#isum11

[secondaryartifacts]

Gary Vaynerchuk speaks at Internet Summit last week. His talk was incredible and entertaining. 

[josh-atwell]

I was interviewed at Internet Summit 2011 (#ISUM11) by +Amy Lewis (a.k.a. @CommsNinja) after the Cloud Panel discussion. I was able to share some of my thoughts on the discussion and how roles will continue to change as we see more Cloud adoption.

What are your thoughts?

[manuelmonserrate]

Internet Summit 2011 Online Presentations #isum11

I loved the energy and the spirit of the Internet Summit 2011 in Raleigh this week. Lots of great information different market trends affecting our online world, including social media, digital marketing, all sorts of analytics, mobile, eCommerce, you name it. It was great, with the obvious highlight of hearing Internet Superstar Gary Vaynerchuck speak.

I wanted to compile a list of the Internet Summit presentations that were shared online by the speakers after the conference so I could have them all in one place.  Here's the list I have so far, to be updated if I find more (@InternetSummit has promised to post them on their website next week).

Next Level SEO: Social Media Integration - Bill Slawski - President, SEO by the Sea

The Art of Engagement: Why Your 20-Year-Old Intern Probably Isn’t a Community Manager - Angela Connor - Social Media Manager, Capstrat

Integrating Social Media Into Your Search and Mobile Marketing Plan - Phil Buckley, Director of Interactive, Capstrat 

The User Experience is Your Brand - Drew Diskin, M.S. - Digital Engagement Strategist, Inertia

Supercharge Your Social Media Results with Relevant Content - Cara Rousseau, Social Media Manager, Duke University

Emerging Social Media Trends, Technologies and Tools - John Lane  VP, Strategy & Creative, Centerline Digital

Digital Experiences that Build Brand, Loyalty and Sales - Sherry Bastion - Web Creative Director, Lenovo

Web Design as a Strategic Tool - Matthew Muñoz - Co-founder & Chief Design Officer, New Kind

How Do You Integrate, Monitor and Measure Social Media ROI? - Jill Carlson - Marketing Manager, Argyle Social

[justingoeres]

Live from ISUM11: Fireside Chat with Noah Everett / TwitPic

Note: See all my notes from Internet Summit 2011 by clicking here.

Notes from Internet Summit 2011 in Raleigh, 2011-11-16.

An Interactive Fireside Chat with Noah Everett, Founder, Twitpic

Q: Let's talk about TwitPic. How did it start, where did you go?

Noah Everett: It was 2008. It seemed like a good shortcut to share pictures, I stayed late at work with some Red Bull and wrote it over a weekend, and launched it. Then it got picked up by blogs and media, and went from there.

Q: When did you realize it could be a business?

NE: In 2009, one of our users took a picture of the plane in the Hudson and TwitPic'd it and it exploded. We had one server at the time, and it melted. I realized then that TwitPic wasn't just a photo-sharing tool, it was for breaking news, etc. We've been running ads since 2008 and run at about a 70% profit margin, which has allowed us to not take any funding. We have 7 employees counting me and Mom & Dad.

Q: Where do you see the micro-blogging space going? What are some uses for microblogging that people maybe haven't heard of?

NE: I separate it into Facebook (private) vs. Twitter (public). Twitter is just a great way to share openly what you're doing without having to log into Facebook and have that network.

UNICED uses TwitPic a lot because they've found that their tweets get a lot more exposure if they include pictures of people they're helping.

Q: How have you been impacted by Twitter's own photosharing app?

NE: Twitter's a great company. We were blindsided by it and we wish they'd communicated better with their outside developers there. But we haven't really noticed a loss of traffic or growth, so we're happy.

Q: Tell us about Heello.

NE: We really rushed to get it out. It's very much a Twitter clone right now, but next year you'll see it really change. We're working to make it more location-based, so you're seeing information based on your area.

Q: Any advice on how to get a new app noticed, other than waiting for another Hudson plane crash?

NE: First and foremost, build an app that solves an issue for people. For getting exposure, make sure your app can share to Twitter & Facebook, and let your users promote your app. Make the barrier to entry as low as possible for your user.

Q: You get some interesting pics through TwitPic. Any interesting ones?

NE: Ashton tweeted Demi's Moore's butt. The funniest are celebrity ones. We're running a thing for Movember now.

Q: What's your advice to other startups re: taking VC funding versus growing organically?

NE: You'll get approached by VCs as soon as your app gets started. My rule is "If you don't need it, don't take it." We've talked to a lot of them, but we can't figure out what we'd use their money for, so we turn them down. That means we still control the direction of the company.

Q: Give us a sense of the metrics that pass through your servers.

