I’m getting a little bit tired of running my events list and seeing some of the best folks sitting behind the paywalls of people profiting off of the community’s attempt to talk to itself.  Each week there are so many great events, blog posts, videos, etc. produced by community members that there’s hardly any reason to pay other than a token amount for in person innovation and startup related content.  Expensive venues?  Pricey box lunches?  Not necessary!  Let’s bring our $5 footlongs to one of the many open spaces that companies and institutions like Sun, Aol, CRESA, NYU/Poly, and Microsoft have been donating to the community for free.

It’s fine if you’re in the event business—but it’s frustrating to me that the media focuses a lot more attention on big conferences and paid series of sessions, and less on Barcamps, smaller Meetups and open public discussions.  Four years, several dozen events and 3,000 people later, and we’ve still never gotten a nextNY feature in a media publication. 

People ask me all the time how to get a job in venture capital or at a startup, and the one thing that I can point to that has enabled me to get the jobs I’ve gotten has been my contributions to the innovation community.  That investment has driven a huge return for me both professionally and personally—and there’s no shortage of leadership opportunities that are just dying to be taken advantage of in NYC.  Just the other day, I suggested to an ambitious young biz dev guy at a startup that he should band all the startup biz dev folks together in a professional group.

Similarly, as I did with Product Manager School, I’ll soon be working on Online Marketing school and CTO school and would love for someone to run with those programs.  Got an idea for a program?  Let me know and I’ll help you get it off the ground.  NYC could use some more people leading the community from the inside, instead of profiting from it.

 

Here’s a job post:

 

Title: Community Leader

Company: New York Innovation Community

Job Location: New York, NY

Positions available: Dozens

Company Description: New York City has always been a center for business innovation.  In the last five years, more and more of that innovation has come from the startup technology community—a thriving crowd that has gained a critical mass of both viable companies and accumulated wisdom.  Startup success has also diversified across sectors.  Not only is the Big Apple the advertising technology capital of the world, with huge successes like Doubleclick, Right Media, Tacoda, Linkshare and Quigo—but consumer facing startups like Meetup, Tumblr, and Foursquare are also key players as well.  Not surprisingly, commerce is also central to NYC’s startup surge, with Gilt Groupe leading the way.

The community seeks ambitious individuals to enable NYC’s continued growth and development as a place to build successful companies.  Critical to that development is helping the community help itself—to foster programs, events, and collaboration driven by the sole purpose to build a better and smarter community. 

Responsibilities:

- Work towards showcasing the most knowledgeable and enlightening leaders as far and wide as possible, for little to no cost. 

- Work hard to expose inspiring new voices that have yet to gain recognition—especially those who have achieved high levels of success in under the radar businesses, especially in B2B and niche sectors.

- Lead to build community, not direct profit.

- Contribute high quality dialogue and encourage intelligent voices to join more public conversation—interviews, podcast, video blogs, etc. are all viable channels for increased dissemination of innovation best practices

- Become a thoughtful voice and a beacon for likeminded individuals through blogging and Twitter

- Participate across many groups and Meetups—cross pollinating people and ideas.  Don’t just attend your own stuff.

- Be a leader among people just like you and bring others along for your professional development

 

No prior leadership experience necessary. 

I’ll be presenting on April 27 to the Founder Institute Singapore on "Hiring and Firing for Entrepreneurs".  My draft slide deck is below; I would welcome feedback.

NYConvergence ORIGINAL

The April 2010 NY Tech Meetup began with demos by area college students Tuesday night at the SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology's Haft Auditorium in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood.  These college students had recently participated in and created their applications during the 24-Hour Hackathon, about which we'd written previously.  The demos included:

• Dropioke: Built on the Drop.io API, the Web-based application allows users to share and tag music through Drop.io.
• Aviary Tennis: Using the Aviary API, users can access this Web-based application to compete in the creation of satirical images.
• Candidates allows users to search specific venues to see who has checked in there via location-based social networking service Foursquare.

Following the student demos, area entrepreneurs' presentations included:

• Where Do You Go?, which creates a "heat map" of the locations where a user has checked in on Foursquare;
• Hangalong, which enables friends to schedule times for when they want to meet and incorporates data about users from the various social networks which they use in order to facilitate new friendships being made;
• Project Noah, an Apple iPhone app which is designed to allow users to identify wildlife which they encounter while out and about;
• Sense Networks' Cabsense (pictured, below right), about which we've written before, provided attendees with a peak at the data used by the app to determine the best locations in Manhattan at which to find taxis;
• BantamLive showed off its "social CRM workspace;"
• Whistlebox's representative played along with the characters in its augmented reality game for children, one of the adventures of the "Do Crew;" and
• Parse.ly's creators talked about how its technology allowed users to filter news from a variety of sources.

