Immad's New World

How To Write A Killer Deck & Get Funded.

noreply@blogger.com (Immad Akhund) — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 19:53:00 +0000

This article was originally published here on Vator.tv.

I have advised a number of Web companies on their way to raise money. I am often mentally ‘face-palming’ as they stagger through their initial pitch. Helping entrepreneurs is something I am passionate about. Knowing how to comfortably raise funding removes the distracting worry of money. Not having to worry about money allows entrepreneurs to focus on the important things, like creating a multi-billion dollar company.

The key preparation material that most people create for pitching potential investors is a presentation deck. This is normally a PowerPoint/Keynote presentation that highlights key parts of your pitch and something you talk along-side when pitching. To help you write your deck I have complied the most common advice I give to most start ups.

The two most important aspects of pitching are: 1) being confident and 2) conveying a consistent powerful story.

Confidence

You must firmly know that you are doing a great thing for the potential investors. You're not asking for money. Rather, you're making them money. And, making them a lot of money at that. This may seem like a bold statement but if you do not believe in your product with such conviction the investors will not believe in you either. The deck/pitch is you conveying the vision of your idea.

Story

It is vitally important to weave a story through your deck. The story should be of who you are and how your idea is going to change the world. Every slide in your deck is part of that story. Stories anchor ideas, help familiarize new concepts and create a smooth flow from start to end of your deck.

Structure

Presentation decks should generally be no more then 6-to-10 slides, with three to five bullet points per page with lots of images and a few graphs. The deck itself should be simple and you should be verbally padding-out the slides with conversational floods of information.

Iteration

Creating the deck should take one or two days. Do not get trapped in creating the perfect deck on version one. There will be a few versions. Heyzap had six versions before we even spoke to investors. Once the first draft is complete, pitch it to other entrepreneurs to get feedback. Give them the whole experience from start to end. Pitching to your friends will help you feel relaxed and their response should tell you if your idea is ready for the Shark Tank. You should not blindly follow all the feedback you receive. Instead you will need to look for common problems in the pitch and ways of improving them.

Once you are pitching investors you will also get continuous feedback and you will still need to iterate your deck, answering common criticisms and providing more information. Sometimes the feedback you receive may be contradictory but if one point is raised consistently then iterate your deck. It is also good practice to have an appendix section for questions that are commonly asked or questions you anticipate being raised.

Memorize your pitch

Before you arrange to speak to any investors you should have the flow of your presentation memorised and be able to take questions in your stride. Remember whenever a question is raised to return back to the relevant slide with ease and weave everyone back to the story you are telling.

Topics you must include

Here is a deck, of a deck, containing all the key points to cover so that your story flows seamlessly.

Hopefully this should help you get less 'face-palms' and more 'high-fives'. If you have any questions about presenting a deck or want general startup advice, shoot me an email.

Immad(at)heyzap(dot)com.

Special thanks to Fatema Yasmine for help with editing this article.

2014: Facebook makes Credits mandatory for all FB Connected sites

noreply@blogger.com (Immad Akhund) — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 01:45:00 +0000

Facebook will soon have 600 million users and already consumes 25% of all US Internet traffic; Facebook is becoming more powerful everyday.

“With Great power comes great responsibility"
- Uncle Ben, Spiderman

As Facebook becomes the corner stone of all things social on the Internet, what will that mean for the rest of us?

The title of this blog post could very well be the future of the web where Facebook abuses its control over the Internet and the world we surf in becomes a scary place. I am a big believer in Facebook and I think in general they are changing the Internet for the better. Facebook Connect or Facebook for Websites as it is now called is probably the most Interesting and powerful aspect of Facebook. With 1-click (or zero in the case of Instant Personalization) a website can go from knowing nothing about a user to providing a fully social experience.