NE: We process about 1 billion requests a day. We try to be really smart and lean with our servers - we have about 50 of them. Amazon S3 is our primary data storage. Somebody from Amazon told us we were accounting for 1% of all Amazon S3 data storage last year.

Q: 5 years from now, where do you think Twitter, Facebook, etc. will be?

NE: The biggest challenge now is curating the data you want to see. Making it more integrated into our daily lives so we can get past the "following too many people" problem.

Q: What problems or successes have you had with Amazon?

NE: There are cheaper solutions out there now, but overall their service is the best and we're happy with them. That said, we built our system to failover in the case of downtime, but that's kind of not a problem anymore.

Q: Are you looking to recreate the old Twitter Developer Love with Helo

NE: Definitely. We're trying to be upfront about where we're going. Our API is live but we haven't launched it yet. Hopefully we've been clear about what areas we're going into so our developers don't get blindsided.

[seewhy-blog]

Thanks!We are so glad you enjoyed it! MT @starbradshaw: @SeeWhyInc Great presentation at isum11! @webconversion

[justingoeres]

Live from ISUM11: Venture Capital Startup Roundtable

Note: See all my notes from Internet Summit 2011 by clicking here.

Venture Capital Startup Roundtable, Internet Summit 2011 in Raleigh, 2011-11-16.

Sean Marsh, Co-founder & General Partner, Point Judith Capital David Heaney, Sr. Associate, TomorrowVentures Don Rainey, General Partner, Grotech Ventures Jason Caplain (moderator), General Partner & Co-founder, Southern Capital Ventures

Q: What do you look for in a new prospect that approaches you?

Sean Marsh: We invest early, so we often invest in something like 2 people and an idea. It's about passionate, energetic, visionary people going after a big market. The first product you go after a big market with is probably not the product you'll eventually succeed with, and we know that. We back a lot of people who are first-time entrepreneurs, first-time founders, who figure out how to surround themselves with impressive people.

David Heaney: TomorrowVentures is pretty similar, we look for similar things. On the idea side we're looking for something that's different and unique. We see lots of ideas that are kind of the same. We're looking for someone who's finding a new market or bringing new technology to an existing market. We're looking for a team with leadership, persistence, perseverence, or do they have technical or domain expertise that will help them on the execution side.

Don Rainer: I react to the first meeting with a prospect. The CEO has 3 aims: win, make a ton of money, or change the world. The Change the World people are where we make our money. If they're trying to "win" the tendency is to narrow down the game. Making money is usually about taking shortcuts. Changing the world involves no narrowing and no shortcuts. So what's a Big Idea? A big idea is frequently where you're in the meeting and you think, "This is an interesting concept and I'm not sure which industry it would have the biggest impact in." It's a crisis of opportunity.

Q: Let's talk about your last investment. The timing, and the reaons you invested.

DR: I just invested in Gramercy 1 (?) - it's OpenTable for everything but restaurants. I like it because it's broadly applicable, but also because they have traction. They already have 2500 spas using their product.

DH: Our most recent is Prism Skylabs in the Bay Area. They're connecting the online & offline worlds through security cameras. They have a way to bring most of those "offline" security cameras online. It has a lot of value for both consumers and companies -- for instance you could go to Yelp and see live video from the restaurant to see if it's busy. From the merchant side, you could use the feed to run analytics on traffic, etc. Bringing that data into the cloud has a ton of value in different industries. So we liked the product but the team is also great.

SM: The most recent for me is a company in NY called Igniter. It's an Indian group and social dating site. Where India is right now on the Internet is about where the US was in 1997-98. Rate of growth of penetration in India is huge. So we've backed these 3 guys. They launched this group-dating thing in the US and it flopped, but hundreds of thousands of people in India started registering for it. So to their credit, they said, "OK, we have to go there," instead of trying to force it in the US. The world is definitely flat and it's easy to move a product like that around the world.

Q: Raising VC is hard and it's not right for every company. What strategies have you seen for entrepreneurs that don't involve raising capital?

SM: I'd say in a lot of cases if you want to build something big, at some point you'll want outside capital to grow faster. You can build it without capital but it will be slower.

DR: We live in an interesting time, where you can start a business with very little capital. There are people who are doing hundreds of startups. That's prompting a ton of small companies with solo guys with no money. That can be a limited value prop for the entrepreneur because it's harder to do it yourself. If you're going to do it without outside money, you probably need 2-4 founders instead of one. And ideally you need to go into a cash business so you have cashflow.

DH: Picking a business model carefully, like an online-only model that's low cost, plus an immediate cash flow, is important. Other value VCs provide, though, is to surround you with talent that complements your talent. If you're strong technically, you need cofounders with other skills. Or build a network of mentors. That's so critical in the first 6-12 months.

Q: The costs of building a company have sharply declined in the last 10 years. Are you able to put in less money and finance less over that time? How as your approach changed?

DR: I don't think the physics have changed. When we go to a startup pitch festival, I feel like I should be making a sandwich -- I could put 4 or 5 pitches together and make a company that I'd put $1M into. We're still always backing companies that need a million dollars or something. There are incubators everywhere handing out $50k/100k etc., but we still deal with the bigger things.

SM: What I've found in these companies that take smaller money to figure things out, is that a lot of times our first 6 months with them is a push and pull with them where they've got the money but they don't want to go. You have to work through that gear-shirt with them. That's a dynamic I've seen. Frugality at the cost of equity value creation.

DH:To get the really big ideas still takes large amounts of money. With the smaller amounts of money you can get further in understanding the market and tweaking the product before committing a larger amount of money to juice big growth.

Q: What are some good online resources for entrepreneurs? Where do you send people?

SM: Fred Wilson's blog is really good, especially if it's truly your first time around.

DR: There are always segment-specific newsletters. I'm a fan of those, they're high-impact.

DH: Some venture funds have newsletters and online resources that describe the types of things they're looking for. Also, go to big universities (MIT, Stanford, Duke, Georgia Tech, etc.) websites. They have sections devoted to who you can talk to in the community and what's available for new or early-stage companies.

Q: What's your favorite company you're NOT an investor in?

DH: J. Hilburn from Dallas, TX. They've done a great job talking to their customers and then customizing their business model. They provide high-quality custom-tailored clothes for men. By using ecommerce and shortening the supply chain they could make things cheap, but they found that guys hate measuring themselves for clothes. So they created an on-the-ground sales force to h

DR: Pinterest. It's a virtual pinboard(?)

SM: I have two. Gilt, a high-end fashion goods club/sales site. Also, Rent the Runway, a site for renting very high-end dressed & accesories for women.

Audience Q: I struggle with the question of competition - answering the question of "am I a feature or a product?" How do I get past that block?

SM: When you start your company you need a focus, but think about how building the business creates barriers to entry for others - how it builds walls that give you a competitive edge.

DH: Another thing is looking at competitors in adjacent spaces -- they haven't already done it for some reason. Think about why not. Maybe it's actually not high on their priority list.

Audience Q: Should I negotiate around a term sheet or should I just take what's offered? Do you guys negotiate around, say, Series B terms or keep the same terms as Series A?

SM: It's all over the map. Broadly speaking we try to make our Seed and A-round terms as simple as possible to avoid complicating things later.

DR: If you're dealing with somebody who's trying to make money on the terms, you're dealing with a knucklehead! If they're trying to make something overly complex, just go to the next person. The truth is at A-stage things are going to work out or not, and it's not because of the terms. The question is what's a fair value that in the fullness of time we all feel good about?

Audience Q: What role do you play once financing is complete? How active are you in the company?

SM: We sit on the board, we try to be as valuable to the entrepreneur as possible. We try to do everything we can to make the entrepreneur better. That usually means helping to build the team.

DR: A lot of what we do is "what can go wrong next," etc. I've been around startups for 30 years and I've got a lot of perspective I can share privately with the CEO about what's going well, what's not. Initially they don't take as much of that advice in the first 6 months as they start to later :).

DH: We vary widely on how involved we are and the types of help we give. If we're not the lead investor, we put ourselves out there as ready to help but we're less proactive. If we're taking board seats, we're trying to be as helpful and possible but without dictating actions. Our role is to help actively when asked.

Audience Q: You mentioned having 2-4 founders to help spread the work. What advice do you have for EXISTING companies who have hit a growth roadblock and are spread too thin?

DR: All these businesses grow through plateaus. Adding the talent you need requires figuring out what skills you're missing. You have to do your own inventory of what elements you could add to the mix that will change things. Most small businesses are small for a reason - frequently it's due to problems with customer acquisition. If you could acquire more customers, you could grow. You can't succeed at customer acquisition and stay small.

Audience Q: When multiple VCs invest together, what are typical challenges they and the prospect company face? (too many cooks in the kitchen)

SM: At the end of the day, if you've got an investor and a new investor coming in, if they can't quickly agree on things at the beginning, if there's not rapid agreement on things you're probably going to have more problems going forward. Syndicates can be really powerful and successful but can also be really distracting. Have these guys done deals together before then that's good. If not, be careful?

Audience Q: What's the right time to bring in a VC, from the standpoint of sales and revenue of my company? Are you looking for a certain level of success?

DH: It varies a lot depending on what kind of VCs you want to talk to. Some really early-stage investors don't need to see anything. It's a question of approaching the right firms at the right time rather than any general guideline.