LAUNCH Blog

LAUNCH Blog

Written by: Launch

Facebook's Product Strategy: Decisive, Distracted or Disaster?

A year ago at the WSJ's D Conference, I was at a private dinner with a dozen VCs and founders of note. One famous attendee lamented to me that their daughter was on Snapchat all the time.

"What's that?" I asked, always on the lookout for the next Rapportive (bought by LinkedIn), Uber (crushing it), Gowalla (Facebook), Wanderfly (TripAdvisor) or GDGT (crushing it) to invest in.

"You don't want to know," they lamented.

I downloaded it that night and had that moment of dread that exists only after you have children in the world. If you're a parent, tell me if you've ever had this thought: "Why would anyone build something like this?!?!? Oh yeah, they must not have kids yet." I know I'm not alone in this thought.

Fast forward a year later and Facebook has copied Snapchat with Poke -- which is the slang word for intercourse in case you're over 34.

Facebook is very proud of this product, so much so they've leaked all kinds of interesting nuggets to the press like the fact that -- gasp! -- Zuckerberg wrote some code for it and -- whaaaaaaaat?!?! -- he voiced the sound effects in the app!

Also, Facebook's PR machine can't seem to shut up about the fact that they copied Snapchat in just 12 days. Twelve days!

There Is No Series A Crunch

The Series A Crunch referrers to the fact that while angel-funded startups (think: $750k invested by angels in two founders) have grown 5x+ in the past three years, the number of Series A fundings (think: $3M invested by a venture capitalist in a 10-person startup) has stayed the same.

I'm telling you right now this is a complete non-issue.

Many folks are obsessing over the supposed "Series A crunch" because, quite logically, if there is a fixed number of Series A investments to go around and a lot more folks fighting for them, well, many folks will not get one.

Parents fleeing a public school system increase the demand for the (relatively) fixed number of slots in private education, making those slots more and more valuable. In fact, it only takes a percentage of actors to "switch teams" to cause an imbalance.

What these folks, largely journalists who have no experience in business, fail to realize is that "things" do not always stay the same in an equation -- and that founders should be wickedly good at adapting to changing conditions.

>> Fact one: the number of Series A fundings could dramatically increase.

The number of slots for players in the NBA this year was 435 (29 teams x 15 players). However, when the NBA started 60 years ago, there were only 11 teams, so the number of slots totaled just 165 (assuming 15-man rosters back then).

In the coming years, the NBA will, mark my word, add a half-dozen teams in Europe and Asia. It's safe to assume there will be a 40-team league some day.

The Best Hackathon Ever Held

Over 1,000 developers took us up on scholarships to the LAUNCH Festival last week, and many asked us, "Why don't you have a Hackathon?"

Since so many folks have demanded it, we've decided to host a hackathon. But, like all things we do, we want to make it awesome and groundbreaking -- we do live in the "age of excellence" after all.

So, our goal is to host "The best hackathon ever held."

We did some brainstorming, and here is what we came up with:

1. A killer prize: I'm personally putting up a $25k *investment* in the winning project at a $1M valuation -- or $10k in cash. ( Hint: take the investment and let's raise a bigger round on AngelList together!). Going to hit up my friends to put prizes up as well.

2. Exposure: the top five projects will get to the main stage -- a full 10% of the team competing.

3. A prestigious award similar to our LAUNCH 1.0 and LAUNCH 2.0 prizes. The 'LAUNCH Alpha' award will given to the best project from the five that makes the main stage.

4. VIP service: Participants can email at any time and get waiter service -- including a 15-minute chair massage (who wants to sponsor that!)

Moderate Success Is the Enemy of Breakout Success

One of the most important skills of an entrepreneur is being able to gauge one's own performance.

Is the project you're working on a failure or success? How do you know?

Should you persevere, pivot or move on and focus on a new, more promising project?

If your company is a success, is it going to be a billion-dollar success or a $10M 'success’?

These questions are hard to answer, and they’re particularly hard for entrepreneurs, who are, as we all know, 'unique.'

And yes, by unique I mean bipolar, insane, moody, delusional, crazy, irresponsible and unbalanced -- at least the good ones are!

You see, self-rating is riddled with bias.

The 'illusion of superiority' leads most folks to believe they're better than they actually are. I read that 70% of folks think they are above average, which is statistically not possible.

A study once showed that over 94% of college professors thought they were above average.

Luke Skywalker thought he was a Jedi, and Darth Vader cut his hand off.

