Startup Diaries

A Case For Working Late

April 22nd, 2012 by shahar No comments »

A couple of weeks ago Sheryl Sandberg went to the top of the Memes with her call to stop overworking ourselves for long hours. Since than, I’ve seen many other people talk about the fact that working into the night is a waste of resources and we should strive for better work-life balance.

I want to make the opposite point.
Well… not exactly. I do think we should have a good work/life balance. I just think that in many cases we should strive to make sure that our work is our life, or better say – eliminate the word work from our vocabulary.

I’m an entrepreneur. I’m working now on another startup. I spend long hours on my startup. I find myself many times coding well into the night. But no. I don’t work hard. My startup is part of my life the same way my friends and family are. My startup defines me the same as my hobbies are.
Many times I look at some of my friends who are working 8 to 5 and really feel sorry for them. Yes, I spend many more hours “working” than they are, but for me this is not work. I don’t look at the clock to see how many more hours I need to do this. Don’t get me wrong. There are many times that I prefer to be diving in some exotic place or just laying on the beach. But I’m not longing for my work day to end. I love what I do.
When I think about my last startup, some of my favorite times I remember were the long nights, coding with my co-founder. The thrill of building something cool. The notion that everything is possible. It’s like going to the gym – you like the pain that comes from lifting heavy weight.

Instead of trying to lower the amount of hours we spend on work, maybe we need to strive to make work not feel like work.

UPDATE: I just want to clarify one thing: I’m single and I don’t have kids. I fully understand that when you have family, what I’m wrote here simply doesn’t apply. When you have kids, you need to spend time with them. Period. But until than…

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Posted in Uncategorized

Tags: long hours startups work

The Real Life Of A Startup

March 26th, 2012 by shahar 1 comment »

The past week everyone were talking about Zynga acquisition of Omgpop, the startup behind the Draw Something phenomena. For most people who are not involved deeply in tech, this seems like one of this Hollywood stories. Small startup release a game, in less than four weeks gets to almost 40 million users and get acquired for $180 million dollars. The ever happy fast way to get money from tech, right? Wrong!

People live with the illusion that startups can be a quick way to get rich. All you need is one fast hit and you are settled for life. This notion attracts many people to leave their jobs and try to build “the next big thing”. But this notion is just wrong. The amount of companies who really made it big in a short time is way lower than what you think. In reality, behind almost every “fast exit” there are a few very long and hard years of nonstop work. Years when no one heard about the company and their products and the reason why for everyone else their success seems to come out of nowhere.
This is exactly what happened in the case of Draw Something. Omgpop actually released 35 games before Draw Something. 35 games that almost didn’t make any revenue. 25 games that no one heard about. But also 35 games that built a team with now years of experience developing social games.

This is the true story behind every startup. A team that work like crazy, don’t sleep, always in fear of running out of money. A team that do a million small things for a few years, a million small things that together build the product into “an instant success”. This is why startups are a marathon. A physical and emotional one that is not for everyone. But if you can make it. If you have the strength to pull it through, you might get to be an instant, fast hollywood story success.

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Posted in Start ups

Tags: draw something omgpop startups success zynga

The Amazing Opportunity Of The Open Graph

November 22nd, 2011 by shahar No comments »

One of the most exciting opportunities for startups in recent months is the new Facebook Open Graph. The life blood of every startup is the ability to reach new users. The old “viral black magic”. Facebook and Twitter were always some of the best tools. Startups who managed to get their users to share more content on these networks, received in return a stream of new users to their services. But the new Open Graph capabilities takes this to a all new level.

First and most important is the fact that users don’t need to do any action to share something. It is all done automatically in the background. You listen to a song – it goes to your timeline. You watch a video – it goes to your timeline. I’ll be the first one to admit that at first, as a user, this option is a bit scary. I wouldn’t want to use this option with every service. But Facebook thought also about that and are giving you, as a user, some nice benefits to enable this functionality. If you use it with a music service like Spotify for example, it allows you to easily see all the music you listened to. Forgot what was this cool song you discovered last week? No worries. With one click you can find it. It’s also quite cool to see how your music taste change over time.

