My cousin stuart died

My cousin Stuart died last week. Stuart Graber was Anna and Sids son and lived most of his life in coop city, New York.  Stuart was my dad's first cousin. Anna was my dad mother's sister.
The most poignant part of Stuart's life and death is that he largely died alone -- more alone than most.  I thought I'd do a little acknowledgment (and it is little)  to him on my blog. Goodbye Stuart. I'll always remember how you tackled me outside my grandmothers apartment without ever moving. I was 8 at the time. Rest in peace.

Advice to local reviews sites

I frequently get approached and pitched by people trying to enter into the local reviews and word of mouth referrals business. It happened again today....and my advice to this entrepreneur is the same as it was to other entrepreneurs in the space.  (Forgive me if this is a repetitive post)
i) GET TO CRITICAL MASS

  • Do this by limiting geography -- stay in one geography for 3 years. Yes, 3 years. Do not expand geography for the first 36 months. Every successful online local business has been in one geography for 3 years.
  • Do this by limiting the number of categories or professions you're trying to get word of mouth on. Do not try and do the entire yellow pages. Choose at most five categories. I might suggest: restaurants, dentists, doctors, auto mechanics, and real estate.
  • Do this by aggressive customer acquisition. Whatever your strategy for customer acquisition, get aggressive about. Do not sit in an ivory tower and expect to get to critical mass.
  • Aggregate content from other places on teh web so you can avoid the empty database problem
  • Spend as little money as possible

ii) Go back to step i

Companies I like to invest in

Q: Hey Andy, thanks for using Askablogr! Given your experience as a founder and investor, what kind of company (what stage, what themes, what kind of founding team, etc.) do you like to back and why?

Posted by Chris DeVore
 

A: I like early stage internet companies. The earlier the better. I prefer consumer oriented companies but have invested in business to business web stuff too. Any company where the founders are passionate about what they're doing and I understand the problem they're trying to solve. I don't do bridge notes and tend to be  valluation sensitive. I don't like to invest in 8MM pre money startups :-)

Simple advice: Try hard not to raise money

At open coffee this morning, we had a great turn out. About 20 people were there. The place was buzzing and good conversation abounded.  One entrepreneur was asking me about raising angel money in Seattle and I heard myself say -- Try as hard as you can not to raise money. The advice is simple to say and hard to follow. That said, raising angel money is always harder than you think it is. Moreover, getting paid for removing some customers pain has the double benefit of growing your customer base and the entrepreneur retaining ownership in their company. Just my two cents for the day.

Movie review: Untraceable

I saw the new Diane Lane movie Untraceable last night. I feel weird saying it -- but this movie is good and worth seeing. It's not for the faint of heart or stomach. It's not a happy movie. But this movie is combination of a more disturbing version of Morgan Freeman's serial killer movie Seven with Jim Carrey's Truman show. The thesis surrounds a web site called killwithme.com. For each viewer of the website the person dies more quickly. Twisted but interesting concept. Check it out.

I know it's hard to believe that I saw a movie mid-week -- but I'm taking a couple days off with my older brother Larry.

Seattle Start Up Shout Out: Butter London

Every now and then, I look at investment opportunities outside of technology. Over the weekend, I met Sasha Muir, CEO of a simple new consumer company based in Seattle called ButterLondon.  The idea is simple: affordable luxury nail salons in airports.  The CEO, Sasha Muir, impressed me when I met her. She seems to have her hands, mind and nails all over this opportunity. And yes -- she has nice nails. Unfortunately, one of the drivers of the business is increased delays and wait times in airports! I haven't decided about investing yet -- but I think the company is pretty neat and I think this one will be successful. 

VC apologizes for voting for George Bush

I had a meeing the other day with a well known venture capitalist. The meeting was an introductory meeting and covered a wide range of topics. I was enjoying the conversation very much when the person (who will remain anonymous) said that they had been a card carrying Republican and had voted for George Bush in each of the past two elections.  The VC then went on to apologize for his votes, his own poor judgement, and for George Bush's complete incompetence. This was an unprecedented meeting. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before -- for this to occur, it really struck me at just how bad George Bush is as a president

Open coffee chatter this morning

After a terrible Seattle commute this morning, I arrived at the Seattle Open Coffee at Louisa's on Eastlake Ave East and was warmly welcomed by 7 other entrepreneurs who braved the slick rodes. We had a fascinating conversation about the adoption rate of technology in general and then more specifically about the introduction of the mouse. At this point the mouse seems like a ubiquitous commodity but at some point in the 1960s it didn't' exist. I'm told it took about 20 years to move from invention and patent filing to being used by Apple in the McIntosh. And Apple only used a 1 button mouse and the patent was for a 2 button mouse. Supposedly (I'm told at coffee this AM) that the engineer couldn't understand why you'd ever want a 1 button mouse when you have multiple fingers -- go figure!  Anyway, it was a fun conversation and my take away is that inventors and entrepreneurs have a big job of getting people to use their product and it takes TIME. This is more true in some instances than others -- and as I've mentioned local online is one of those markets that takes TIME.  So everyone who's out there slugging it out -- be patient and keep putting one foot in front of the other. And remember that sometimes one button is better than two.

Google does small things in a genius way

I went to a google document just now and got this message:

The bad news is that Google Docs has just encountered an error.

The good news is that you've helped us find a bug, which we are now looking into.

We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.

This is a bug. The software didn't work and I left the experience feeling better about the company before.  This may seem small but it is huge when you think about it! Google is genius! 

Acai Plus at $40 a bottle

My brother swears by this stuff. He says it's changed his life and the way he feels. He's so into it that he's sending me a bottle. I'm open to my life changing and feeling better -- but I'm a little skeptical of a company using multichannel marketing and promising to pay people up to 1.5 million per year. That's a whole lot of life changing juice. Check out this page from their web site outlining their payment scheme...and drink up.  I'll let you know more after I try this stuff for a week.

Start ups are just a great game of monopoly

I was talking to Tom Staples, President of a Cooler Planet yesterday and he's in the process of raising a seed round of capital. I told him that running a start up company is a lot like playing real life monopoly. You've sometimes got to pass Go, collect $200, in order to keep on running and buying properties. He liked the idea of seeing his life as playing a game -- I think it reminded him not to take the whole thing too seriously.

Confusion about fund raising

I had breakfast with a venture capital friend of mine - Andy Dale of Buerk Dale Victor LLC. We were talking about the confusion amongst many entrepreneurs about raising capital.  It's easy for entrepreneurs to perceive raising a big round of venture capital as success.  There's a feeling (and I've had it) of raising 5 or 10 million dollars and feeling like you've arrived. It's an easy trap to fall into and one that successful entrepreneurs fight -- remember -- success in business comes with profitability or at least with cash flow positive.