Just added: 1000 more scholarships for the LAUNCH Festival

As part of our mission to "be the most helpful to founders and startups," the LAUNCH Festival gave away 1,000 tickets to developers, designers and UX professionals last week. Demand was so great we've decided to offer another 1,000 scholarships! This will make the LAUNCH Festival the #1 event for people who actually build stuff (i.e., the people many of you want to hire).

Free Ticket to the LAUNCH Festival

tl;dr: Set goal of LAUNCH Festival being biggest event in tech industry w/5,000+ peeps. Giving scholarships (free tickets) to developers, designers, founders, UX folks. Apply here.

Lawyers, VCs, angels, corporate raiders and rich folks can buy tickets.

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Friends,

The LAUNCH Festival is March 4-6th, 2013, and this is the sixth year I've run the event (the first three as TechCrunch50 and last two as the LAUNCH Festival). I don't need to make a profit on the event, and frankly I'm bored with how easy my life is getting and want to challenge myself. #realtalk

We are already the best place to launch your new startup (1.0 competition) or product (2.0 competition), but we want to go bigger and do more for the startups who choose our stage over DEMO and TechCrunch Disrupt. The three things startups need are cash, developers and PR. We're the best place to get all three. Hands down. We crush Disrupt and DEMO on these three factors -- but we want to push our event harder!

You see, AOL is making about $2M in profits from Disrupt, and DEMO throws off well over a $1M in profits for IDG by charging the startups up to $20k each to present. We don't have to make any money, so we can do crazy, insane and disruptive things: like give away free tickets to cool people!!! :-)

Mind-blowing Idea: Free Transportation for Life

I've been privileged to be able to own both of Tesla's models (Roadster and Model S sedan) over the past four years. During that time I drove 15k+ miles and never visited a gas station, with the rare exception of my summer retreats to the Catskill Mountains driving convertible Mustangs around the Adirondack Lakes.

During that time I realized that we, the humans on planet earth, were hoodwinked, duped and bamboozled by the political industrial complex that electric vehicles were not feasible.

Last week, the Tesla Model S won two awards: Automobile of the Year from Automobile magazine and Car of the Year from Motor Trend. Well deserved to be sure. The car is flawless, and to call the object a car doesn't actually do it justice.

Now, the Model S is as much a movement as a vehicle. And while the car is groundbreaking inside and out, the greatest innovation is hiding in plain sight.

I Wonder If Live Crowdfunding Works? Let's Find Out!

tl;dr: We're making an iPhone app that will let the audience invest in the startups @ LAUNCH live. Like a mashup of a Sotheby's auction and Kickstarter with a splash of AngelList.

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$2M was invested in the startups at the LAUNCH festival last year from the stage by angel investors and venture capitalists. This was the first time anyone had ever done a life funding at a conference and it was a wild success.

If you had invested in our alumni, folks like Powerset, Mint, Yammer and Red Beacon, at the event, you would have made, ummm, a huge return (of course, conversely, if you had invested in many of the other companies, you would have lost your money--that's the nature of startups: most fail).

Recently I thought to myself, "What if the 3,000 folks who came to the conference or the 100k+ who consumed it remotely could have invested in these companies--for equity?" Just like folks do on Kickstarter?

At this year's LAUNCH Festival--the sixth--we’re making an iPhone app that will allow everyone in the audience and at home to invest in the companies while on stage.

T2E: Time to Excellence

How long does it take to make an excellent product?

That's the question I've been asking myself as I pivot and prod my own startups, and make a handful of angel investments a year.

In the '80s, it felt like the journey from good products to excellent took decades. In the '90s, it felt like it took 10 years. Today, it feels like it happens overnight.

[ Note: If you're reading this, I'm going to assume you read "the Age of Excellence" and agree that the world doesn't care about average or simply good products any more--and that you want to make something excellent in your lifetime. ]

The time to excellence, which I will refer to as T2E, has halved or more every 10 years since I came of age in the ‘80s.

Let's look at three groups of products: computers in the form of the Mac, iPod, iPhone and iPad; social networks in the form of Friendster, MySpace, Facebook and Path; and cars in the form of the Tesla Roadster and Tesla Model S.

Google's Fiber "Proof of Concept" Is Anything But

How many folks want fiber in their homes?

[ everyone raises their hands ]

Keep your hands up if you've looked into getting fiber.

[ everyone's hands remain up ]

Keep your hands up if you have fiber at home today?

