concise. The last thing you want to do is sit in an interview and end up blabbing away about your business the entire time which then looses focus on the real reason behind the interview. It sounds silly but a lot of hiring managers make the very same mistake.

END of QUOTE

Recruitment often seems like such an easy thing but in fact, it's really a science and an art in and of itself.

The End of Microsoft?

According to Venture Beat, Gartner did a presentation recently on "why they think Microsoft’s Windows operating system is on the verge of dying." If they are right, it will be an interesting day to see when a bunch of regular non-techie users are running around with OS X and Linux regardless of the purpose of usage. ;) Unfortunately, I don't think it will be that easy. I have a hard time believing that the Redmond software giant hasn't already put their brightest minds on strategically digging themselves out of this Vista hole that they are currently in. On top of that, there's MS Office and Exchange that most businesses cannot live with out. I mean, even though I am an opensource enthusiast, I still wouldn't replace Exchange in a corporate environment as exciting as some of the opensource alternatives are out there. Nonetheless, I think Gartner has an interesting theory and I am definitely not denying the possibility of that things will eventually go the way they predict. After all, what goes up, must go down right?

Facebook Chat Limited Launch

Tech Crunch says Facebook Chat Launches, For Some. What does that mean for Digsby?

Personally, I think Facebook doesn't need anymore extra features to clutter it up more than it already is but that's just me.

Google App Engine VS Amazon Web Services

Last night, the search engine giant, Google announced its App Engine product which is a rival service of Amazon's Web Services. Here's more coverage on it at Venture Beat. It's too early to say how much of a threat they are to Amazon based on unknown pricing factors and the duration of the lack of support in other languages besides Python. However, I must say that my knees would be a little shaky at this point if I was Amazon.

It seems that a lot of startups now-a-days are leaning towards running their apps on Amazon's, and now also Google's infrastructure for just a fraction of the cost of dedicated hosting or co-location. Easy and cost effective scaling is also a reason why these services are so popular. All in all, from a pure business perspective, I really don't see much of a compelling reason to not go with them especially when it also dramatically reduces infrastructure maintenance costs. However, it goes without to say that there are yet also some cons to this type of hosting. What I see as cons or more specifically, barriers would be that you are subject to their security practices, downtimes, and customization policies. Now, what I would really like to do is to be able to give these services a whirl on my own to see how it feels. My extent of experience in this area has really only been Amazon's S3 which I don't even play much with because where my engagements use S3, someone else is in-charge of the management of it. The other thing that I am really interested in is to hear the personal opinions and reactions to this new hosting paradigm from authorities that are in the colo/DH business.

With all that said though, something inside of me still prefers to run my own servers and manage my own infrastructure probably largely due to my IT and security background. The ability to customize my system architecture and retain data on dedicated locations has always been a perk that I valued more than anything else. I am also concerned about the compliance related implications to using something like AWS and GAE. I would even go as far as to argue that the extra cost of hosting your own infrastructure ends up being a worth while investment in the long run. We'll have to see if I will change my mind though as AWS and GAE matures over time.

Couple Sues Google for Invasion of Privacy

Since my Google Street View post was such a popular one, here's yet another interesting ValleyWag story on it not too long after I replied to a reader about how it would probably be a privacy issue if Google Street View actually gave live views to our streets. ;)

Couple sues Google over Street View pics of their house

Likeminded Local

Growing up in the suburbs in rainy Seattle during my teenage years always made me feel like I was the odd one out unlike say a place like LA. My peers around me always seemed a bit too laid back and with not enough career ambition. Of course, there are always exceptions like anything else. But even so, it always seemed like it was hard for me to find likeminded individuals with similar life experiences. With that said, interestingly enough, I ran into a blog today with some posts that I can really identify with like this one. It reminds me of the time when I finally left Vigilos after having spent 4 crazy years with them which I enjoyed more than any other time in my career before.

It turns out that the author lives in Seattle and has some very similar attributes as me. Furthermore, I seem to be able to identify with most of the content he writes about. This doesn't really happen a lot. It actually makes me want to reach out and meet the guy.

VoIP Bridging for Non-3G / Wifi Capable Phones

This is a pretty cool idea but sounds all too complex to use. Sure they are trying to iron out the inconveniences but I am perfectly fine with my 3G enabled smartphone running Skype natively. ;) After all, the perk of running Skype on a phone for me is so that I can get in touch with my international clients when I am on the run and possibly without my laptop. Of course, I am probably not the general user as they put it. However, I would think that most people that are aware of such technologies would already be unable to live life without a phone hooked up on a nice data plan which would mean they would run Skype natively as well?

