rtoennis

rtoennis

21p

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13 years ago @ Feld Thoughts - Have We Reached The So... · 0 replies · +1 points

I read the NYT review of "Common as Air". Makes me want to buy the book.

Key comment in the review...,"But he does not propose a program for action, nor does he dispute the need for limited commercial applications of new knowledge."

This to me continues to be the problem with cleaning up the mess we are in with the state of the patent system. No one is proposing a new model that solves the obvious problems of the current system but retains the protections needed for small, independent, non-wealthy innovators.

In human societies, "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely". If there was absolutely no patent protection for internet-based innovation (SW copyright is no protection at all), it is a fact of human nature that those humans with wealth/power will take advantage of the situation. Sad but true.

A completely open creative commons of all new internet ideas/knowledge that have commercial potential will result in those with wealth/power taking the best ideas from the non-wealthy innovators and preventing those rising entrepreneurs from pursuing the blessings of liberty.

In theory, a fully open creative commons where all can leverage the common knowledge for personal and common good on a level playing field is an attractive but utopian vision. It works only in a society where everyone has reached a point of financial security significantly beyond having their basic needs for food, shelter, rest and liesure fully met. In that utopia everyone can focus all their energies equally on creative pursuits and all would benefit equally. But this is not realistically achievable anytime soon.

The reality is when you add the power of "previously accumulated wealth" to this egalitarian vision of a creative commons the true outcome is the "rich will get richer" and the "poor man innovator" will be exploited by the wealthy without redress of his grievance.

I have in the past proposed a new patenting model for protecting/encouraging small non-wealthy innovators to reach for the stars without fear of having their ideas taken from them by accumulations of wealth and leaving those "working class innovators" with no financial benefit for their innovative efforts.

But no one seems interested in thoughtful well-designed solutions that are balanced in alleviating the ills of the current system but retaining the intents of the framers in this area.

The debate seems to be limited to "Status Quo at all costs!" or "Throw out both the baby and the bath water!"

13 years ago @ VC Adventure - Pricing models, the fr... · 0 replies · +2 points

Thanks for a GREAT post, Seth. Found it via Brad's blog pointing here.

We have through trial and error arrived at some of the same insights you share but not some of the others (Short trial periods). Seeing your post really fuels my fire to push through the pricing fears and do what you are suggesting.

I think all the free/freemium services of the last 10 years have created an amazing pricing opportunity for entrepreneurs where an online service can separate itself from the competition and get traction by actually being significantly MORE expensive, even WAY more expensive. But it requires something from the entrepreneur they may not be comfortable with. (More on that below).

Chris Anderson in his book "FREE: The Future of a Radical Price" I think is projecting "FREE" to continue when in fact it is a local phenomenon and that right now we are hitting an inflection point back toward "You Get What You Pay For".

His core mistake in his "FREE" book is in not recognizing some fundamental universal laws. The "No Free lunch" law (2nd law of Thermo) and the "Time is Money" law (Hawking's unidirectional 'Arrow' of time). The "Free" effect, economically speaking, is a very local phenomenon that cannot extrapolate or scale broadly as a true basis for economic stability. In a "mathematical model of economics" sense Free is a "local slope" in the curve that taken farther hit's an inflection point in the "economic model of the internet" exploration curve we are traveling on.

The key to true success with a startup in this new local area of the "evolution of the internet economy" is understanding what your paying customers care about and what they need help with and then doing something that directly meets that need. Hmmm. Sounds like a place we've been before. ;-) I think it means the internet economy is finally on a trajectory to maturity.

The core issue for ALL small/medium businesses today is they are overwhelmed and "under-timed" (Not enough time in the day) trying to survive a strategic reduction in consumption by consumer's coming down off "materialism-bender) ("Walmartism") of the 90s/00s.

NONE of the businesses you want to sell a SaaS service to today have the problem of "not having enough logins to cool new, Freemium SaaS services with cutesy-pie names".

We have a business solution we were initially thinking of offering at $49/month as a self-service, SaaS solution for businesses and hoping to move up in price over time with features. That was not working and we found ourselves lost in the clutter of options businesses had to choose from. So we decided to change the basis of competition from "features to service" from "ease of use of a SAAS Technology tool" to "we run the tools for you and deliver you the results and the bill so it's really easy for you to pay us".

So we made this change and we moved the initial baseline price to 10X of $49 that, yes that's right, 10X ($499/month) Since we have actually had way more success in getting serious customer interest and we may move the price up even further. The key was in recognizing SMB businesses desperately want the simplicity of a "soup to nuts" bundle of product services that result in a full outsourcing of various core business functions.

Most of them actually now HATE technology-centric, SAAS products that have more cool then results.

