6 posts tagged “entrepreneur”

I was google-ing the web 2.0 conference which I attended a few weeks ago for something for a friend and stumbled across a blog which referred to me as legendary entrepreneur Richard Titus - wow I'm quite flattered - thanks! (though I suspect notorious is more appropriate..

I did find the presentations from Web 2.0 2008 as sought.  I have to say, yet again, web 2.0 proved to be inspiring, thought provoking and a great time all around. It was also also great to meet up with some old friends, and make a few new ones.. (including Trish I think)

This week was interesting - I'm both quite engaged with the mobile universe + the radio, music and mobile worlds in which I'm immersed and simultaneously quite fearful about the general economy.  I have so many friends who are QUITE smart, looking for work ad panic'd about being without.

Simultaneously the crash and burn of pownce this week really set home that the crash has happened and we are back to a value, CASH, based world.. no more easy credit..

not that it will matter to me, ever since college and those "no charge for a year credit cards" i've been largely debtless.

I was google-ing around for one of the presentations from the Web 2.0 conference I attended a few weeks ago and found someone referring to me as legendary entrepreneur Richard Titus  ok that's pretty flattering - and likely a bit posh..

that said, here's the slides from web 2.0 2008 as always, easily one of the most awe inspiring and thought provoking conferences I attend every year.

Kevin from wired's preso and Al Gore definitely were my favorites, though the prevalance of electric car sessions was also both inspiring, and proud again of "Who Killed the Electric Car?"

Bought a tux today (the old one was five years old!)

So Jason and I last night were making a list of all the things new start-ups do wrong.. it's  long list, but we distilled it to some interesting points:

1 - Don't bet against the consumer. They ALWAYS get what they want. Sometimes it takes a bit of time, but they always win in the end.  The more your business model requires thwarting or subverting customer desires, the faster you will fall from Grace.  Microsoft learned this, AOL learned this.  Steve Jobs, are you listening!

2 - Never try and solve a problem for an industry or business.  Solve a problem for a customer. a 1% improvement in a customer's experience is the easiest sale in the world. a 1% improvement in business efficiency, with no benefit to the customer is a far harder sale. Think on this a while and you'll see it's true.

3 - Don't build a business which does something else which is already being done, "almost as good" as that thing. In the music business there are like 10 online radio - streaming services. none of which hold a candle to Last.FM (met him yesterday btw, lovely chap) or Pandora. If it's not a noticeably better user experience no one will care.

4 - People will pay with money, they will pay with attention , they will pay with their data.  But the less significance you can place on the purchase decision and the more significance you can put on the benefits,  experiential, commercial, lifestyle of the result of the purchase, they are less aware of it as they incur the charges. This is why Amazon's one click was so brilliant. What we need now is Snocap+amazon 1-click in a widget. oops did I say that out loud?

5 - Its a distributed world. Forget building anything in a giant monolith, build tiny distributed things that connect together and are more powerful or move things closer and more handy to consumers.  Again, the better the user (customer) experience = you win.

6 - When you are pitching, ALWAYS listen to the objections. even when you disagree, listen. when you here the same one over and over, take some time to think about why. If your customers are telling you something - listen to them for God's sakes. Why is it that so many entrepreneurs think their customers, who have all had to fight, claw, manipulate and grow into the position of being the person who has purchasing authority might have missed learning a thing or two on the way there. I can't tell you how many pitches I've been in  (on both sides) where a particularly excited entrepreneur began bickering with, or in one case YELLING at a customer. 

Remember the 1st rule, the customer always gets what he wants. your goal is to give it to him.

so I'm off to SF, LA , Vancouver and then NY, before a return to London in a week. So this week I had so many meetings about so many varying opportunities, I started to do a SWOT analysis today just to assess who to email back 1st. Wow.

Seriously though, I had dinner last night with one of my two leading contenders.. Frankly he is 50% of the reason for my being interested in the opportunity, but over dinner and conversation we began to re-frame the opportunity from what was, before dinner, the trailing opportunity, into what is now the leading opportunity.

This crossroads is so strange. One opportunity is 100% strategic, plan, do deals, spar, think, explore and it includes the opportunity to have a MAJOR effect on something which will change the face of the net and media for the next few years, if we didn't screw it up. More importantly it involves working with great people who I really like and I feel like I could really make a difference.