But for developers this functionality is pure gold. It means that users will constantly keep pushing your content in front of their friends. The specific app aggregation view is also great. It allows other people to easily discover vat amount of content through their friends’ profile pages. Just check the how my Stagedom timeline looks like. With one glimpse you can see exactly what music I listen to, which new artists I discover and find new music videos from the web.
And the best thing: The integration with the Open Graph API is very simple. It took me just a few hours to configure everything. There is simply no excuse to not integrate with it right away.

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Posted in Facebook, Stagedom, Start ups

Tags: Facebook Open Graph Stagedom startups

Is Spotify Going To End Up As Netflix?

November 18th, 2011 by shahar No comments »

A couple of weeks ago I wrote the following blog post which I forgot to actually publish. Today I woke up to an article in Wired stating that more than 200 small music labels have taken their music out of Spotify and Rdio. It reminded me of this post, so here it is, late but never more relevant:

I’m a big fan of music subscription services. While they became all the rage in the US just recently, Iv’e been using a few of them for years now.
But this week I got a few big disappointments. A few of my favorite artists came out with new albums and to my surprise I couldn’t find them in any of the services including Spotify and Rdio. The artists I’m talking about are Coldplay, Kaskade and Florence + The Machine.
Now, it’s true that it might be just a coincidence and I hope it is. Because the other option might suggest a change that will make services like Spotify end up like Netflix – The “Rewind” service for music.

But if Spotify is growing like crazy, why we even talk about such an option?
Because under this growth, there are still some big problems and questions that the streaming services and the music industry as a all need to solve. Some examples are:
If you are not a very big name artist, you are simply not going to make money from people playing your music with these services. And if you are a big name like Coldplay, you can actually decide to put your new album on iTunes only for a few months, get the big money there, and than push it to streaming and hope to get some more.
And what if you are a small band? Well, the big point that the streaming services are fighting for is that they allow for people to discover your music. That people won’t buy your albums, but if they can listen to them for free they might discover you and you will make money on touring. The problem with this is the statistics behind the service. For example, on Spotify, more than 90% of the songs played are the same 10% of songs mostly coming from big artists (Worth to note that this is the exact opposite from the stats behind Pandora).
Now, this might change a bit now that Spotify is integrated with the new Facebook Open Graph which allows for better music discovery, but we will need to wait and see.

So will we see more artists and labels take their music off the platform or will subscription will become the main way we consume music int he future? Tell me what you think.

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Posted in Internet, Music, Uncategorized

Tags: Music NetFlix Rdio Spotify subscription services wired

The Startup Scene: SF vs NYC revisited

October 20th, 2011 by shahar 1 comment »

As many of you knows, after a few years in San Francisco I’m now spending most of my time in New York. I made the move mostly for personal reasons as well because my new startup is very entertainment focused and I wanted to get to know the NYC scene.

But the last few months here gave me some perspective on the long debate whether you should build your startup in NYC or the bay area. I wanted to share some of my thoughts here with you:
I’ll start by saying that there is no doubt that the NYC startup scene is getting bigger and better in rapid pace. It’s nothing compared to where it was just two or three years ago. You can find many weekly meetups and events, there are many new co-working spaces like General Assembly and WeWork Labs and it seems that every day there are many new entrepreneurs around.
When you live here you can not miss the buzz around. NYC feels like the center of the world. It feels like it is the next big thing that going to pass the bay area without looking back. But as much as I love this buzz and rush, whenever I go back to visit SF it takes me just a couple of days to put things in proportion.

NYC is getting better. It even might be the second best place to build your startup in. But it is still a far second. The amount of investors, money, developers, experience entrepreneurs and potential partners in the bay area is still a few times more. If you want to build a super ninja technology team, it will still be much easier to do that in the bay area. If you want early stage investments and access to capital, you will still have many more people to meet with in the bay area. NYC is getting better, but it’s still not there.
You can easily see that in the numbers provided by the Huffington Post. SF share of all VC deals for 2011 is four times bigger than New York. If you look at the amount of money committed this number grows to five times more.