Top 10 Legal Mistakes made by Entrepreneurs

A good friend of mine sent me this HBS article earlier this morning and told me that he would have loved to have had the chance to read this prior to some of his previous partnership fallouts. It definitely is a must read for all of you out there that are trying to do your first startup. You will definitely feel the importance of it if anything ever goes wrong which happens more often than most people expect. In my opinion, these precautions should always be taken into consideration and in most cases, as standard practices no matter how much you trust your partners and others.

Entrepreneurs vs. Arm Chair Quarterbacks

I have in my life taken a much different route compared to most of my peers. Startups and entrepreneurship have always been part of me since the very early stages of my life. I vividly remember the experience of leaving my cushy IS Manager job at a medium size corp when I was 16 years old to start an import car accessories and stereo consulting/installation company for the first time. Sure, it wasn't a glamorously successful venture but I made my lunch money and had lots of fun while doing it. From that point on, I knew that entrepreneurship was what fits me best. However, startups are not for everyone. I think many would agree with me. With that said, the thing that I can't stand is exactly what Kelly Smith from Curious Office beautifully describes in his blog entry, Entrepreneurs vs. arm chair quarterbacks. Arm chair quarterbacks criticizing startups can be pretty annoying. It's like if EnGadget were to do product reviews without ever even touching the physical thing... Doesn't make a lot of sense does it?

China Content Filtering

One of the things I found annoying when I was in Beijing at the end of last year was that I was unable to blog because Blogger, Livejournal, wordpress, and most any large blogging sites were blocked by the government's filters. This is not new to me since it's pretty much a widely known fact but it's one of those "I knew that" type things that didn't really sink in on me until I actually experienced the block first hand.



This experience made me think of a crazy idea. I started by thinking that if I ever moved to China, I would make sure I had a VPN server hosted in the US so that I can route all my traffic through the US to by-pass the filters (I am sure other techies have thought of this before and probably already do it). Then I thought hey, there are probably quite a bit of US/UK/CA entrepreneurs and English teachers that would enjoy the same technology. What if I made a business out of this by providing a service available to foreigners visiting or living in China? That way, the online freedom we have always enjoyed can travel with us regardless of what country we visit. Of course, that's given that the Chinese government only cares about filtering the content that the Chinese nationals see and hear but not foreigners as well. However, even with that aside, it may still be an unrealistic idea after all. This is because I am concerned about two factors:

1. Political implications
2. Demand for this type of service to make it a viable business

As you can probably tell, this is probably something I won't pursue myself but if anyone is gutsy enough, has a good business model, and has enough connections with the Chinese government to get their support for it based on economic growth implications, I would love to see it happen!

Stress Relief / Team Building Facilitator

One of the coolest things about working at Imagekind is that everyday between 3pm - 7pm, you will from time to time hear this "tick, tack, tick" sound coming from near by our front door at the office. This is not a clock ticking like you might have guessed but rather the sound of pairs of our employees taking short 10 min breaks to get their ping pong game on. =)



Some times startups get so entrenched into their work because of limited resources, they forget that proper team building and stress relief also needs to take place to keep a healthy company culture. It also puts an interesting mix into a work day which allows employees to look forward to not only taking down their work related challenges each day but also an intense 21 point ping pong madness.

You might wonder, "What about productivity?" Let's just say, with or without ping pong, people should always step away from their monitor for 10-15min which will one, give their eyes a break that they need, and 2, give a short down time for the employees to rejuvenate their mind so they can attack their challenges again when they come back to their desks. With that said, what a better use of time than to play some ping pong and loosen up your entire body and hence, getting some real rejuvenating rest?

For you readers out there, what do you do for stress relief at work? What's your facilitator? I would love to hear more ideas.

Ideas, People, and Execution

I am sure by now, most everyone has read one article or another that says, "it's not the idea, it's the people." I like to take one step further and point out that, aside from the ideas and the people, what's even more important is "execution." I am not the first one to say this as this idea has been published by well established entrepreneurs like Ryan P. Allis before. Here's an example.

With that said, this is not to say that I am undermining the importance of good ideas and great people but on a scale of comparison, execution is what I see as the primary factor for why many startups fail which ties in very closely with my last post because execution summarizes exactly what many former fortune 500 executives running their first startup fail in.

Ideas need to be refined to create a sound business model but as Allis pointed out in the above linked article, unless you are a PHD doing research at a top university, chances are, someone else has probably thought of your idea. On the other hand, giving "people" credit for a successful business seems flawed in that although the people is the source of effective execution, at the end of the day, "execution" is the underlying factor on why a business is successful.