The 2nd opportunity, which until now was way ahead and is now in a dead heat, is the polar opposite in terms of tactical job scope and details, but is just as interesting. It's the chance to go into and build a company, inside another company. Actually two companies, though they don't know that yet. The Existing company is a well run, wonderful company and I feel like i could bring a lot of value and frankly learn a lot from the folks who are there. Again the person I would work for, even though we haven't spent as much time together as #1 is a good person and I like and feel like it'd be a great team.

While I've been with my wife since my 20's, this feels akin to my pre-Tavin dating many women at once stage. I'm quite fickle at this moment.  The thing is - I feel like this decision will re-frame the remainder of my life, changing what doors open for me and what doors close. I'm at an age where I have to think about not just this door, but the next three and what I want them to be. It's a hard choice.

The good news: Either opportunity would be amazing for my family and allow me to see them more, though one is stronger in this capacity than the other (of course it's the one that pays less! - aaach)  Both involve good people and good companies, no sketchiness. Each has it's negatives, of course, but they are really more challenges to be overcome, within myself and within the organizations. Strangest of all, neither of them is a start-up, which will surprise a lot of people.

I'm having breakfast this a.m. with someone about the big super-secret-world-destroying start-up idea I have. It's the dark horse in the race. Some days it feels like a complete windmill tilt, others I feel like it's a real chance to change the world. What I can't decide is my reticence due to self-preserving  prudence, or feel of failure.

Lastly, I agreed, today, to take an advisory role (being defined) with a company to help them raise money.This company recycles electronics goods, computers, laptops, whatever. What's interesting about them is they are a 100% green business without them all of this stuff goes into landfills. They step in, refurbish and re-market 70-80% of the stuff and dismantle and scrap (no landfill 100% reuse) the remainder. It's literally a junk into gold business model. More about this as I help them craft the pitch. - this isn't a gig, just something I'm doing on the side, because, as my friend and I agreed this week, "Its something I can do, its a good thing to do, and it's good that the thing will be done."

Ciao

So last night, at the invitation of the CEO of SpinVox (which, btw if you haven't tried it is simply the most important and useful new technology I've stumbled on since the blackberry - Voice to screen - with the 1st killer application emailing me perfectly transcribed voice mails with smart text phone numbers in them.)  I attended the launch of an environmental non-profit here in the UK called The Green Thing. It's founded by a couple of chaps from the advertising business including Andy Hobsbawm who founded my old nemesis Agency.  (razorfish and agency were the Hatfield's and Mccoys of the old interactive agency days.)

The event was lovely, great food, good conversation.  The ask wasn't too harsh and I felt these were people who really want to make a difference.  The idea is quite simple really - build a set of small, viral, jib jab style vignettes (website, emails videos, etc.) which encourage people to do one "green" thing a month. Like walking instead of driving for instance.

What I found most fascinating was in chatting with various folks at the event how knowledgeable people in Europe are about the topic of climate change compared to the US.  I'm going to try and help them in a few ways including arranging a benefit screening of Who Killed the Electric Car? I did meet a chap in the electronics refurbishing and recycling business who was lovely - and has a VERY interesting business model.

As I start to build my UK network I find its both simple and challenging.  People are quite welcoming and interesting, but I don't seem to be communicating for some reason that I really am looking for a job.  Is it really so hard to imagine that I just might want to get re-engaged in something to do which is NOT of my own initial construction?

I still think that in the perfect world, I'd start an early or mid-stage VC fund. But my sense is that I don't quite have the profile to do this yet. Over the past three weeks I've met with 20-30 entrepreneurs and found easily 8 companies I would have invested in if I was on that track.  London is a fascinating place and I'm still in love with it.

So today I went to what they call London Open Coffee which is a forum for entrepreneurs and early stage vc's to collect and meet. I expected very little, as similar events in the us I've attended previously were mostly a waste of time; occasionally I'd see something interesting, but the stalker to star-up ratio was high.

This actually turned out pretty to be good. Lovely people, met a few VC's including Jason Ball A couple of decent companies - all in all it was much more interesting than expected. Most of them are a bit intimidated by my USA-digerati communication style (direct/blunt/opinionated) but all of them were smart folks. I really didn't meet any time wasters!

Strangely they are quite ignorant of the US market, which surprised me, I would expect British entrepreneurs to be looking wistfully over the pond. The UK is a tiny market with lots of capital. The US is a massive market with difficult capital - I think that this is a good place to be an entrepreneur.

Off to Home House now - which is another of those posh private uk clubs they love so much.