I had wished very hard my sharp-minded friend Sébastien Blanc joined me as a partner when I founded environmental management software company Verteego, almost two years ago. Instead Séb accepted an offer from online collaborative tools Yoolink, which makes me think that either I’m very bad at convincing people on joining me in projects, or that Yoolink is a very special startup. Although both options are still wide opened and not exclusive at all, I like for some reason to consider it’s Yoolink that’s an amazing company and felt it would be just fair play from me to interview Sébastien on what actually Yoolink is doing for its enterprise customers.

Hello Seb, could you please introduce yourself?

Hi Jeremy. Well, my name is Sebastien Blanc and I am the Business development director for YoolinkPro, a Paris-based start-up developing a micro-sharing Platform for professionals.

Things have changed and knowledge now is increasingly on-line. We all spend loads of time googling the Internet for information about customers, about markets or to solve work-based issues. Yet when we find an interesting document we rarely do anything with it.

YoolinkPro changes that. The service allows you to save, share, tag and discuss information you find on-line. It allows you to bring the knowledge you find on the web into your company to increase productivity.
– What’s Yoolink business model?

We are mainly targeting SME. So our business model is really flexible. You can subscribe to the service and pay a monthly fee depending on how many people are going to use the service. It starts at 34€/month for 5 people.

For departments or teams within large companies we offer special plans depending on needs and of course we offer tailor-made developments to ensure the product meets each customers’ needs.
– What is YoolinkPro’s market?

We are developing sales on different markets, the main ones being communication agencies, R&D fuelled companies and public organization. We have customers in Western Europe but France is our main market. Our average customer is a 30-40 person company but we are currently implementing tests in companies way larger than that. We’ll keep you posted!
- Is Enterprise 2.0 an evolution or a revolution? Let me ask the question differently, do you think large companies are ready to switch to Web 2.0, online services like Yoolink?

That’s a good question and I think many people are discussing it in depth: Dion Hinchcliffe or Denis Howlett to name but a few. Personally I don’t think it’s a revolution per se. You can’t get into a company – large or not – by saying everything they are doing is crap and they have to change it all. They were making profits way before you existed. So talking about revolution is not likely to drive up sales.

If you want to work with large groups, I think you have to start with a small team of highly motivated users and then use them as a base to spread within the company. It’s a one-step-at-a-time approach. And I think dropping the buzzwords is also a good idea. Or to put it differently, you solve problems rather than bringing in some fancy technology. People call me back a lot more since I started talking about operations instead of 2.0.
– What is Yoolink’s secret sauce? What makes you better than del.icio.us and Wordpress altogether?

Wordpress is not really a competitor. We are working with people who are using both YP and Wordpress. Wordpress is used to communicate with people outside a company and YoolinkPro is an easy way to share information within the company. Both services can communicate with each other.

As for Delicious there are of course some common features. But it is definitely a service for private users, not for professionals. YoolinkPro offers features a company really needs that private users don’t: privacy, guaranteed quality-of-service, support, storage, etc. When you address companies, you have to meet higher standards.
– What are you most proud of at Yoolink?

Our interface. We definitely have a good interface. We often have a “wow” effect from people during presentation. That’s something we really enjoy and that is critical in users’ adoption of the service.
– What will you be most proud of at Yoolink in 1 year, 3 years, and 5 years? In other words, what will be Yoolink’s next major landmarks?

Our next landmark is a business one: break-even. That’s what we are working toward. Bringing the service to companies, solving their problems, developing new ways to work. I hope my portfolio of happy customers is going to be what I am most proud of in 1 year!
– Do you find easy to get bloggers write about Yoolink Pro?

Well if you want me to be honest I’d say it is one of the hardest things I’ve encountered. From a more general point of view it is really difficult to get visibility as an IT start-up when you’re not US-based. It’s as if being American boosts both your product and your brand…
– Is blogging and twittering most useful when it comes to building a community around the Yoolink brand?

Definitely. We worked a lot on PR and media a couple of month ago. And then we realized that a single twit or blog post from a good analyst was worth more in terms of users than several articles in major on-line newspapers. Besides, with twitter and blogs we can actually exchange with our users and not just publish information…
– How does the Yoolink team look like today? And tomorrow?

We are a small but efficient team. There are 6 people, three of whom develop the service, 1 designs it and 2 develop the Business. Everyone is highly motivated and devoted and the CEO – Sunny Paris, former founder of Weborama, a listed company – is bringing loads of energy and vision to the team. I think the team is going to remain the same for a while, at least until 2010.
– How is Yoolink funded as of today? What are its capital development perspectives?

We raised 500k€ last June from industrials and BA and we have a really low burn-rate. So we don’t plan to raise money in the short term. Once again the focus is on business development.
– On a more personal standpoint, what is your next move?

I have many in mind. The one coming the fastest though is to try running the semi-marathon in less than 1’30!

Many thx Séb.

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My cofounder at Verteego Rupert and I met Michelle Greer in the line to the TechCrunch Party during last December’s crappy LeWeb Conference in Paris. Michelle was the sunshine of at-that-time very cloudy Paris for us: we could discuss blogs (see Michelle’s blog), Twitter (follow Michelle here), hot startups, online business models, web marketing, as well as music, France, the US, blablabla

Since then, Michelle being based in Austin, Texas, we’ve been keeping in touch and I couldn’t resist introduce you guys to Michelle Greer, a great professional as well as an amazing person. Plus, I’ve become lazy writing blogs just myself with me and I, so here Michelle goes:

- Hey Michelle, could you please introduce yourself?