When you offer a "soup to nuts", "we'll do it all for you", product/service solution bundle, it immediately translates in a small business owners mind as "a time saving way to ease my mind and help me put the fire in my hair out."

The challenge to doing a startup like this is the management challenge of scaling a 'full service" SaaS solutions model. Fortunately my team and I have a lot of big company experience building and leveraging VAR(Value added Reseller) programs that deliver both product and personalized "soup to nuts" services around the product.

The hype-filled days of "Build a cool online service that goes viral on it's own" are I think are pretty much over now. Now the real, hard, grungy work of actually understanding a business customer and serving their core needs continuously over time is back. Thank goodness.

R

13 years ago @ Feld Thoughts - Senator Mark Udall Co-... · 0 replies · +1 points

I'm a big supporter of allowing people, especially smart motivated people, to come to this country, make a new life and succeed and contribute to society the way my ancestors did.

So I'm supportive of any legislation that makes it easier for the best and brightest from any country, who want to come here, to do so.

However, I'd also like to see legislation that aggressively supports both US citizens and foreign citizens on "Startup Visa's" in actually delivering funding opportunities so everyone has some time/resources to actually make those companies a success.

Today most government economic support is aimed at supporting banks or the top 500 existing large businesses. Virtually nothing is available from the public sector to directly help small businesses, even less startups, get going and succeed.

I've called for a long time for the SBIR program to be expanded into a full fledged government-backed seed fund that can give small grants and loans to startups. Given that traditional Angels and VC's have nearly completely abandoed the seed stage and nearly completely abandonded supporting first time entrepreneurs it's left to the public sector to fill this need.

I'll be writing to Senator Udall asking him to also look at this "Getting started" problem for first time US and foreign entrepreneurs. The country needs a LOT of people to transition to the entrepreneur mindest and traditional VC's have never been in a position, and certainly aren't now, to support a really big chunk of the workforce becoming entrepreneurs and employees of startup companies.

So lets really push the pedal to the floor and give both the budding foreign entrepreneurs and budding US citizen entrepreneurs the funding opportunities they(we) need to remake our economy and provent our society from heading into decline as the 20th century Fortune 500 economic model rusts out from the inside and collapses.

13 years ago @ TechCrunch - Microsoft Page-Turning... · 0 replies · +1 points

Holy crap, you have no idea how patents work do you?

13 years ago @ Feld Thoughts - Bummed Out About Bilski · 0 replies · +1 points

The reality is it's not particularly easy to find out if there is prior art. It's much easier now than in the past with the internet and search engines though.

13 years ago @ ben's blog - Why Andreessen Horowit... · 0 replies · +2 points

Hi Ben,

Thanks for your replies.

The 10K business signups is definitely impressive. Are those businesses mainly in trial mode, non-paying? I'm guessing yes. Still impressive though. The rub of course is converting them to paid status. Then beyond that the challenge is to minimize churn on the consumer side.

However, I do agree with you that "something is going on here". It's a fundamental shift in how consumers interact with their world of commerce on a local AND national/global level. It's becoming way more personal now.

Lots of opportunity and I think there will be a lot of startup "winners" who figure out various aspects of this change.

I humbly believe I've cracked the code on a particular part of the overall opportunity space with an online solution I'm launching in August.

So I am thrilled 4SQ is helping to "make this market" by already educating 10000 of the 4,252,424 US businesses that have gross revenue between $100K per year and $10M.

FYI: Those 4,252,424 businesses gross $4T in revenue every year of which ~4% is allocated on average across industries to marketing/advertising. Thats a tidy sum of $160B/year spent by those businesses for marketing (mainly traditional direct marketing) solutions.

So a big ocean for us to swim in. Contact me if you have interest in hearing about our thing.

Cheers,
Roger

13 years ago @ ben's blog - Why Andreessen Horowit... · 2 replies · +1 points

I guess I'm just wondering what the metrics you used to determine that the Starbucks campaign was "super successful"?

I definitely can see why a big brand like Starbucks is open to playing the 4SQ game as a strategic branding effort aimed at positioning their brand as at the forefront of the social media explosion. That's smart on their part.

But when it comes to 4SQ's longterm ability to crack into mainstream adoption by local businesses, beyond outlets of "big national chains" like Starbucks, I see a proiblem. Big chains have big names but the reality is they represent less than 20% of the Local businesses GDP.

If non-chain local businesses, who don't do strategic branding, don't jump in to offer coupons then that limits the consumer adoption pipeline because to be really useful to the mainstream consumer you need to have more like 30+% of the local businesses "in play" with coupons/offers/deals.

Plus to monetize you have to get those 30+% of non-chain business owners to pay 4SQ for the use of the service. Recent polls show that 90% of businesses who have tried foursquare would NOT pay to offer coupons on the service.

What you have here is the Classic "Cliff problem" that Seth Godin wrote about in 2004 in this blog post. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2004/07/t...