[ 96% of hands go down ]

Everyone in our country wants fiber, but it's my belief that the evil folks at cable companies and telecoms are sabotaging fiber in order to maintain their legacy businesses: be they content in the case of Time Warner or phone calls and text messaging if it's AT&T.

As your internet gets faster you spend more time online. This is one of the core tenets of Google's success. Instead of adding features to Gmail, YouTube and Google search, they historically focused on making things faster (at least first).

Why?

Because speed drives usage.

Good to Great to Excellent: A Roadmap

By Jason Calacanis

I've spent the past two decades building products. As a "builder" your career generally starts with idea generation. "Wouldn't the world be better if you could press a button and A happened?" or "Why does A work like B when it should just do C?" are the non-stop tormentors of founders.

For as long as I can remember, I have tried to imagine how everything I looked at could be improved. That's how I approached life, and I made a bunch of products I felt were great.

And while it was never a struggle for me to conceive products, it certainly was a bit of a struggle to launch them early on (getting funding, building a team, finding office space -- blocking-and-tackling type issues). Later on it became easy to launch them (folks wanted to work with me, angel investing got easier after I made some folks a 15x return in 12 months, etc), and the challenge was to make them good.

Now it turns out starting companies and making good or great products is not so hard -- making them excellent is.

I realized that great is the starting line, not the goal.

"You made something great in a world that wants excellent," I keep reminding myself.

I've gotten more sustained feedback on the "Age of Excellence" piece I wrote on April 25, 2012 than perhaps any other piece of written. Thanks for all the insights.

The question that inevitably comes up after reading the piece: "How do you make something excellent?"

I've been focusing on this question for the past year, and I've got some early thoughts on the journey "Good to Great to Excellent."

Building a Better Techmeme

We live in an age of excellence as we've discussed.

Every product and service is being studied by entrepreneurs and consumers alike, who wonder, "How could this be a little better?"

One of the services I fell in love with over the past couple of years is Techmeme. It's a news aggregator like Digg, but it did something near and dear to my heart: human-powered search.

It basically automatically clusters hand-selected stories together from the top tech blogs and ranks them. If Apple has a new connector for the iPhone 5, Digg gets sold or Marissa takes over Yahoo, dozens of stories are clustered together so you can efficiently scan them.

I've loaded the page dozens of times a day for years. It's awesome.

However, over time, two strange things started happening:

LAUNCH Looking for an Awesome Full Stack Engineer/Developer

Since wrapping up the LAUNCH Education & Kids event last month, we've built out a pretty efficient tech news ticker. You can also sign up for our daily Ticker email and follow @LAUNCHTicker.

We're now at the point where we need a dedicated engineer/developer who is passionate about helping startups. If you're interested or know someone who would be, please head to
http://www.launch.co/jobs.

Live Blogging LAUNCH Education & Kids - Day Two

[ Kicking off day two is Global Imagination -- check out that awesome Magic Planet globe. ]

Thirty-one amazing education/kid startups launched or launched new products on stage at Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus in Mountain View June 12 & 13, 2012. Check here for all the action on Day Two and go here for Day One.

Event details at launchedu.co.

Spreadsheet of all presenting companies here and our photos here.

6:09pm: WINNERS

Diamond in the rough award (Gigi award, first given at LAUNCH '12): ManyLabs

Best International: Tipitap

Best Design: Timbuktu Labs

Best Technology: LearnStreet

Best Presentation: JoyTunes

Audience favorite: Nearpod

Best Overall 1.0: Penyo Pal

Best Overall 2.0: Launchpad Toys

Live Blogging LAUNCH Education & Kids - Day One

[Marshall Tuck, CEO of the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, shares which technologies LA's worst-performing schools use and what they've learned.]

Thirty-one amazing education/kid startups launched or launched new products on stage at Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus in Mountain View June 12 & 13, 2012. Check here for all the action on Day One; here is Day Two (including winners).

Event details at launchedu.co.

Spreadsheet of all presenting companies here and our photos here.

5:28pm: Thanks to judges, we start at 9am tomorrow, doors open at 8am. More great companies and Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese!

5:20pm: Judge discussion of Session 2 companies

Scoble: Had three ties on my sheet. GatherEducation, Kno, Launchpad. In terms of this conference, I want to help teachers more than consumers, going with Gather. It lets teachers teach to wider audience. One of my rules in life is get more scale out of what I do. Teaching in online context like this makes teacher more scalable. I'm hopeful that the world moves to something like this.

Stefan: Also Gather. Felt natural. LearnStreet also a top.

Christine: Timbuktu aside, really liked Penyo Pal, demo with Alejandro clinched that.