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> NY Tech Meetup Debuts New Monthly Feature

So midway through their rocket ship ride to a million users and beyond, the Foursquare team is going to jump off for $100 million and a chance to work at Yahoo! for the next couple of years?

Riiiight.

If you believe that, I have a bridge app to sell you.

Sure, Yahoo! may be considering buying Foursquare—in the same way I’m also considering dating Lady Gaga.  Both are being considered very carefully, I assure you.

The problem is, you need both sides to agree to a sale—and Dennis Crowley is a man on a mission.  Whatever you think about Foursquare or the valuation, you have to remember that this is a guy who has essentially been thinking about this app for 8 years, if not more.  Beginning with the launch of Dodgeball as his ITP project, Dennis has been obsessed with the mobile location space for years, and Foursquare is the culmination of all of his work—and it’s taking off.  The first time around, not only could he not get funding for the Dodgeball, but it never really broke past his friends of friends—a small but dedicated userbase.  That was mostly because it was too early in terms of mobile phone technology adoption. 

He wound up selling Dodgeball to Google and proceeded to have a pretty miserable experience there, culminating with Google shutting the service down after Dennis left.  Do you think he really wants to repeat that again?  Given today’s announcement that AOL is shutting down Bebo, the idea that big companies are good caretakers of the brainchildren of entrepreneurs seems less and less believable. 

Nope…  this is not a guy or team that is going to be satisfied with just a million users.  More than the money, which will still be there in a year or two, the team at Foursquare will undoubtedly want to see the service go mainstream.  They’re the closest ones to unlocking the longtail local ad market—bailing now would be completely premature.

This is part of my Series on Angel Investing.

There is a rather large missile rapidly approaching America's innovation culture. Predictably, it has been hurled in the most careless of manner by a group of uninformed politicians and their staffers in the form of Senator Dodd's sweeping Banking Bill. Putting aside the merits and thrust of the Bill itself, (which ostensibly seeks to regulate the banking industry), there are two provisions in it which, if not removed ASAP, will essentially wipe out a large chunk of one of America's engines of innovation- namely angel investing. These provisions will raise the bar on the definition of an 'accredited investor' from $1M in net worth or $250K in annual income to $2.3M in net worth or annual income of $450K! It will also hamstring angel investing by slapping any such investment with a 120 day SEC review.

If this concerns you, you may want to call your congressmen and educate them on this issue. 

For more in depth condemnation of these stupendously destructive provisions, I refer you to the following cacaphony of frustrated voices emanating from the startup and investment community:

Venture Beat: Angels Sing: Frankly Ridiculous Restrictions Might Destroy Silicon Valley

NY Times: Angels Rebel Against Dodd Bill

Kopelman: Dodd Isn't on the Side of Angels... or Startups.... It Proposes a 120 Day SEC Review Period

Litan: Proposed 'Protections' for Angel Investors are Unecessary and Will Hurt America's Job Creators

Xconomy: Dodd Bill Could Render Startups Too Small to Succeed

TechDirt: Why Does Financial Reform Punish Startups and Angel Investors?

Wilson: Startups Get Hit by Shrapnel in the Banking Bill

Shane: How Dodd's Reform Plan Hurts Startup Finance

This is part of my Series on Entrepreneurial Culture.

Those of us who have set-up LLC's in NY State know well of the antiquated 'publication requirement' the State still imposes on so many of its entrepreneurs. (In 2007 alone, 50,000 LLC's were formed in NY State!).

Along with standard incorporation fees, having to publish the "existence of your LLC" in these obscure journals can easily run up an entrepreneur's total expenditures to $2,000 even though any company formed in NY State can easily be found online at the NY Department of State website. This anachronism achieves only one result: it penalizes those same entrepreneurs that the State and the City have spent so much time, effort, lip-service and money trying to empower.

The good news is that there is an effort underway to repeal this legislation in the form of Assembly Bill A04496/Senate Bill S1667.

You can do your part by familiarizing yourself with this issue and if so inclined, by signing this petition.

A couple of weeks ago, nextNY had a great round table discussion about the explosion of new models and companies in eCommerce—from group buying to flash sales to local discounts.  A lot of ideas came out of it—many were ones that we’ve been thinking about at First Round for a while, given our investments in One King’s Lane, Homerun, Bigdeal, Modcloth, Monetate and Packlate, among others.  There’s also been some great blog chatter from Sarah Tavel (here) and Josh Kopelman (here and here) on the topic.