But before all my New Yorker friends are after me let me add that I think that NYC has some advantages over the bay area:
First and foremost it’s the access to industries and businesses that simply don’t thrive in the bay area. If your potential customers are in the music, fashion, entertainment or finance industries this is definitely the place for you. But it’s even more than that, while in the bay area when going to networking event you mostly meet techies and entrepreneurs, here I find myself meet actors, musician, non profits, scientists and many others. The variety of people around the city is something that is hard to find anywhere else in the world. This also affect the kind of early crowed you can reach. They are not going to be just the early tech adopters. They can be the trend setters and “cool kids” that we at the bay area sometimes love to push away.

So bottom line, what is my recommendation: I think that if you are still building your team and initial product you will probably do better on the west coast. But when you want to go out, test your product and push it to the market you will probably want to start spend more of your time in the big apple.

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Posted in Start ups

Tags: bay area investments new york nyc san francisco startups

The Man Who Changed My Life

October 6th, 2011 by shahar 1 comment »

As very young kid I wanted to be a film director. But as the years went through and sometime around age 13 my fascination from technology and computers took over and I knew that this is what I’m going to do. It took another couple of years before i also knew what I want to do with technology. There were three people that pushed me there: Andrew Grove, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
I remember reading articles and interviews with them and more than thinking, knowing, that this is what I will do. It wasn’t just about success and fame. It was about the change. About changing the world. The ability to imagine and build products that millions of people touch and use every day fascinated me all together. It still is.
This was the first time that Jobs, without knowing, touched and changed my life. At first I was a total Microsoft geek. Back than it was already not cool to like Microsoft but I was fascinated by the user interface behind many of their products. But as the years kept passing, I started to gravitated toward the Apple camp. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple he didn’t bring with him just a new spirit. He took Apple, than a broken company, and made it the most innovative company in the world. He brought his vision and dedication for user experience that captivated me and inspired me every day.
Today I’m writing this post on a Macbook Pro. In front of me on the table sitting an iPhone, an iPod touch and an iPad 2. I probably own another half a dozen other Apple products. It’s fair to say that I spend more time with Apple products than with any of my friends and family. The way I’m consuming media, do my work, talk with friends and basically live goes through this or another Apple product.
This is the second way Steve Jobs touched and changed my life.When I’ll finish this post I’ll go back to my work on my new startup. It is a full mobile startup and I spend most of my time today writing and developing an application for the iPhone. It’s fair to say that without what the iPhone brought to the world and the way it changed the mobile industry, I wouldn’t do what I do now. My startup won’t exist.
But this goes much deeper than that. I won’t exaggerate if I’ll say that at least every three days I find myself debugging some feature in the middle of the night. I’m tired. I’m hungry. I just want to go to sleep. At these times it’s easy to just say “It’s ok if the icon doesn’t look that good”. Or, “It’s ok if this feature won’t be perfect”. But almost every time it happens I stop and think of Apple and say to myself: “What would Steve Jobs say?”. And the answer is obvious. He will ask for that perfection. He will give that extra hour and make sure the user experience is just right. And so that’s what I do. Because we all want to build a product that will be looked at and treated by the same way we all look at the iPhone or the iPad the first time we hold them.
This is the third way that Steve Jobs touched and changed my life.

I never met Steve Jobs and I never will. But even without ever meeting him, with his work, his vision and his spirit he touched and changed my life again and again. The world just seems a bit less magical today.

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It’s Not About Measurability. It’s About Predictability

September 30th, 2011 by shahar No comments »

I spent the last few days in a really cool event named SHIFT which was produced by Social People. Many of the conversations there reminded me of one of the big lessons we learned running NuConomy.

Coming from the creative and digital sides, many startups that try to work with the agencies, can’t understand why they can’t convince them to use their products. For us it’s hard to understand why these agencies spend millions of their customers money on TV and other platforms instead of do highly targeted and measurable advertising on the web. What startups need to understand that it’s not about measurability – It’s about predictability.

These agencies have worked and ran campaigns on radio, newspapers and TV for tens of years. They have seen everything and than again. They know exactly what will happen when they put a million dollars on a prime time TV campaign. They don’t need it to be fully measurable as the web. They have done the same thing so many times before, that statistically they can predict the exact results. At the same time, we the startups, offer them superior solutions. But these are also solutions that no one have tried before. Solutions that were tested just a few times. For us a couple of years seems like a long time, but these companies were doing business for tens of years.
What startups needs to understand is that in the end of the day it’s about people lives and careers. Predictability is also security. It’s knowing that your job will probably won’t be in risk.
What we need to offer agencies is not more data points to measure, but a way to have the comfort and security of predictable results.

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The Web Is Changing And Facebook Leads It

September 23rd, 2011 by shahar No comments »

Yesterday F8 was a great example of why for the past few years Facebook (and Mark) is one of the companies I highly admire. It’s not because of their size and success. It’s because that even with their size and success they still have the courage to dramatically change their product again and again. They have a vision of where the world is going to and they go after it without looking back.

The past week ,together with yesterday announcements will make Facebook an all new experience than we are used to. Timeline is amazing user experience and the thing that got most of the attention. But the most important announcement was the automatic publishing from apps.
I’m sure that in the next few weeks we will read about users uproar against this change. Hell, even to me this seems a bit creepy and hard to swallow. But like many other changes they brought in the past, I will bet that also this time, one after another, we will all get used to it and then hooked to it. In a year we won’t understand how we did things before that.
Facebook bets on what they said for years: Most of us don’t really have much to hide. Our basic human need to share and social with others is stronger than our need for privacy. If you thought that people knew much about you until now, wait until this new auto publishing will become mainstream.

From the developer perspective, this brings up an all new world of possibilities. Auto sharing of media, location, events. Suddenly everything is social. Everything can be discussed in near real time. Maybe more important, more sharing means much better opportunity to be discovered by other users – the lifeblood of any startup. For Facebook these new changes also put structure around the data. Structure that allows for much better understanding of our actions and interests, which of course translates to better targeted advertising.

One interesting thing to note is the fundamental shift in Facebook strategy. With Facebook connect and the like button, they basically brought the platform out to the all web. Now they are doing the opposite. Click on a Hulu video or a Spotify song and interact with the media inside of Facebook. If this will catch on, Facebook will become its own “mini Internet”. Understanding the new graph rank (and how to manipulate it) might become more important than ranking in Google search results and SEO.

It’s been years since we saw so many fundamental changes to the web and how we interact with it. From Google+, to new mobile devices and now the Facebook changes. The way we will interact with the world and people around us will be very different two years from now. This is an incredible opportunity for entrepreneurs and startups and I’m super excited to be in the middle of it.

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Posted in Facebook, Internet

Tags: Developers F8 Facebook Timeline Vision

The Art Of Pitching

September 16th, 2011 by shahar No comments »

It’s been a few years since I had to pitch a new company and I almost forgot one of the most important lessons for entrepreneurs: Pitch early and pitch as much as you can.

There are tons of post that details why you should not adopt a stealth mode and the importance of getting early feedback. But there is one additional very big benefit for pitching early: How it affect you. It’s amazing to realize how your pitch changes from one to the next. It’s not just that you slowly perfecting your pitch. Many times it actually change how you think on your business model, future obstacles and features you need to implement in your product.

The moment you try to explain your business to someone else something changes. Suddenly it’s not just about your feelings and instincts. Suddenly you need to face some hard truths that you didn’t want to admit. There is also some very strange but powerful psychological effect when we say something out loud instead of just thinking it.

So my advice to all of you entrepreneurs is very simple: Pitch early and pitch as many times as you can.

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Posted in Start ups

Tags: entreprenurs pitch pitching startups