I want to illustrate what I mean by "execution": For example, even if you have the greatest product in the world but your deployment staff is poorly trained or communicated to, no customer is ever going to be happy with you. Another example would be, if your employee's morale is low, the outcome of their work will never be optimize even if it's acceptable. Perhaps an even better example would be, if you don't properly foster a healthy environment for employees to step up and take charge of their area of expertise, you are wasting money and producing poor results.

The point to all of this boils down to one thing. When starting a business or reevaluating why your business may not be optimized, pay very close attention to the execution portion of your business and the answers to your questions will become much more clear.

Common Problem of Many Startups

Over the last 10 years, I have heard over 50 entrepreneurs pitch to me about how a niche of their startup is that their management staff consists of former big shots of so and so fortune 500 company. Little do they know that it's a red flag for me when I hear a pitch like that.

This is why:

1. They over reference how things were done at the fortune 500 they were working for (ie. At Microsoft, this was how it was done..." 10 times a day! Get over it... you are not at that company anymore and this startup is nothing like it!

2. They have no idea how a small business should be managed. Their team building skills in startup environments is particularly weak. They also want everyone to do things the "big company" way even when it doesn't make sense to do so.

3. They carry over bad and illogical habits from their fortune 500 experience. ie. being overly political about everything that just doesn't need to be.

4. Their bandwidth for managing multi-facets of the business is usually very low because they are used to the blinders that they have to put on when working at a fortune 500 or otherwise spoiled by having other departments to take care of some of the responsibilities of a manager in a startup. ie. What? I have to worry about chasing after my employee's benefits paperwork? Or what? We need another IT guy for 20 extra hires?

5. Communication is not fostered by them. ie. Let's keep the information to ONLY the people that ABSOLUTELY have to know. Well, news flash buddy, a lot of other people need that information too if you just put yourself in others' shoes to analyze overall information needs and distribution. For example, I once worked with a startup that fired people and didn't announce it hoping that it would just blow over... Imagine that. They apparently didn't understand that this method of terminating employees only leaves others feeling like they don't know when they will be let go of too for whatever unreasonable conspiracy. Former fortune 500 managers also often forget that because the company is so small, even employees from other dept also feel near and dear about why another employee at another dept is fired unlike a large corporation where segregation makes it none of their business. The result is that, when you asked the employees what they thought of the manager who did the firing, 80% of them used the word "shady" to describe the manager. The issue then was that there was no more trust within the organization and morale for the company as a whole became extremely low.

These are just some of the reasons why I am not a big fan of most former fortune 500 executives running their first startup. I say the word "most" obviously because not all of them are the way I describe them to be. However, I bring this up because this has been responsible for too many growth stunnings of startups from what I have seen. Of course, even with all that said, there are also many other counter factors that can make a startup successful even with such management personnel but I will leave that for another post.

Thoughts on Venture Capital & the Current Market

I have been meaning to write something about this topic for a while and finally decided it's time. I think the kicker was definitely from reading this blog entry.

If you scroll down towards the readers' comments after reading the blog entry, you will see an individual commenting on the fact that NWVA is failing because of its investment strategy. I am not dismissing that there's the possibility of that being a partial cause of failure but I am more supportive of Simpson's explanation. Here's why:

The market is saturated and full of failing ideas because:
1. There are too many individuals with great ideas "playing business" when they are blatantly not ready and haven't the slightest idea about what they are getting into.
2. Most of these same individuals described above are extremely outspoken and can easily manipulate investors even though they have no viable execution plan.
3. Simpson is right in that, there are too many "me too" companies. Everyone seems to think "I can do better." Face it, it's not that easy.

This is largely fostered by an influx of venture capitalists as described by Simpson who are just throwing money left and right. When the supply of funding became greater, the natural market reaction was that the minimum quality of what investors demand decreased by a mile. I think most of you would agree with me that some of the business ideas that were funded in the recent years are just absolutely ridiculous.

In my opinion, everything is interrelated. There's always a cause for every effect. In this case, I would say the current business trend caused by many of the factors mentioned above has created a broken down economy. The only reviving chance is if more realistic and experienced entrepreneurs step up to supply us with some breakthrough businesses to stimulate our downward curving economy.

By break through, I mean business ideas that are less trend aligned. I have never really been a big believer of business ideas that are heavily aligned with the latest hype such as a good number of the web 2.0 businesses out there. Sure, they make money and I am definitely not denying the success of trend catchers. However, I truly believe that a great business idea is something that's timeless. Of course, maybe this is most likely derived from the fact that I am more or less a traditional and conservative businessman.