One thing that Chris Fralic and I have been tossing around is the lack of a retailer centric play—where individual retailers can run their own group buys, manage discounts across various sites, run local campaigns across Foursquare, Facebook fan pages, etc.  All of the current sites revolve around a centralized curation and sales function.   To get that spa or sandwich shop onto your system, you still need a person getting on the phone, calling them up, running through the economics and particulars of the deal, scheduling, etc. That leaves a lot of open space in the market.  Even if you have 5 major competitors in a city and they do a different place every weekday, you’re still only covering about 1,000 retailers and merchants per year, assuming no overlap and no repeats.  On top of that, the economics of having that salesforce requires you to raise boatloads of money. 

On the other hand, how many places would love to run their own little group sales—sales that might not be big enough to be the Homerun deal of the day, but might make sense to do economically if they can get two dozen people in that day?  Many would run those deals everyday if they could.

Enter Closely.  Closely just launched at DEMO this week and is the natural evolution of group buying and discount sites—allowing retailers to run these deals on their own in front of their own audiences.  I’m sure at some point, the best of these deals will be syndicated to Homerun, Groupon, Buywithme, etc., and maybe those sites will eventually compete, paying for the right to run the best deals at the most highly sought after venues.  They might even do it at a loss on a per deal basis if it means acquiring a customer. 

I’d also want to see the ability to manage deals across existing local platforms—as there’s been an explosion in local inventory that needs to get monetized.  Will Foursquare start running Closely ads?  It should… and retailers should be able to see how their campaigns are doing across sites and platforms.

Another early effort to watch in this space is BeeMe, which is a project run by some ITP students.  BeeMe is taking those little coffee shop loyalty cards (the ones you punch for your 10th and finally free coffee) and moving them online.  Retailer centric, self serve models are where it’s at—*IF* they can figure out how to acquire customers cheaply.  These plays still have the “last mile” problem of getting new venues onto the platform when the average retailer barely knows how to use the web and generally sucks at online marketing. 

Community is one solution I had in mind.  What if you weren’t just a platform for distribution of deals, but a kind of local virtual chamber of commerce or small business organization—with some social networking features so that retailers could get together to share best practices, work with each other, cross-sell, etc.  In fact, the failure of the local chamber of commerce and economic development organizations is largely the reason why it’s so expensive for local plays to acquire customers.  If you get a permit to do business in the city, you should automatically get signed up to take an online marketing course and be presented accounts in all of these local plays.  Same with banks—they’re equally incentivized to have you figure out how to bring customers in the door after they loan you money.  Chase should be a reseller of Homerun, Foursquare, Square, and all of the different ways that retailers can innovate, save money or grow revenues.

A good example is the Etsy seller community which does a lot for new sellers to help them get up and running—sharing best practices about taking photos, copy, pricing, etc.  This kind of selling optimization takes the pressure (and cost) off of Etsy to solve this problem of getting and onboarding new sellers on their own.

Not only is deal origination likely to disaggregate, but so will the end purchases.  After Facebook integrates payments, how long before you start making purchases right in your newsfeed without ever leaving the page.  Your friend will say that they bought a dress from Modcloth, publish it to their newsfeed and you’ll be able to buy the same dress right there in the newsfeed with your Facebook Payment account without leaving the site.

NYConvergence ORIGINAL
by: Amy Berryhill

The Fashion 2.0 meetup, held last night at the W New York in midtown, brought together designers, marketers and developers to promote and discuss the use of online tools in the world of fashion. Speakers on the panel represented different areas of the fashion business, but their comments shared a common thread. They explained that social media and ecommerce are a must for new and established designers alike.

Some of the advice was specific. "People don't realize that tagging is a really great thing," said Rafe Totengnco, after explaining how his company adds loads of keywords to online content.

On other topics, the discussion was more general. "People on Facebook love free stuff," said panelist Dave Cook, with an echo from panelist Aaron Mandelbaum. The speakers gave examples of different marketing events where free giveaways on Facebook delivered exponential increases in Facebook Fans, as well as increases in traffic back to the company website.

While technical tools allow designers to reach abroad and avoid brick and mortar costs, there is still an aspect of relationship management required. Kerry Bannigan described a contest, created in partnership with Ask.com, that has been able to generate over 30,000 entries through relationships developed with fashion bloggers.

Bloggers lend their support to an initiative for three reasons, according to Cook: exposure, content and recognition. As it happened, these were the same issues at the core of many of the audience's questions during the meetup.

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> Tech Startups Show Off at Fashion 2.0 Meetup