My name is Michelle Greer and I am a web marketing strategist here in Austin, Texas.  I love good movies, traveling, funny people, skiing, tennis, yoga, and using the web to connect people.

Michelle Greer was interviewed by Jeremy, who didn’t get paid for it! Look, Tech IT Easy isn’t even mentioned in Michelle’s favorites…

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It’s high time I came back to give Vincent a hand on making this blog very active as you people deserve.

I’ve been rather inconspicuous on Tech IT Easy ever since I started Verteego, 18 months ago. Initially, I found a hard time looking for economies of scale and synergies between being a tech blogger and a sustainability entrepreneur. I was wrong: the more our company grows, the more I realize how much what we do at Verteego actually leverages Technology.

I’ve got loads to tell and share on bootstrapping, product positionning, building a great team, going abroad, learning from your mistakes, closing sales deals, establishing partnerships, raising funds, getting Press coverage,…but most of all, our core business at Verteego really is enabling organizations, be they companies or local governments, to go green thanks to our software and services.

So, one topic I would like to discuss frequently here is Green IT, because Verteego definitely is a Green IT company.

According to the Gartner Group, Information Technology accounts for 2% of worldwide carbon emissions – about the same as the entire aviation industry. This figure is by and large correct. However, Information Technology has the power to lower the 98% remaining CO2 emissions. That is Green IT: use technology as an enabler.

And that is exactly what we do at Verteego: sustainability software. For instance, one of them, Verteego Carbon, is a carbon management software that enables organizations to collaboratively assess, analyse, and report the greenhouse gas emissions generated by their activity or products. Verteego Carbon is also a beautiful entrepreneurial story in itself: started as a side-project by one of my partners, the application now represents a significant chunk of our turnover and a truly global product. Verteego Carbon is indeed available in French, German, and English.

To make a long story short, I’m back on the Tech IT Easy tracks for good and more-than-ever willing to start amazingly interesting conversations about my experience as an entrepreneur in the Green IT business. You can expect one post per week from me on this exciting topic of Green IT.

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I attended LeWeb, a conference dedicated to…the Web industry, almost 2 weeks ago in Paris. I apologize not to have blogged before, but December was a frantic month, business-wise, and I wish I could blog during the conference but as you may have read on the blogosphere, there was no Internet. On top of that, I wanted to leave some time before I blogged to check whether my words would soften.

I arrived at Le Web, investing a lot of time (2 full days) and money (more than EUR 800, that is to say around USD 1100 – which is a lot of money for what I got), with very high expectations, and I have to say that this conference was a huge disappointment to me. Actually, it was more of a disappointment: I actually found Le Web ‘08 conference to be a huge piece of crap. Here’s why.

The organizers: Loïc & Géraldine Le Meur

Prior to the conference, I was a big fan of Loïc Le Meur. The guy looked like Midas to me: everything he touched became gold. The guy gets people lining up to invest in his startups (look at his list of investors in his last startup Seesmic here, impressive). Loïc understood that blogging was going to be big before everyone, and positioned himself accordingly (a huge blogger and founder of Six Apart, the editor of TypePad). Loïc is also an early investor in LinkedIn, my favorite web app, and recently founded and funded Seesmic that I find to be a very cool video conversation platform. Well, the guy seemed to be the perfect investee for VCs, and the perfect investor for entrepreneurs. However, when it comes to organizing conferences, I would tend to say it’s not there yet. Loïc and his wife Géraldine have been organizing the Le Web event for something like four years. Last year already, criticism had emerged, but overall comments were positive. Well, after attending one Le Web conference, I can only blame myself for not having due diligenced better: I wasted my time and my startup’s money.

The theme

Love. This year’s Le Web conference was about love. At first sight, I found this theme brilliant – too bad the idea wasn’t well executed. Love is a universal value that is only discussed in novels and Vogue. Plus, Love is the perfect theme if you want to think an outside-the-box conference program. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case at all. Although there were a number of supposedly quality speakers, most didn’t actually mention the theme, and I guess some didn’t even know that the theme was Love (Marissa Meyer of Google, Didier Lombard of France Telecom, Maurice Levy of Publicis, to name some of them…). I think it’s a big waste, because having a truly deeply-thought consistent program around Love, with at least some continuity between speakers, could’ve made of Le Web a truly mainstream event rather than just a reunion self-proclamed visionaries.

The speakers

Speaking of self-proclamed visionaries, I had a hard time looking for new ’stars’ on Le Web panels. Or even just interesting content.

Paulo Coelho is a brilliant man, but he had nothing to do at Le Web: his speech didn’t bring anything new, it was self-promotion, and an uninteresting one as a matter of fact. Same with Susan Wu from Ohai, preaching her church (virtual goods): boring slides, boring intervention.

Didier Lombard was absolutely out of scope too. He basically paid to get on stage. And you could feel it.

I was very disappointed by Maurice Levy from Publicis (and by the questions asked by Loïc Le Meur: boring) – the guy could’ve given us interesting insights on web advertising. Instead, we had a boring “fireside chat”, as they say. I liked one thing about Maurice Levy though, he publicly gave his email address saying he was looking for startups to invest in.

Startup competition updates were extremely repetitive; the only thing you could here was “despite the crisis, there are still a lot of innovation around; I’m thrilled by what I saw in the startup competition room”. Except that when you looked at the jury in the room, they were all on their Blackberry or iPhone aswering emails.

I liked Yossi Vardi, Chris Anderson, John Buckman (good tips for entrepreneurs), Marissa Meyer (a few insights on the Google roadmap, like wanting to take Chrome out of Beta) & Joi Ito though.