Alan: Tie between Timbuktu and Launchpad Toys. Liked creativity in both of them. Comment on Gather: seems gimmicky to have Kinect but big fan of having full person there. Holodeck way more interesting.

Vivek: First time where I liked everything at a conference.

[ love fest -- Launch team is great, Vivek says we really support entrepreneurs. ]

Vivek: Penyo Pal, so impressed with what kid learned from it. Marhsall gave PlayTell 9 out of 10.

Jason: Your favorite of first group?

Vivek: Not enough notes on that.

Jose: Everybody did amazing job. Launchpad Toys, Timbuktu, Penyo Pal. Favorite was Launchpad Toys.

5:16pm: Alejandro played with Penyo Pal, let's test his Chinese. [Jane having conversation with him]. He names the pear, orange and apple -- all correctly. He says it was fun to use the app. Says he has done language in school but didn't learn much. Tells Jason he would prefer learning on tablet to learning from teacher.

Watch the LAUNCH Education & Kids Live Stream

We're going to have an amazing 1.5 days together at the LAUNCH Education & Kids conference starting Tuesday, June 12 at 1pm PT with Marshall Tuck, CEO of Partnership for Los Angeles Schools. Last Wednesday I sat through 30 rehearsals with the startups and I was blown away.

Education is one of the last giant markets to be disrupted by technology. This is our first education-focused event, and I believe we are at the start of something very, very big.

Even if you can't be there, here's how you can follow the action:

1. Live stream: http://launch.co/live or www.ustream.tv/launch

2. Hash tag: #launchedu

3. Our twitter account @LAUNCH will be live blogging.

LAUNCH Education & Kids: 30 Companies (6 Stealth) Plus Scoble, Alan Louie & Nolan Bushnell

To make sure we selected the most awesome companies for LAUNCH Education & Kids on June 12 & 13 -- just 11 days from now -- the LAUNCH team spoke with over 160 companies of the 300+ on our list.

We debated our favorites and narrowed it down to 30 startups that will unveil something new, including six stealth startups that will launch on stage. Each company will also share its hard-won insights about the education/kids space.

Bottom line: We simply had too many great companies to limit ourselves to 25!

Since we know how much entrepreneurs appreciate receiving immediate feedback, we're also putting together a roster of top judges. Those confirmed include Robert Scoble, Alan Louie of Imagine K12, Christine Tsai of 500 Startups, Wesley Chan of Google Ventures and Ted Maidenberg of the Social+Capital Partnership. Our unofficial judges for the event: tech-savvy kids sitting in the front rows -- we expect them to be nothing less than brutally honest!

First Eight Companies for LAUNCH Education & Kids

We are just five weeks out from the LAUNCH Education & Kids event at Microsoft's campus in Mountain View June 12 & 13.

So far the LAUNCH team has spoken with over 130 startups in the education and kids space -- we're blown away by the passion, sophistication and insights these founders (a number of them educators-turned-entrepreneurs) have shared with us.

Eight startups impressed us so much we couldn't wait to let their founders know they received one of the 25 spots on stage. Here they are:

The Age of Excellence

Listen to Lon Harris reading this editorial on "This Week in Startups" episode #252 and the follow-up discussion with Jason and Tyler Crowley. Download it here.

The business world is changing very fast right now.

Transparency and global marketplaces are the catalysts.

There's no room left in 2012 for average, or even good, products.

Just three or four years ago, making a good product was good enough. In fact, a lot of the business thinking at the time focused on knowing when to stop investing in a product and get it out the door.

"Perfection is the enemy of progress," I would tell folks. The MVP (minimum viable product) and lean startup movements are great for learning -- but there is nothing MVP about an iPad or Ridley Scott film.

Is There a YCombinator Valuation Bubble or Not?

At the end of Friday's piece, I asked you guys to vote on SurveyMonkey what I should write about this weekend. Over 50% of you said you wanted me to discuss the buzz around the bubble in valuations for Y Combinator companies. ( Full results: http://jc.is/HE3AV5 )

I speak with six to 12 investors a week, both angels and VCs, as well as a half-dozen founders. Almost every discussion for the past couple of weeks has shifted to the valuations of the latest YC crop.

[ Note: In this piece I will not reference any specific knowledge I have as an angel investor. Everything here is based on public discussion of these issues. ]

For background, the valuation of a startup is the number investors and founders come up with as the full monetary value of a business during a financing event.

Valuations are always a hot topic, but they are delicate for two specific reasons: