STARTups

I'm working on a new startup I'm pretty excited about. More coming soon. Wanting this one to be successful, it got me thinking about other startups I've been involved with and why they weren't successful. I've always wanted my own successful business. My first business was to take all my mom’s magazines and arrange them in a magazine library and then try to charge my family to come read them. A friend and I used to pick figs and sell them with ice shavings on the street. I don't want to work for other people. I want to create something good that actually solves a problem. Businesses to me have always been that place where you either put up or shut up. Business plans are relatively easy, ideas are a commodity. It's the execution that really matters, and where I think I've failed the most. Most of all, no matter how you look at it, if someone is working for some other independent actor just to make a living it is a form of oppression. Not injustice or malice or something, but a very personal oppression. I can feel the new liberty that would come from running my own thing. And I want it. Here are some companies I've worked on. The common theme I think is not so much a lack of good ideas so much as an inability to execute compared to the market scale and competitors.

ZipBird.com - The idea for this came when a friend missed the Plain White-Tees come to town. He wondered why something on the web couldn't track his interests and text him or call him when they were nearby. The site lets people create pages, upload dates, and then other users can sign-up to be reminded within a radius of their zip code. This was in June of 2006. Biz Stone and crew launched Twitter in July 2006.

Fortunately, our concept shares little in common with Twitter. As information, and the points that we can access it, continues to grow (to the extent it can take up our entire lives if we want), filtering this information so users get what they want will become more and more valuable. No one's (yet) built the right way to taper content just enough so that you are neither barraged with unwanted content, nor left out of touch with stuff you really like, there's literally no mainstream solution for this out there. Something needs to automatically connect users' core preferences with all content aggregators across users' mobile devices. This, in my view, comes down to the user interface more than anything (and some other more secret components). There is one application that literally blocks parts of Twitter feeds, but this does nothing to ensure you're informed of what you want how you want, and it's also a very clunky approach. It reminds me of one of those cones around a dog's neck, like an obedience device. No solution out there also fully connects all the forms of content on the web with mobile devices, in a proactive way. If you think I'm being a little vague, you're right, and for a reason.

NQ Systems - I worked as an intern at this company that was truly ahead of its time. The idea was, why should you have to wait in crowded restaurants for a table to open up, or worse yet, lug around a giant walkie-talkie to be paged when they could just call you on your phone? This company is brilliant. They built their own telephony system at a time when VoIP was still pretty nascent- really hard stuff. Developed working relationships with big name brands. OpenTable and others have since incorporated cell paging. It's a hit.

QMania.com - I never worked with this company, but a good friend did. The idea is online coupons. The idea kind of speaks for itself. Just imagine what you could do in this space with smart phones, real-time updates, group discounts and promos etc. The company was founded in early 2007. GroupOn was just on a Fall 2010 cover of Fortune as the fastest online company ever to hit $500M in revenue. LivingSocial is blowing up.

Plategro - This was a site I tinkered on about a year and a half ago. The idea was a mentoring based social network. Mentorships can be one of the most valuable things in the world for just about everyone, including businesses. Take a look at TechStars for instance. But it's such a crapshoot connecting with the right people. Why not create a place where everyone could post their interests, availability, and if it's a good match, have a mentorship or speed mentorship? This ran into a classic scaling problem right away- what comes first, the mentors or mentees? How do you develop trust and brand integrity? How do you attract and vet talented mentors and protégées? All of these can theoretically be overcome. But I didn't put enough into it. The idea remains TBD.

MyLastLecture - A place where each user could only submit one video or one entry (they'd have to replace the old one if they wanted to add another) about the most valuable thing they've learned. I love deep introspective, meaningful talks. It's so hard to filter for this though in the sea of mindless crap on UGC content-aggregators like YouTube. I saw value in creating a serious forum for people to provide their sort of living, evolving message to the world.

Shorty - This summer I pitched an idea that would distribute short code access to any user so that physical locations could include mobile or web plugins. SparQcode.com is killing this right now.

GroupSmack.com - This started with my work giving me a free pedometer. I think a promising model, but it is really scale-dependent with no go-to revenue model.

*** ShowKicker.com *** - I dont' have time to write about this because I'm too busy working on it. But this idea is 1) long, long overdue 2) could make so many people/customers happier, better off, and wealthier and 3) has multiple revenue models, the core one is not scale dependent and is the most legit model I've ever worked on BY FAR.

So, anyway, my bottom line is execution. If a startup fails and there are no customers, does anyone care? No. It’s about doing.