The sponsors

Le Web’s official sponsor was no company else than Microsoft, the tech giant that probably least understands the Web provided the very poor quality of its online applications, like Hotmail, or its total absence of the collaborative web apps landscape outside its expensive minority stake in Facebook. The good news is, Microsoft folks are smart asses and let some selected startups (some of them embedding no single Microsoft technology) demo their applications rather than demo Microsoft products. Microsoft alone paid Le Web USD 110,000 or EUR 80,000 to get its brand on top of others, rent a lounge space, and get speaking time.

Google also was a sponsor of Le Web – they had Microsoft move first when it came to getting the “official sponsor” title. Google had a special room dedicated to presenting its own stuff during day 1. Nothing new there, except that Google brought in speakers on a number of topics like Adwords, APIs, etc. I guess the fee also included the 2 keynotes Google got. If I were Google, I would, to ensure a maximum buzz around my brand, not attend or sponsor Le Web. That would make the entire conference speak about the absence of Google whilst the whole web revolves around the Google search engine. Google being a sponsor amongst others makes of it a regular company. Too bad.

There were other partners, like SwissCom that sucks big time (they had a booth, and did not manage to make the Internet work during the entire conference + Loïc Le Meur says they got paid more than USD 100,000! to make nothing work), Facebook (?), SixApart & Seesmic who got it for free obviously,…and a number of others that are not worth talking about in this not-so-long post.

The budget, the price

1,400 participants x an average of EUR 1,000 per entrance

Sponsoring & demo room for at least EUR 200,000

The overall budget for this 2-day conference amounted to EUR 1,500,000. Yet, there was no wifi running, definitely not enough food for all participants (I had to go grab a sandwich each 2 days), no consistent editorial line, a crowd of people investing time and a lot of money to listen to the same self-called visionaries on stage.

I haven’t paid myself in one year (I live on my fiancée’s salary), every since I started Verteego. I bought myself a ticket to Le Web almost as a Christmas gift, hoping to enjoy a lot. It was a sort of sacrifice (EUR 850 + 2 days of turnover for Verteego – I’m the sales guy there – is hell of a lot of money! the price of a superb laptop or a great long weekend, say, in Venice) but I was plenty of hopes. The least I could say even 2 weeks after the conference is that I have a very angry feeling at myself: I feel I’ve been financially abused. And I lost two days of hard work during an important period.

The place, and the temperature…

Well, it was free-zing. Which is okay for me, except that with so many people inside, there must have been a sort of natural warmth, which wasn’t the case. I felt this place had the worst energetic efficiency in Paris. This absence of environmental awareness stroke me: the second day, it was warmer. I couldn’t believe how much energy was used to heat the place. I am very disappointed by the overall lack of consciousness of web entrepreneurs for environmental issues: if you are really about changing the world, then you should think about measuring their environmental footprint and take action to reduce it from one year to another & compensate the remainings. But they sure didn’t. And I’m not writing this just to sell Verteego Carbon here: I just don’t understand entrepreneurs to pretend they want to change the World and who don’t care about behaving socially & environmentally responsibly. I think that Le Web, an event that took place in Europe at the same time as the Poznan conference (pre next Kyoto talks in Poland) AND which theme was Love, was just perfect place to ensure Social Responsibility and Sustainability became buzz words in the blogging, startups & VC microcosm. Géraldine & Loïc completely missed the train here.

The startup competition

I didn’t apply to the startup competition. I felt it wasn’t right to make startups pay EUR 1,500 for just a pitch. I was wrong in doing so. The startup competition was probably the only interesting thing during this conference. I paid, as I said, EUR 800+ to go to Le Web Paris ‘08 and basically meet with friends. It would’ve been worth paying the double to try and get 7 minutes to pitch Verteego in front of around 300 people. That makes it 5 euros per viewer’s attention, + the backlinks, visibility, and blog coverage you could get later on. Not applying to the startup competition was perhaps my only regret. And that would probably be the only reason I would attend next year.

The food

It was a shame. There’s no other word for it. I could get no food at all, not during the first day, not during the second day. The first day because there was none left. The second because there was no vegetarian food! Both days I went outside for a sandwich. I could then make friends because people were coming to me to ask where I had gotten this.

Worse: during Day 2, I needed to drink water during the day because I caught a cough during Day 1, because of the cold. And I was basically given a negative answer, because the bar was opened neither at 11am, nor at 3pm (which actually made me leave the place). You get 1500 people pay EUR 1000 on average, and there’s no food, and no water???

The Internet

There was very little Internet during the whole conference. Here’s a recap of this lousy situation: not only were you locked in with boring old speakers & because of the price you paid, you couldn’t answer client requests, or blog because of this.

Loïc Le Meur wrote an apologetic post, but I found this post actually ridiculous for him: Le Web gave EUR 100,000+ to SwissCom not to get a service. The excuse is: no provider is used to so many attendants. This is untrue: the very week before Le Web,  I attended a huge (20,000 visitors per day!) Trade Show, Pollutec, in Lyon. And there was perfect Wifi.

The attendants

Obviously, I met with many of my existing friends, and I was glad to. I also met with new people from everywhere around the world. Lots of great people there, from everywhere around the World. But come on, at what price…Furthermore, the mindset was rather negative: people weren’t ambitious or optimistic. They should be: the crisis is a great opportunity to move fast whilst remaining lean.

