I was on a great panel last weekend at the CalTech/MIT Enterprise Forum on the CalTech Campus (www.entforum.caltech.edu). The topic was “Social Networks and the Entrepreneurial Reality: Fertile Platform or Investment Nutworks?” The panel was kicked off with a keynote from Jason Feffer, CEO and Founder of the social networking site Sodahead (www.sodahead.com), and also included Mark Jeffery, CTO of social search site Mahalo (www.mahalo.com), Joe Jason from SK Telecom, Tony Karrer founding CTO of eHarmony (www.eharmony.com) and Andrew Shandlin, Executive Director of the Caltech Alumni Association.

While panelists seemed to agree that while there are plenty of nutty social networking ideas out there, the social networking space in general continued to be a fertile area for smart entrepreneurs and well placed venture investments. After the discussion, I had the opportunity to speak with dozens of social networking entrepreneurs who were looking for some “rules of thumb” to help launch or expand their ventures. Much of the advice I gave was echoed by the earlier panel discussion. I’ll attempt to summarize the main points here: Continue Reading »

Take a step back 20 years, and pretend you’re the owner of a neighborhood bookstore. Being there everyday, you can count how many people came into the store day, how many picked up a book and looked through it, and most importantly, how many people actually bought a book. You can easily determine the demographics of shoppers and observe which books they peruse and which they neglect, how much you spent on advertising to pull each customer into the store, and analyze the data to increase your bottom line.

Fast forward 10 years to the days of the dot-com bubble. Companies were raising tens of millions and spent obscene amounts of money on acquiring eyeballs (bringing customers into the store aka customer acquisition). Cookies and user tracking were in their infancy. More importantly, tools which informed webmasters of who was coming to their site and what they were doing were very basic. Continue Reading »

For many founders to be, the thought of starting a company is fairly daunting. Founders often come from one function like development or marketing and must figure out how to deal with all of them – with limited resources to boot. The good news is that the right philosophy will enable you to make good, quick decisions in business functions you have little experience. The right philosophy is based on “how to think” as opposed to “what to think.” “What to think” answers only specific questions. “How to think” provides you a guiding philosophy to make good decisions. Remember, you don’t have time to learn everything or make the same mistakes most people do.