Twentysomething

Twitters rise & Founders At Work

Twitter is on it's way to big success. What started off as a side project back in March '06 for Obvious Corp, makers of the not so succesful Odeo, has grown into the next big thing. As it rose, it took awhile for me to comprehend what made it so special.

A couple of dugg articles later, such as this one, have helped me get that it's an evolution of social networking, with rapid fire responses, as well as a live blogging tool, as well as anywhere instant messenger. The interesting dichotomy here seems to be that you need to invest a lot of a little in terms of posts, to create value from the app.

Having a presidential candidate use the thing has definitely helped their appeal, but the real closer seems to be their inclusion of SXSW. Some are speculating that the influx of messages conference will kill the service, but I think that it will actually keep the ball rolling, as it helps create more press. I give it a few more weeks until the mainstream press gets ahold of it.

What's fascinating to me is how Twitter's founder, Evan Williams, has twice evolved his businesses, as he was previously the founder of Blohowgger, which started as a project management tool. I stumbled onto his chapter last night in "Founders at Work", one of the best books I've ever read. Evan isn't the only one with that ability, and it seems to be a prevailing case for many of the founders which are interviewed in the book (the exception being Ray Ozzie, who seems to have future goggles).

Max Levchin, the Paypal founder shared the same story, as he started Paypal as a PDA money transfer tool. The ability to adapt and evolve is a skill that isn't typically highlighted when people talk about entrepreneurship, and I think should be spoken about more often. It's something I've personally had to go through already and can be an interesting dilemna to tackle.

Andy Sacks, Judy's Book founder, has been a prime example of this evolution, and has graciously let everyone into the process on his blog.

UPDATE: Lots of other bloggers took notice:

Vallewag: Twitter blows up at SXSW
Micro Persuasion - Steve Rubel - Twitter, Human Attention and Moore's Law

The Valley is more like me

Andrew Chen, who worked at Bellevue based Revenue Science has a great post about the differences between Silicon Valley and Seattle, most of which are fairly obvious. He notes that Seattle and the Valley have the similar groups of nerds:

"...except here, they wear Google shirts and not Microsoft fleece jackets."

I also found this interesting:

"Another interesting factor has been the sheer number of 20-something entrepreneurs running around, many of them with venture funded companies. Let's face it - in Seattle, smart people from Stanford and MIT only go there for one reason: Microsoft. So by the time they go in, buy a condo in Kirkland, do some skiing, and go from Program Manager to Group Program Manager, they're pretty old! And definitely more risk-averse. The kids here come from Berkeley, Stanford, UCSF, and numerous other schools around here, and start companies from an early age. Young folks here are treated as equals here, and taken very seriously, whereas in Seattle I constantly got advice to "get more years under my belt.""

I have trouble finding many entrepreneurs in my age bracket here in Seattle, and constantly hear about young guys in the Valley doing their thing. It seems very tempting for most college grads in this area to take the easy route and go work for MS. In fact, a large majority of local entrepreneurs have!

Take almost any local company, and they have some relation to Microsoft. Zillow/Expedia were Microsoft veterans. Valve Software, makers of Half Life, were Microsoft guys. Even recent startups such as BlueDot were funded by Microsoft guys.

Having no clear juggernaut (although Google is rapidly approaching this status), the Valley seems to breed an open system of entrepreneurship.

Thanks to John Cook who posted about this first!

Startup Resources

My friend Alan Leong runs the entrepreneuship program at UW Bothell. He's had some great speakers come in and has most of their slides online:

http://www.uwbcse.org/2007/01/06/first-lecture-bonus-slide

I don't typically enjoy looking through slides without the presentation but some of these are absolutely worth it. Look at "Marketing for Entrepreneurs" by Jen Hall, who helps my company, Trendi. Great stuff that entrepreneurs should learn to live by.

Eric Mattson, one of the speakers he hosted, is a friend of mine and runs a marketing/podcast directory for entrepreneurs. His blog is over at http://www.ericmattson.com and he's now starting what he calls a "long tail media company" over at http://www.jenerous.com. He's interviewed a lot of entrepreneurs, marketers and smart people, and still has a long list of interviews to add!

He gave a killer speech last week to the class and I'm looking forward to watching more great content for entrepreneurs.

Features vs. Technology

Features vs. innovative technology. Which one leads to the development of a successful web app? Some may see feature set and innovative technology but I think their is a distinction that is pretty simple to follow. For instance, Google has always built it's applications based on innovative technology.

Google Search is light on feature set, in fact, it started with just one - search, but through the usage of their innovative technology, they've made a winner. On the feature set spectrum, the easiest examples to use are the social networks. MySpace became viral largely because it offered a variety of features, none of which were incredibly technical or innovative.

LinkedIn is another example of such a company. LinkedIn has been growing in popularity largely due to their feature set. Again, they are not reinventing the wheel here, just releasing enough functionality to keep people interested and modeling them in an interesting and addictive way.

For instance, when they launched their answers functionality, nothing about it was fundamentally difficult. As a user, you can ask a question, and get answers from the community. You can then pick  the best response of the bunch. The reason it caught on was that they chose to feature it prominently on a users profile. In fact, it's the first thing you see when you log in.

Spreading the questions through the network by making those that pick up steam easy to click into, and rewarding the users that answer with the most accurate response was a great way to add stickiness.

It seems as a web app you typically need a good combination of innovative technology and addicting feature set. The successful companies of web 2.0 have all been able to master this.