The TechCrunch party

It was so-so, I was disappointed and angry: 1) I had bought my business partner (who hadn’t attended Le Web) a EUR 30 ticket, to be told at the entrance that a pass to Le Web was worth 2 entrances. I think it should’ve been explained somewhere because I basically wasted EUR 30 with no possibility to get a refund. 2) I waited for 30 minutes outside, in line, to get in. And during this time I saw 2 groups of people showing up in front and squeezing the line: I found this very abnormal, because the Web is about democracy, having all the same access to information. 3) the place was very small, but this is less of an issue.

Conclusion

For the price I paid, I got very little value back (basically, the only benefit of Le Web was that I got to see many of my friends in very little time). Rather than apologizing, and provided the HUGE profits this conference made, I believe not reimbursing participants for providing no wifi, no heating, and no food services is irresponsible at that cost. I repeat: rather than blame their food supplier, Swisscom or the Cent Quatre (for the heating), I think Loïc & Géraldine Le Meur should’ve refunded participants for providing such a low standard service rather than making this huge profit (I also think they should display publicly the P&L of the conference). This is the least they could’ve done since giving me back 2 days of work isn’t physically possible. Loïc and Géraldine Le Meur didn’t show any social responsibility here, no respect for their customers.

Last, but not least, those who are not going to complain about Le Web ‘08, both in terms of organization and content, are either those who didn’t pay anything to attend, or those who paid so much that blaming the event would make them look stupid.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

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We’ve already covered ULIKE in the past. You may recall: it used to be called ULIK. Well, Ulik, cofounded by Mathieu Léronde & Raphaël Labbé, has become ULIKE.net. I like a lot the vision behind ULIKE: ULIKE is not a web app, nor is it software or a “cultural Facebook”. ULIKE is before all a vibrant community whose members are taking pleasure on sharing their tastes. You can tell their community is extremely powerful by the density of their contributions: once you’ve subscribed and spent some time on the service, it becomes addictive naturally when you meet new people & discover new things you may like. Here’s a screenshot of their new, beautiful, interface:

I suggest you take a look at their excellent advertising: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXKICOo5qdM]

…or the movie their team (now funded by AXA Private Equity, one of the best VCs in Europe) made for their launch party. The movie highlights the 100 top contributors: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dZcV_iyhv4] (I love the music, by BNN)

Now that the introduction is made, what’s ULIKE for?

- meeting new people, alike or very different, both virtually and in real life (ULIKERS tend to meet quite a lot offline)

- discovering new stuff: books, paintings, cities, people, etc.

-  sharing your tastes with your friends, family & fools so that they can buy you gifts

-  and having your own non-geek online gallery accessible to all online (so called ULIKE lounge).

At least, this is the way I use it. How about you? 

Check out my ULIKE.net lounge! http://www.ulike.net/jeremy

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Can you believe this?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/He7Ge7Sogrk&hl=en]

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This post is aimed at helping friends bootstrap projects (although they certainly don’t need me to turn everything into gold, especially these ones). I apologize for the inconvenience caused to readers coming for content, not announcements, but these are 2 AMAZING projects that definitely deserve exposure. Unfortunately, a number of readers won’t be able to be part of the game since #1 is for French companies only, and #2 is for French speakers only. There we go:

1. Sheirin Iravantchi, Aymeril Hoang & Paul Degueuse, three people who have been instrumental in the success of the study trip to Silicon Valley (full quality debriefing in French by Olivier Ezratty here)I organized back in November 2007, are organizing what they call a (French)TechTour between May 19th & May 23rd 2008. The concept is pretty clear and very appealing: a sample of 10 startups will be selected to go to Silicon Valley & meet with corporate development departments of major large corps. Here’s a list of planned meetings (note the diversity of industries considered):
   1. Google David Lawee, VP corporate development
   2. Ebay Erik Stuart, Director, Corporate Strategy
   3. Cisco Didier Moretti, VP Business Incubation, Emerging Technologies Group
   4. Microsoft Beti Cung, Director, Emerging Business Team - I met Beti before, and an hour with her is worth the return trip: super smart girl, if all meetings are planned to be of such quality then becoming a TechTour participant is what you should be desperate working on
   5. HP Damien Henault, Director, Strategy & Corporate Development
   6. AT&T Rupert C. Young, Director, Strategic Business Development
   7. Intel Capital Eghosa Omoigui, Director, Strategic Investments
   8. Symantec Hans van Rietschote, Senior Director, Office of the Chief Technology Officer

Assuming that the agenda speaks for itself, impressive uh?, my bet is that you should take a look at the following links and apply:

(French)TechTour, the blog here; details on the tour here; application file here; the launch post here. Enjoy!

2. Thomas Faivre-Duboz, a former classmate of mine & Raphaël Fétique are 2 very active entrepreneurs in Paris. They run a consultancy aimed at helping website owners with a conversion rate enhancement methodology. The name of their company? Converteo. The good news is that Converto recently launched an Error404 competition: design the most appealing Error 404 page and you’ll win a one week conversion rate optimization audit worth 4000 euros HT (1 million US dollars – just kiddin’, around 6000 USD). I believe this is a great initiative: some Error 404 pages can be such a shame that they might never make you feel like coming back on a site; on the other hand, some display a message like ‘our teams are now aware of the malfunction, thank you for helping us improve our service and sorry for the inconvenience’, a sort of message that may improve user stickiness at the end of the day. Here’s the link to the Error 404 Converteo competition.

Wanna jump on one or the other, or both competitions? Please be their guest. Feel free to keep me posted on the outcome of your applications.

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We are proud to announce you that you can be proud of your favorite high tech blog.