Until a critical mass (>30%) of consumers is using 4SQ the small business owner will not see value the service and adopt it. But to get to that 30% you have to have a critical mass (>30%) of businesses offering deals through the service. It's a "Catch 22" and a very tough nut to crack.

The 4SQ challenge is I don't see 30% of the consumer population being willing to "play the 4SQ game" even if more than 30% of the businesses in their area are "playing".

13 years ago @ Feld Thoughts - Bummed Out About Bilski · 2 replies · +1 points

The software's "life" isn't over if people are still using it when the patent is approved. If it's a great idea then eventually the patent will get awarded and the first innovator has a chance to earn some wealth off his entrepreneurial moxie.

Thats why "Who invented it first" is part of the patent system. The point of a patent system is to encourage people to push the envelope of innovation, in the face of pain, with the goal of "inventing it first". That drives innovation.

When we reach a human utopia where energy is free, wealth is massive, poverty is banished and all is shared equally than we can open source everything and patents will be moot. Until then we actually have to have a way to reward innovators to suffer financially without having to worry about well monied "idea thieves" reaping the benefits of their sweat and leaving them with nothing.

Wealthy VCs who are against all patents have simply lost track of the fact that though they may live in that utopian space the majority of the rest of us don't......yet. (See I'm an optimist. :-) )

13 years ago @ Feld Thoughts - Bummed Out About Bilski · 3 replies · +1 points

You know I'm a very progressive guy and I consider myself to be mainly supportive of those ideals that support the common good and promote the general welfare, including open source and freedom from predatory patent infringement litigation

But I also know that the realities of life require that each of us also be able to narrowly support the specific welfare of our immediate family (spouse and kids) with food and shelter. (Something perhaps the average VC has lost track of on a visceral level)

So if one fancies oneself an entrepreneur, and given the times we live in it's likely our entrepreneurial passions are focused on the creation of novel and unique SW solutions, I would ask what remedies the "anti-SW-patent" supporters recommend for making sure that we "little guy" SW innovators don't get raped continuously by well-monied corporate and private equity interests when we happen to do something useful and sale-able using modern SW tools?

A SW-Patent-Free universe is a lovely Willy-Wonka-esque romp for rich and powerful VCs and other members of the "I got mine" fraternity. But what about the poor SW folk who have a great idea and who sweat and suffer to make it a reality only to discover that the "VC Plantation Owners" have co-opted that great idea away from the poor "SW Sharecropper" because there is no law against said plantation owner stealing the "land" from the "Sharecropper" using superior power and money?

So...perhaps it would be important to explain how we might provide some "civil rights" to poor SW innovators who aren't VCs or are not "made men" serial entrepreneur henchmen who report to the VC "Dons".

Again, I'm not a fan of irrational and obvious patents of any nature and I'm definitely averse to the idea of predatory patent trollers stifling innovation. I think the latter actually verge on committing treason against society.

But I also don't wish to squash the passions of the entrepreneur because they know "Big Money" will just steal his/her idea because there is no protection offered by a rational patent system.

Thoughts?

13 years ago @ ben's blog - Why Andreessen Horowit... · 4 replies · +1 points

Thought experiment: Walk with me here....

So I'm a business owner and Foursquare can offer me access to data about my customers who come to my physical storefront. OK fine. Sounds interesting on first blush.

So now I start thinking. (Remember, I'm a business owner.)
For what percentage of my customers will I get data access?

Clearly only some percentage of my customers, obviously significantly less than 100%, are going to be visible to me through this "Foursquare Lens". So lets do some filtering of who I will see.

I'm thinking the customer set visible to Foursquare, and to me by extension, will be limited to those people...

1. With GPS enabled smartphones who...
2. Are comfortable being physically tracked at all times and also have decided to...
3. Choose to become Foursquare users by setting up an account and downloading the Foursquare app and...
4. Who regularly check in using the Foursquare app so their visits are counted accurately compared to all other customers and who...
5. Don't get "check in fatigue" after 6 months of using an app like Foursquare and stop using it or who...
6. Don't use some other clone of the same service like Gowalla.

Question: What percentage of my loyal customer base that truly does come often enough for me to see them as "profit-makers" for me does that represent? Both initially and for the longterm, what is the expected percentage?

I would guess after applying all those filters you are on average going to only get good data for me on a max of 2% of my existing customers and more likely less than 1% of my customers.

Plus, when I start giving VIP treatment to the "Mayor" and "City Council" of my business isn't it possible that a bunch of my truly great and loyal customers, who come in way more often that the 4SQ mayor, are going to find out and get pissed?

So explain to me again why I, a busy small business owner, is going to be interested in spending precious time pouring over data for a small fraction of my customers?

Am I missing something here?