The rumour was spreading fast and it is now official: Tech IT Easy’s just been acquired by California-based web startup news media TechCrunch for an undisclosed amount (7 figures is all I can say)!

The trigger was double-legged: First, Om Malik announced last week that the next TV show would occur only in Summer 2008, which leaves TechCrunch enough time to bite into GigaOm’s readership by upgrading its content; second, ValleyWag is (undeservely?) taking over TechCrunch, in a rather scary way…It was time for TechCrunch to look for a prey and counter-attack. This is where Tech IT Easy joins the game. A few minutes after the deal was signed, Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, said (will be quoted tomorrow in San Diego Mercury News): “From a quality stand point, TechCrunch has always been severely outperformed by Tech IT Easy. We needed to either kill them or eat them. Lucky them, we eventually went for a French kiss rather than a French trafalgar. TechCrunch + Tech IT Easy is a very unique combination in the tech media industry, a winning combination“.

Want the full story? This is how it all happened.

Following a post by my humble self on TechCrunch France on Thursday last week (the original here in French; Google English translation here), where I was invited by Ouriel Ohayon from TechCrunch France, I got a call from Michael Arrington this last Friday saying he would be in Paris the next day to “discuss synergies”, which, in Silicon Valley-maverick code, means “gonna acquire you, bitch”. Upon this call, the Tech IT Easy scrambled (you bet!): Kari, our lead negotiator, came right away from Helsinki, Vincent drove down from Rotterdam to Paris, & Matthias from Munich. Alex, back in his London bank, couldn’t make it because of FT acquisition of CreditCrunch.com. Same for Raphael in Singapore, who insisted on taking part of meetings through our conference call system. Raj, Fidji & Remi held a first meeting on Friday afternoon with Michael: Michael asked tough questions regarding our editorial policy & guidelines, the underlying technology and whether is you it was interoperable or not (thank you Wordpress, it is), went through the résumés of us all, checked references and sources on a number of articles, etc. Price became an issue when Fidji revealed none but Leonard & Emmanuel were full time on the job. It was almost a deal breaker, and Michael said “2 people to run a blog that posts 2 posts per week is like having 1 post office in the entire New York State: a rather dumb thing to do“. Fortunately, when Michael realized our monetization potential (no job board, no Google ads, etc.) could find itself in the hands of ValleyWag, he decided on going further in the negotiation.

The next day in Paris, things went very smoothly. Ouriel had arrived early in the morning from Tel Aviv to check our red tape in the data room – severely guarded by Lucien & Cecil – and save time. Georgia, Steve and Kari handled the negotiations with Michael, who came right away with the right price & the right approach. We wish there were more people like him (to those who call him a diva: he is NOT! a tough-minded but yet human and tech-passionnate entrepreneur who respects entrepreneurs).

We are delighted to have seen this happen. Starting from tomorrow, the team will integrate TechCrunch directly and this site redirected to TechCrunch.

Thanks to all the parties that allowed for the deal to happen; especially to our lawyers who arranged all the contracts, the Deli’s downstairs for being Mike’s official provider with ham & pickle sandwiches all along, and to our readership. Without you, no such thing could’ve happened. It’s been a delight and an honour to have you as readers. Please now follow us on TechCrunch.com. We are all committed to one post per day. Stay tuned!

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Jason,

You sure don’t know me. I’m one of your anonymous 7,000 Twitter followers (my feed here), your whatever number of blog readers, and I’ve watched a serious number of podcasts featuring you. I think you do a fantastic job at sharing your passion for entrepreneurial adventures & your obvious will to change the world. I think Mahalo is a brilliant Wikipedia-style idea, and I have a lot of respect for your public speech & communication skills.

Same with your recent post on startup cost-killing rather modestly entitled 17 Really Good Tips to Save Money. Most of it was compelling, and I had all the office read it – I’m an entrepreneur too, I should’ve added before. We’ve decided on applying a number of them, starting with #3 ‘use lunchtime for meetings’, #2 on second monitors (especially to software developers), & most of the rest was already implemented but #4 & #12 which I fiercly disagree with.

• Your tip #4 says that startups should spend about 600$ on chairs & 100$ on desks. To me, this looks extravagant. Take a look at the picture right here. The leather-style chair costs 59 USD, and the table in front of it another 59USD. That is about 120 USD per work station at my company Emerald Vision (don’t worry, we’re no competition: we do exciting enterprise software. And sorry, website still in French & workin’ on an English version) vs. 700USD at Mahalo. Are you guys extravagant on the West Coast or what? I should add that my chair is by far the most comfortable chair I’ve ever bought. FYI, & I’m not getting any rebate or commission, it’s all from Ikea.

•  Second and last (because, as I said, I loved your post – but a couple little things), tip #12 says startups should buy a 3K-5K USD coffee machine. Come on Jason, no one is making 5K / month in my company as a stipend, and you want me to spend 3 – 5K in a coffee machine? Makes no sense. Here’s our ‘Help Yourself’ space at Emerald Vision. We purchased a 25 bucks American-style coffee machine that’s up and running day & night; a 20USD kettle to drink tea or instant coffee; Xuoan (photo blog here), a web graphic designer & SEO specialist who rents office space from us (see, we had already applied tip #6), brought his good old 130$ espresso-machine that does pretty good coffee, thanks. That’s less than 200 USD overall, & less than 500 USD if you add the fridge & the microwave. 500 USD for a fully equipped ‘Help Yourself’ corner at Emerald Vision vs. 5000 USD for a coffee machine at Mahalo. I think you investors would love working with us.

Before I finish this post, I just wanted to state clearly that there’s nothing either sarcastic or personal in these remarks. These are just 2 plain, sincere feedbacks on your tips (15 of them were just great). For 600$ a chair & 5000$ a coffee machine, I would’ve either tried to quit the digital & Clean Tech business to enter the furniture market in Silicon Valley, or at least tried to buy second-hand Philip Stark design chairs & coffee machine on eBay or so, or most probably provision it for when times get worse on the Web to show how we value cash, or give it out to top performers in the team as a way to show how we care about people working on building the next big thing with us.

I still and more than ever enjoy looking at what you do on an hourly basis on Twitter, reading great startup fish on your blog (like larger monitor = better productivity; or these very interesting thoughts on work-life balance in startups - I needed it bad). I hope you don’t take this post personally, & that we’ll have the chance to meet you some day here or there. Maybe you’re okay for the two of us to sit at a table, discuss treasury management & compare burn rates – all things being equal (we’re a very early startup compared to you). At Le Web 3 (or 4?) in Paris next winter? You may even come to our office at the very center of Paris & try on our wonderful chairs. Keep me posted.

Cheers,

Jeremy Fain

PS1: On #17, come on, do you really need a PR firm? A 15K USD / months one? or even 3 times 15K USD / year one? You, Jason Calacanis? You do more PR than all European startups together (I’m based in Paris, France). Save on this too, or be tough-as-nails bargaining every 6 months or so (tip #15) because they’re definitely not using so much bandwidth with you.

PS2: another French blogger, Hervé Kabla, wrote pretty interesting complementary remarks on his blog here - however it’s in French only, sorry about that.

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After two months in my new life as an entrepreneur, having turned my back to the  corporate world, all I can say is that it’s been so much fun – & hard work, that I believe, & I know that I made the right decision. Let alone that I strongly advocate all my mates to forget about six figure salaries costing them their souls and go it alone with the best people they’ve ever worked with, like I did with a team of guys a thousand times more talented than I am, to try and change the world. Becoming an entrepreneur when you’re still very young is, I think, the best way to become successful and to make your stakeholders (employees, clients, suppliers, investors) happy.

I’m turning 25 today, a good enough window of opportunity to provide you with 10 good enough reasons you should start a startup before turning 25. There you go. Before turning 25..

1. You have no fancy habits: I’ve never, or hardly, ever been spoiled by perks like a corporate car, four-star hotels on business trips, & unlimited long distance phone calls. My lifestyle is still the one of the student I used to be until June 07: in many ways very inexpensive. And I don’t mind spending 100 hours working-sleeping-living in a room with a bunch of brilliant minds eating pizzas. If you’ve recognized yourself in this pattern, then this is the first reason you should consider starting a company.
2. It is easier to raise business angel money: as a young entrepreneur, especially in Europe, raising VC money can prove extremely time-consuming and challenging. The venture capital crowd is an elitist herd that needs to show its limited partners (institutional investors providing them with the funds later invested in startups) a serious track record for the entrepreneurs they’ve bet on, just in case things turn wrong with their investees. Turning to business angels, whose decisions rely on a simpler governance since they invest their own money, is therefore the most viable option on the condition that you treat business angels like a VC – that is to say like a tough-minded, selective investor. By & large, there are two kinds of business angels: successful entrepreneurs, & successful executives who never found the time or will to start their own company. I regard being young when trying to raise angel money as a huge asset: angels want to have an impact, and the chance they’ll make the difference with a younger, more flexible mind is larger than with a seasoned former large-corp executive. Business angel are more likely to patronage youngsters than grey hairs.
3. You most of the time have no family to take care of: before turning 25, you should still have at least a couple years to go before having babies and all that jazz. So, from a personal risk standpoint, taking professional risks is not risky. On top of this, you don’t have too tight a deadline to start getting a decent salary. Last, at the end of the day, hunger seriously makes you bootstrap your butt off.
4. You face less social pressure: few of your former classmates but the entrepreneurs already make millions so you don’t feel like the tramp in the room at alumni reunions & events; today, you all eat pasta & rice, but when the time comes some of them will be reasonably wealthy (most probably those working in investment banking, market & risk finance & real estate), you’ll be the one with two exits on the tally.
5. You haven’t been corrupted by ill corporate habits taken from procedural organization: politics, unethical struggles for promotion, pyramidal hierarchies, etc. I don’t know anything (almost; for instance in my last corporate experience, I was told ‘white’ on the one day, and ‘black’ on the other: it’s okay except when it’s about your career. So I started wondering whether people really cared, and I want no one except myself to take care about my career anymore) about it and feel good about being certain not to reproduce such wrong behavioral patterns in my startup.
6. Ignorance is bliss…No fear, can-do attitude. That’s you. Same for us: we’re running for the next big thing: high risk, high return. We’re not there to play pussies & since the opportunity is huge, the chance that we have an impact on the world is significant. We deeply want to make of the world a better place. We’re embedding meaning in our quest. That may sound naive, but as Mahatma Gandhi once said: “Almost everything you do will seem insignificant, but it is important that you do it”.
7. You have no regret for a job as an apparatchik in a large corp, since you don’t know how comfortable it can be & how hard it can be to find the guts to say “good bye” to.
8. You have plenty of time to do it again: being an entrepreneur isn’t a job. It is a state of mind. Once you become an entrepreneur, you’re an entrepreneur for an entire lifetime. I can picture so many first time entrepreneurs who, in their fifties or even forties, know they’ll have time to build only one success story on their own – if not zero. This is a very frustrating situation because those who succeed most, financially speaking, are repeat entrepreneurs. Because repeat entrepreneurs learn not to repeat their mistakes and hence do things everyday better. As far as I’m concerned, I see starting young as a huge asset because I’ll have time to build a number of companies (say 5) over time.
9. Your cost of failure is zero, not to say negative; say you fail and don’t want to do it again (which is unlikely) then you’re off to the job market at a premium because everybody’s looking for entrepreneur-minded people. An experience, be it a failure or a success, as an entrepreneur is worth every MBA-trained strategy consultants altogether. Your cost of failure may, depending on your cost of opportunity & the necessarily small amount of money you invested in your own venture, actually even be negative: failed entrepreneurs are a scarce resource on the job market. Those with large corp experiences are largely commiditized against those with startup ones.
10. You will get rich faster than if you had worn dark suits because you’re working and hence creating value for yourself rather than for someone else.

Convincing enough?

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It’s Saturday or Sunday depending on your time zone, so the chance is high that you’ve got more time to think hard for a few seconds  and write a valuable comment than during frantic week days.

I badly need your feedback indeed. This post aims at getting crowd consulting on something that matters a lot to me: the visual identity of my company.

As the frequent readers of this blog already know, I’ve been starting a company for a little more than a full month now. We’re still at the early beginnings, and we’ve just frozen the design of our logo below.

I need your input:

What do our logo and tagline say to you about the kind of product or service we build and deliver?

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Here’s a quick question to all people used to either interact with or being part of software development teams.

Consider a software vendor, a good one, and its technical headcount. It is no secret that R&D teams aren’t made of software developers only. In order to be deployed successfully, architectures and code need to be tested by a QA department (QA = quality assurance) where professional testers run through thousands of automatized-or-not scenarii; documentation; technical support staff help the install base with potential regressions occuring during updates and coping with changing information system environments; localization project managers monitor translations of the software: and last but not least, application engineers actually parameterize the software at clients.

Now my question, how many technical staff should you account for every software development engineer? I figured out an average ratio of 1 to 4, that is to say, for every technical team of 100 there should be around 25 software developers actually hacking code.

I know there exists extremes but by and large, from what I’ve seen, I don’t think I’m too far from the reality with a 1:4 developer / all-categories-technical-staff ratio.

What do you think? Feel free to describe what the company does when sharing your experience, because, since there are very large discrepancies between, say, an SAP that manufactures ‘heavy’ enterprise software and any web application designer that may not necessarily run industrialized testing and that has no professional service department, we might not get nuances at first sight.

PS: the ratio will also depend on the maturity stage of the company: at Microsoft, [# of develops]/[develops + Microsoft Consulting Services staff + developer evangelists + localization engineers + testers (1 for each develop) + architects] approximately equals 1/4 (1 to probably 5 ot 6 adding documentation specialists; & 1 to much more if you consider the system integrator ecosystem that actually does the application engineering). But the company is rather mature and therefore can afford to focus on quality of execution rather than productivity in execution. Which probably wouldn’t be the case for an enterprise software startup for obvious resource reasons. Anything to share? Best and worse practices, per specific industry (Web 2 / UGC, Video Games, enterprise, affordable consumer traditional applications, etc.) most welcome. I need to test my own budgeting assumptions

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I usually don’t ’steal’ posts from others -especially without adding any value-adding comment, but I couldn’t help sharing this one – found on Richard’s blog thanks to Twitter (follow him). Here’s a very inspiring slideshow by Index Ventures VC & founder of Open Coffee Saul Klein:

[slideshare id=58242&doc=nextweb2007-saul-1518&w=425]

The slideshow speaks for itself, doesn’t it? And even if you don’t chose to become an entrepreneur yourself at this very moment, in Europe or elsewhere, my take is that you should join an early-stage startup. Let me tell you a quick story about this.

The first time I thought of leaving MS to start a startup (a thought that never occurred again, believe it or not, before I actually walked out to either join another company or take the big plunge), I hadn’t even joined Microsoft. I was at Capital IT, a major VC forum in Paris, as a Microsoftee although I was due to join the company a few days later. There I met, for the first and last time so far, Pascal Mercier, a French fundraiser whose firm Aelios Finance is pretty successful at matching the best entrepreneurs and smart money (to my knowledge both angels & VCs). I was introduced as a recent graduate and the second we met, Pascal Mercier asked: “Why didn’t you choose to join a startup rather?”. The best answer I found was: “but I do work for startups!” Which I thought was true since 1) MS is just a damn successful startup (you would be surprised to see the easy-going startup atmosphere within the company); 2) I was part of the team that took care of emerging ISVs in France. Acknowledging reason #2 only I guess, Pascal nodded and we parted ways. I later realized though that working for startups, and working in a startup, are clearly two different things. When you represent Microsoft, you may call whoever you want and the door will be opened the next day. Your brand power is so strong that at the end of the day, you never know whether you achieved great things because you’re damn so good, or because your company is so powerful in its industry. As an entrepreneur, and I’ve been facing this issue already, you need to fight like a pitbull to get passed through the right person on the phone, and fight again to get an appointment. I should also mention that you’ll need to deliver the best pitch of your life, after waiting for an hour in the lobby without even being served a cup of coffee, to actually get to the point where you may pretend to try and sell your solution. This struggle for survival is real life and that makes entrepreneurs fully accountable for their success or failure.

The same rationale goes for early-stage startups, without a brand name yet: life will be tougher for sure than if you worked for a big name, but the impact you can have on such companies is huge (eg double revenues in 6 months, etc. something unachievable in an 85K-strong corporation like Microsoft – or even at Google, a 20K-strong company & definitely not a startup anymore). Whether you want to be an entrepreneur or join a larger group later in your career (or both), an unknown and yet ambitious startup is where you should start your career to acquire the right survival toolkit. By the way, did I mention the stock option plan?

My two cents…

Addendum 11am: check out comment #3 to discover how to spot startups that will pay you better than large corporations and resign from consulting, banking and Fortune 500 companies to join them!

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Last week, the unsexy world of lower software layers witnessed some significant consolidation moves: Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL AB, and Oracle Corporation acquired BEA Systems.

I know you guys browsing the blogosphere want to hear about Paris Hilton (this one keyword to boost visits from search engines), and most of all Twitter, Google, Apple, MS-bashing (which I won’t do unless deserved & today I believe it’s not the case), Facebook, and all that jazz. So I’ll make it quick, although I think this topic is more strategic anyone else, especially when it comes to applicative platform decisions – amongst them web apps.

• MySQL’s acquisition by Sun Microsystems

One thing that’s pretty sure is that 1bn$ (800m$ cash, 200m$ in Sun stock options) for a flagship asset like MySQL is dirt cheap. MySQL enjoys a very large developer community, a well-deserved strong brand awareness amongst web and SaaS application developers & DBAs – as well as geeks of all sorts, and most of all references like Linden Labs (the publisher of Second Life), Flickr & Facebook that have proven wrong those, like me (although I still think the TCO of MySQL is a lot larger than with MS SQL Server or Oracle 10g technologies), who doubted MySQL could handle massive loads (see this interesting slideshow by John Allspaw from Yahoo! on Flickr’s architecture) despite it’s very nice and simple administrative console. To me, MySQL will be to Sun what Flickr, MyBlogLog and del.icio.us are to Yahoo!: the jewels of the crown. 

So, from a price standpoint, I’m buoyant. However, it’s hard for me to say whether Sweden-born MySQL is a good or a bad acquisition for Sun, strategically speaking. The move looks a lot like a vertical integration effort by Sun to push its application server SunONE against Apache to run with MySQL, and its server-side OS Solaris against Linux server distros when it comes to running a MySQL database. This is where since may get mixed up, as Sun has been engaged in a very fruitful partnership with Oracle to almost bundle Solaris & Oracle 9i/10g. The same goes for Postgre SQL by the way. Therefore, my take is that a lot in the success of the acquisition will depend on how Sun’s management positions MySQL databases against Oracle.

A quick last remark: in Europe, it’s become very trendy to pretend you’ll IPO to actually get acquired by an American corporation. Anyways, I’m glad there’s one more financial success story in open source: MySQL AB wasn’t in business to be open source, but had chosen to be open source to actually do business. Open source ayatollahs pretending to developer communities hacking code in their spare time for the greatness of mankind are fools treating others like likes – that is to say fools: open source is one more software business model. Period.

• BEA’s acquisition by Oracle

This very aggressive move is one more confirmation of Oracle’s market share-acquisition strategy. Oracle is now at loggerheads with IBM Software Group, the world’s leading middleware vendor. Websphere 6.0 and Weblogic Server 9.0 + Aqualogic BPM, alongside with Software AG’s Webmethods, have been competing for a while in the business infrastructure middleware market – & I suspect Oracle anticipates Microsoft’s upcoming marketing effort to generate adoption of BizTalk Server amongst large accounts. Hence the fact that I believe that this time, Oracle’s acquiring a little more than juste market share: with Weblogic, Aqualogic, Oracle Databases and BI Suite Enterprise Edition, Oracle has a broad enough catalogue of good products to compete with Websphere, DB2, Cognos on the IBM side, and BizTalk Server, SQL Server and PerformancePoint Server & ProClarity Analytics on the Microsoft side. 8.5bn$ was therefore the price to pay to win back Weblogic Server + DB2 or + SQL Server accounts as well as afford not to loose the everyday larger account base willing to go through one software vendor, and one only, to get equipped in infrastructure software. Moreover, Oracle kills two other birds with the same stone by 1) isolating SAP whose catalogue, although enriched with BO’s acquisition a few months ago, lacks heavy weight munitions in lower layers; 2) harming Red Hat whose JBoss Application Server has long been embedded into Weblogic. It may look like gambling, but I doubt Oracle will let Red Hat support Weblogic too long.

It’s not the end of the middleware war yet, but we’re getting closer to it since the entry barrier for a potential new incremental-innovation entrant has become very high in the recent years. 

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My new office. The picture was taken a few days ago when I first visited the place (a former women garment warehouse), and since then, we moved in. Btw, any design or furnishing tip? Budget = roughly zero.

I seriously want to make of it the coolest place for software developers & beautiful minds of all sorts to work in Europe. Trust me, despite appearances we’ve already got some extremely strong bearing points in this respect.

+ we might rent out some office space (250€ / desk included wireless Internet w. visitor access, electricity, security alarm, water & paper toilet, located in the very center of Paris). Give me a buzz if interested and I’ll answer when we do it if you’re early enough.

Addendum: answering several emails at the same time, yes, I’ve left Microsoft. Made the decision a month and a half ago. Enjoyed the company a lot though. Tough decision but no regret, it’s a lot of fun out there. More on this some day soon.

Addendum 2 (should’ve added that in the initial post maybe): it’s very exciting to move in your own place. The only thing is, we now have to keep cash coming in the door or we’re OOB before we can wink.

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