Every new experience created on the Internet is highly socially connected and even the Google is trying to build in social into all its services. However if 50%+ of the Internet relies on Facebook this could cause some major problems

Single Points of Failure

By using IP routing and DNS the Internet ensures that there is no single point of failure. All Internet traffic does not go through one source and if any node goes down there are many others ready to take over.

If Facebook Connect becomes prolific it would make Facebook a single point of failure. If Facebook goes down or its security is compromised it would pose a serious problem to the whole Internet

Censorship and Control

Facebook will have unprecedented powers to censor and control people. This could be used to suppress certain views or destroy competitors.

Recently Facebook showed its power by killing Lamebook.com. Facebook said that this was unintentional and a mistake, but this is evidence of the power it can yield. Facebook will be in a position to kill websites by 1) not directing users to them and 2) killing most of their social functionality.

Extract Monopolistic Profit

Such control will give Facebook a lot of power to extract value and margins from the Internet. This is what the headline refers to with Facebook Credits becoming mandatory across the Internet. Facebook Credits are slowly becoming mandatory across Facebook apps so it is not such a far-fetched suggestion.

Facebook Credits is just one way that Facebook can extract Monopolistic profits. Additionally it could use its millions of users and data it has on these users to create a socially targeted Ad network. This would have no serious competitor.

Such use of power would have several dangers:

1. As the Internet becomes less profitable the incentive to innovate would decrease. This would also make previously profitable markets non-profitable.

2. Facebook could easily copy competitors as it has done with Twitter and Foursquare. This behaviour would also lead to decreased innovation.

The Future

I think there are 4 possible conclusions:

1. Facebook becomes a benevolent dictator and doesn’t abuse its power over the web.

2. Facebook does not become that powerful: Other websites make parallel Social Graphs. The proliferation of Facebook Connect does not go much further than it already has.

3. Facebook abuses its power as a monopoly over the social graph and no one controls it.

4. Government intervention: Facebook abuses its power as a monopoly, but the US and EU governments step in and force it into position 1.

All of these are interesting futures to think about. In fact this is a repeat of the situation with Microsoft Windows. In the case of Windows the solution turned out to be government intervention. They crossed the line with Netscape, killed a big company but were held accountable and now on the whole they don’t make such moves. Similar thing just happened with Apple when it suddenly eased its hold on the App Store under pressure.

Overall I am pretty optimistic about the Internets and Facebook's future. It should be interesting to see how the next few years unfold.

How can there only be 7 + or - 2 websites people use regularly?

noreply@blogger.com (Immad Akhund) — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 17:19:00 +0000

Reid Hoffman gave an awesome talk at this years Startup School, if you haven't already I highly recommend watching the video: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272179996

One of the interesting things he said is that most people go to around seven sites +/- 2 on a regular basis.

As an Internet entrepreneur this idea is disconcerting for two reasons:

Will I be able to make my website be one of those 7?
How does innovation really happen on the Internet if people are only thinking of 7 websites!

Obviously most entrepreneurs noticed number 1 early on otherwise they would be screwed :). This line of thought leads to a contradiction.

The Contradiction

There is a contradiction between these two things:

People will only go to 7 sites regularly
There are many many orders of magnitude more than 7 sites in terms of creativity/concepts/content on the Internet.

Built on the Shoulders of People

The answer to this contradiction is simple. The websites that thrive in the most important 7 are the ones that lead you to other peoples creativity. Here is a list of the top 10 US sites according to Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US):

Google - Leads you to other peoples websites based on keyword
Facebook - Leads you to other peoples social sharing. Sites and other content
Yahoo - similar to Google
Youtube - Leads you to other peoples videos
Amazon - Leads you to other peoples goods
Wikipedia - Leads you to other peoples knowledge of the world
Twitter - Leads you to other peoples thoughts and links
eBay - Same as amazon
Blogger - Same as twitter but long form
Craigslist - Same as eBay and Amazon

It is pretty indicative that all the top 10 sites are nothing without the content/creativity they have on them. It is all about what they lead to and how they harness and organise other peoples ideas/items.

Build on the Shoulders of Platforms

Internet platforms are so powerful that entire industries are built on them. SEO/SEM in the case of Google. Facebook Apps in the case of Facebook. If you want to be one of the 7 websites and be the centre of the Internet you should be giving an avenue for other peoples creativity. Helping them organise it in a way never done before, exposing an important medium/data that was previously unexposed.

Additionally the ideas that do well have to get the users off the existing sites that people are using, at least initially if not forever. Here are some examples that did this or are still doing it

Youtube - Initially built traffic on Myspace
Groupon - Most of their users come to them from email clients
Paypal - Inititially built traffic on eBay
Google - Initially built traffic on Yahoo
Facebook - A slight contradiction since they build traffic on the real world School campuses rather than off other websites.
Zynga - Built traffic on Facebook

Be a Platform

This is in essence the idea of being a platform and why platforms make some of the most powerful businesses online. You can harness a collective power and build in powerful network effects. I could do another blog post that talks about the attributes that make a platform successful but one of the key takeaways is the broader your platform is the more successful it can be.

Picture: http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/16/reid-hoffman-startup-school/

Heyzap is hiring

We are always looking for talented engineers and entrepreneurs to help us grow: Check out http://www.heyzap.com/jobs and email us jobs@heyzap.com!

Presentation and Pitching skills for Entrepreneurs

noreply@blogger.com (Immad Akhund) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:05:00 +0000

One of the more undocumented benefits of Y Combinator is that Paul Graham is very good at advising YC companies on how to present and pitch their companies. I have watched YC companies transition their pitch from awful to awe inspiration.

As an entrepreneur you are always ‘selling’ your idea. Half of your sell is obviously how good the business opportunity is. However the pitch and how it is delivered can change everything.

I am on a fund raising panel in Y Combinator today and Jude and I had the pleasure of giving a talk at Seedcamp a couple of weeks ago. An important topic that I talk about is presentation skills. Here are some notes I made:

Be Confident

Confidence is probably more important than anything else. You should:

Talk loudly and clearly
Look straight at the audience, not at the slides or down
Be calm and relaxed, but at the same time convey your enthusiasm and excitement
Make a joke or two

A lack of confidence can really undermine a whole pitch. Entrepreneurs have to sell their business to clients, employees, acquirers, themselves etc. If there is a noticeable lack of confidence in the pitch it is assumed that would also carry through to other attributes of the business.

Practice a Lot

Practice goes hand in hand with confidence. By the time you get to an important presentation you should have every single line memorized. You should be able to deliver the presentation without looking at the slides or q-cards.
Steps to practice.

Practice to yourself at least 10 times and write down every single point you plan to convey
Pitch in front of your co-founders/friends
Pitch in front of people you respect, like other entrepreneurs and get their feedback
Constantly iterate your slides, pitch based on feedback

Know and Convey your Market

How big is the market opportunity? Sometimes the answer to that question is obvious. Most of the time in early startups the market opportunity is not obvious. You should know what your market is and have at least one slide which clearly states your market opportunity/size with some justification.

Do a Good Demo

It is particularly annoying to me when someone goes up on stage and says they are building “a new way to discover and share content” or “a new enterprise productivity tool” and fail to give an actual product demo. There is nothing that can explain a web app better than the app itself. You should fire it up and step through a few screens showing your most exciting and differentiated features. Demos go a long way to showing that you can actually execute on your vision.

Don’t say Anything Negative!

Statements that should not be in your pitch

We are young and inexperienced
The market size is small
The product is still buggy
We are having a hard time raising any money.
A lot of people have failed in this space
We are going to give this idea 3 months to see if it sticks

Pitching is not the time to talk about negative things. If there is a big elephant in the room then talk directly about how you are going to solve it, or have it resolved before pitching. The pitch is not the place to be negative.

Address the Core points

Venture Hacks has a good post about what should be talked about in a pitch: http://venturehacks.com/articles/deck. In a more public pitch you probably want to change the contents slightly, but don’t miss the core, obvious points. Make sure you cover your team, market, traction, technology and financing.

Explicitly Talk About your Current Status

Often after a presentation I have no idea whether the product has been launched or when it is going to launch. Sometimes the fact that the product is launched is mentioned very late into the pitch. Talking about your status early on puts the whole pitch in context. If your second sentence in your presentation is

We launched last month and are already serving 20k people a month and growing 20% every week

Then you already sound awesome and you haven’t even started your presentation.

Show Graphs of Traction.

If you have launched show graphs of some real numbers. People often have absolute numbers with no graphs, which always seems strange to me.

Only One Person Should Speak

The audience develops a relationship with the presenter and the presenter controls the story. Sometimes people switch the presenters half way through or even worse throughout the talk. This is hardly ever a good idea.

Make Jokes and be Light-Hearted

This goes along with the point about confidence. Have one or two lines lined up that are amusing, don’t take this too far but if you can say something funny to break up the presentation and be memorable then take the opportunity. If you seem friendly and funny people will know you are good to work with and confidant.

Finally...

Based on the situation how you pitch and what you say will change dramatically. There are specific bits of advice that I could talk about for sales pitches vs. 1-on-1 investor pitches. I might put those in a separate post or I am happy to answer questions on them.

Interview on Mixergy about Y Combinator

noreply@blogger.com (Immad Akhund) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 01:14:00 +0000

I had the pleasure today of doing an interview on Mixergy with Sachin (Posterous) and Howie (Etacts). Mixergy is awesome, Andrew does a great job of getting insightful entrepreneur interviews. Original interview is here.

I am still not used to the sound of my own voice! Enjoy:

Internet stocks Predictions for 2020 (GOOG, AMZN, maybe FCBK?)

noreply@blogger.com (Immad Akhund) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 18:00:00 +0000

One thing I would like to do more of is invest in Internet stocks. Since I live and breathe the Internet, I’m more adept to make better judgements of companies than the market. I thought it would be interesting to go through the top Internet (tech) stocks now and predict where the companies will be in 10 years time.

I am including companies like Apple and Microsoft, who are not all about the Internet, for now at least, but clearly will be shape it in the next 10 years. This won’t be a comprehensive list of tech companies, as I like to make informed predictions.

Factors to be considered for a 10 year prediction

I was analysing companies for the following attributes:

Foremost is innovation, in 10 years the Internet will be a different place and the only companies that will grow are those that innovate daily.
Strong technology and network affects. Both of these factors lead to long term stability on the Internet.
In large markets that have lots of room to grow.
Either already sufficient diversified or have the positioning to be diversified in the future. Diversification goes hand in hand with innovation, all innovative companies would tend to become diversified in the long term.

Winners - Predictions of the rising stars:

Google (GOOG)

I am always in favor of the under dog and feel that the Internet is dynamic enough that most cash cows will die and other things will take over within 10 years. However Google never fails to impress me. They are vertically and horizontally integrating into every part of the Internet (YouTube, Google DNS, Google OS etc). Their constant innovation will ensure that they don’t become irrelevant. They clearly missed Social Networking, but they keep doing everything else right.

At the end of the day as long as Google controls search, the conduit to the Internet will still be theirs. Without a strong social network, they do lose the random “discovery” aspect of the Internet, but I think they can control the rest of how people get to data. Or conversely, if it becomes important, they could buy Facebook, Twitter or Digg. For now, their search deals with Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace, ensure they won’t be totally left behind as the social web expands.

Amazon (AMZN)

Amazon is a ridiculously smart company. They continue to innovate in areas that most people don’t realize; they control e-commerce and continue to extend themselves to be much more than an e-commerce site but a platform (through fulfilment and their market place etc). With One-click payments and Amazon Flexible Payments, they are also one of the easiest way to pay for things online. AWS make them the leader in cloud computing infrastructure.

The things Amazon does in-house are leading the technology world (AWS, Kindle), they also make great acquisitions (see Zappos, Alexa, IMDB). It is really hard to see how Amazon will not continue to own e-commerce online and extend themselves in to synergistic verticals/ horizontals.

Apple (AAPL)

There are enough fan boys out there that I don’t need to sell Apple too much. Their Achilles heel is that they are more closed than Microsoft and that might hurt them, but in terms of the ability to innovate and change hardware they are un-paralleled. Hardware and computer interfaces still have a long way to go, and Apple will probably be the one to push them for the foreseeable future. Their only weakness is their Web app ability (and their closed nature), which in some ways might kill them if hardware innovation becomes too commoditized, but I don’t think that is happening too soon.

Activision Blizzard (ATVI)

ATVI has a market cap of 14bn, but there’s still opportunity for them to expand. World of Warcraft is under-leveraged yet continues to reap large revenues. Diablo III will be a big hit. Guitar Hero is awesome. Almost everything they touch is high quality and does very well. If they do a reasonable job with launching on new platforms (Facebook + Mobile) and take advantage of Virtual Goods based models, they will continue to be successful.

Comscore (SCOR)

I didn’t realize ComScore was public until I was doing research for this blog post. The Internet is going to become even bigger in terms of Market Share and usage, on top of that, analysing the Internet has yet to be perfected. I think there will be more innovation in this space and ComScore will push/ buy a lot of it. It also seems very undervalued.

Facebook (not public yet)

I was going to put Facebook in the next category (unstable), but actually I think most tech people underestimate Facebook. Even though they are not yet the biggest website in the world, they have, by far, the most information about their registered users. Facebook has really changed the Internet, and they are collecting together smart people to continue innovating. The thing that might destroy them is similar to what might destroy Apple, they are a walled garden. The Internet and entrepreneurs don’t like being imprisoned in walls and so will fight it. If they open up or become more infrastructural then they might stop the anti-wall tide. So far, it seems that that is their goal with Facebook Platform.

Facebook could at some point switch on a revenue stream that would surprise us all. That might be in Facebook payments or it might be in something else, but as long as they are experimenting, I am sure they will find it and when they do they will be very formidable. As they have leverage with their userbase and don’t have to solve the “chicken or the egg” problem.

Zynga (not public yet)

Perhaps I am slightly biased (Union Square Ventures invested in Heyzap and Zynga), but Zynga has grown ridiculously fast, and I am sure they will have a long way to go before they peak. They define a whole new era of gaming and execute tenaciously on their goals. I imagine they will continue to do bigger and bigger hits across many more platforms.

Skype (not public yet)

I love Skype. They have a massive and growing user base. They control Internet telephony and even before they were spun off they were making great moves in Video Chat and offline phones. I can imagine in 10 years, every mobile/ land-line will be Skype enabled. I am sure if they do more innovation for a couple of years and re-list it will be much higher than their spin-off price.

Unstable - Predictions of the ones that will go either very high or fall very low

Paypal (EBAY)

Paypal is in a great place as they could effectively be the “Bank of the Internet.” On a personal level, I have been locked out of my Paypal multiple times, and their recovery procedures can be a real pain so that bit I don’t like about them. Also I don’t really see that much innovation coming from them. Overall I really don’t know what will happen with Paypal, options are:

A disruptive startup comes along and takes their market. Something like Square, Facebook or a better Internet bank
They keep their share and nothing much happens
They innovate more and start taking on other banks more directly

Twitter (not public yet)

Really undecided on whether Twitter will be around in 10 years. They still have some time to go before they are really mature and have a scalable business model. They do provide a lot of value and have a good network effect of users so that’s something that they could leverage to continue to grow.

Microsoft (MSFT)

As much as Microsoft missed the Internet, they are still around and still making a ton of profit. No one is really making a dent on their enterprise foot hold of the OS and Office, though many are making valiant efforts (Google Docs). They are also finally doing something right with Bing. Also they are owning the traditional console market with Xbox 360. Given their cash reserves and overall impetus, I wouldn’t be surprised if they come up with other cash cows and preserve their existing ones. Alternatively, they may just continue to miss the boat and Windows+Office could become completely irrelevant as everything moves to the web. That’s why I put them in the unstable section.

Yahoo! (YHOO)

They are so low that the only way is up. They have really made some awful strategic moves with giving away search to Bing, but I do think that they could come up with something. Yahoo has a lot of users with their portal, mail, IM and Flickr, so if they could just do something right then they could galvanise those users in to making money. Also Yahoo Finance is still way better than Google finance hence the links below, (still nothing beats Bloomberg, why not?).

Boring - Predictions of the neutral

I won’t comment on these companies. Mostly they have some strong sites/ domains in their portfolio and are likely to survive and continue to acquire other good companies. I wouldn’t expect much actual innovation though.

Expedia (EXPE)

Flowers.com (FLWS)

Netflix (NFLX)

Note on Netflix: I think the whole market is shrinking, prices of on-demand Movies are going to go down and people are going to either pay very little at home or lots in the cinema. Maybe 3d movies and other technology could save them.

Fail - Predictions of the fallen

Myspace (part of Newscorp)

Myspace is quickly becoming irrelevant, and that is FIM’s biggest site.They are currently under-leveraged, but alas don’t think it’s going to happen.

Ebay (EBAY)

Ebay seems to have forsaken its auctions business, the consumer experience has not improved for 5 years and everything is about power sellers. I think Amazon is going to beat them at the power sellers business, and someone else may come along with a dedicated consumer auctions business and take that market.

[Update removed Omniture as it was acquired by Adobe in 2009]

Priceline (PCLN)

Was tempted to put Priceline in neutral, but I still feel like in 10 years they won't be around. Not very impressed with my experience of them. Seems very gimmicky and slightly scammy (see CNET article).

Verisign (VRSN)

I don’t have a good feeling about Verisign. SSL and .com seem like their cash cows and those are not long-term businesses. A lot of other stuff they do seems to be more of giving an impression of security rather than true security. This part is not that well researched so take it with a grain of salt.

Conclusions

I am very optimistic about the Internet. I am certain that at least 100 other companies will be on this list in 10 years time and most likely even my favorites will disappear. The Internet is still in its infancy, and there is still room for tremendous growth. It certainly is an exciting time to be in the industry!

Notes:

Nasdaq Internet Index (QNET) - Was a useful source of info

Thanks to Dru Wynings and Jude Gomila for reviewing this post.

All views are mine, and don't make any investment decisions based on what I say :).

Heyzap is hiring

We are always looking for talented engineers and entrepreneurs to help us grow: Check out http://www.heyzap.com/jobs and email us jobs@heyzap.com!

Definition of Success

noreply@blogger.com (Immad Akhund) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:17:00 +0000

I think people's views on business and personal success are too simple.

It is fairly routine for the tech community to criticize some companies and founders because their company is not yet profitable (especially 37signals). I think they are largely missing the point of what success is. Twitter has changed the way millions of people communicate and it is routinely used and talked about, even if it is not profitable it and the founders has achieved something rare and remarkable.

37signals recently put down the success of the Mint.com acquisition. I am sure the founders have had an amazing journey and in no way could you say they have not achieved personal success.

What is (Business) success?

Profit

On one level, profit is what every business should aim for. But pure profit does not necessarily maximize the long-term viability and success of a company so I would not consider a business successful purely based on that especially when it comes to relatively new innovative startups. Here are some other factors that may be equally or more important.

Employing Great, Highly Talented People

People are the backbone of any innovative tech company. If you lose talent or don’t employ the best you would quickly squander any profit.

Long term Viable Market Position

There are many things that can destroy a company.

Insufficient R&D - falling behind its competitors
Legal problems
Unhappy customers
Potential commoditization of product
Squeezing on the supply/demand side

Disrupting Markets and Creating Innovative Products

If you don’t continually innovate than someone will come and take your market. The best companies like Google know this and invest a lot into new products, acquisitions and people.

Scalable business model

Some models such as consulting do not scale very well. In order to increase profit you have to increase staff, and it tends to be time consuming to build up scale like that. Other models such as on-line market places scale tremendously well, such that 40 people can run hundred-million dollar revenue companies.

Having High growth

When specific metrics that increase the companies “long term viable market position” are growing exponentially.

Large customer base

Corrolary to High growth is companies that have a large customer base. These can potentially up-sell very well and presumably already have some data and brand with their customers.

Powerful Market position

Market ecosystems are interesting to try to map out.

Who are the players?
Who are their suppliers?
Which plays are in the most powerful position?
What are their potential risks?
What are their potential future plans?
What are they in a great position to execute on?

Some market positions lead to minimized risk and maximized potential. Here are some attributes of a powerful position.

Great data on customers – data can provide lock-in and understanding data can help you create better products
Amazing brand and respect from customers
Inextricably linked to a valuable point in the flow of money. For example a search engine.
Fragmented demand-side and supply-side dynamics.

That is in no way an exhaustive list.

What is (personal) success?

Although I have no where near achieved what I want to, in many ways I consider myself successful. Here are some personal ongoing definitions of success I have:

Learn new things
Try to achieve as high as possible
Work on something meaningful where I have a big impact
Work with great people.
Build a large network of friends/associate.
Never work on anything I am not passionate about

Obviously money would aid some of these goals but it would not change everything.

When I evaluate a company’s success, I try to look at the above criteria for business success, which hopefully helps evaluate how successful I think it will be on an ongoing basis. Hope that helps and makes you think twice about what success is.

Heyzap is hiring

We are always looking for talented engineers and entrepreneurs to help us grow: Check out http://www.heyzap.com/jobs and email us jobs@heyzap.com!

Heyzap story Q1-Q2 2009 :)

noreply@blogger.com (Immad Akhund) — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:35:00 +0000

I seem to be very bad at keeping this blog up to date (as you can see from the last 4 months). A lot has happened this year and I thought I would sum it all up for myself and you.

January – Heyzap Launch

In January we launched Heyzap, we were very focused on launching as quickly as possible and we had to work hard to meet the demands of our partners. We worked very long hours launching new sizes, APIs, reworking the front page and number other critical pieces for our product.

March-April – Raising money

Raising money from Y Combinator is very different from raising money from Angels/VCs. Although Jude and I have both done business for 2 years this is the first time we were pitching to investors and raising a sizable chunk.We found out we had a lot to learn and Y Combinator alumni were a great resource for us during this phase. We then reached Y Combinator demo day in the right place. We had some investors interested and the product was doing really well.

We closed our funding with Albert from Union Square Ventures Leading, Naval Ravikant (Hit Forge), Joshua Schachter (Delicious) and Maurice Werdegar (as an angel but a WTI partner) also took part.

April - Swinefighter

In early April, Jude and I had the idea of doing a Swine Flu game: Swinefighter. This was inspired by the success of Sock and Awe and we thought it would be funny and successful. This deserves another blog post but it was truly successful. It was featured in TIME, USA Today, Reuters and a ton of other places. It had millions of game plays. The overall exercise probably took 2 weeks from conception to peak distribution and taught us a lot about creating massive word of mouth successes and how the press works.

May onwards – Scaling

James, an old friend of Jude and I, joined the team. We also have a couple of interns now and are recruiting. It is really cool to be a larger team and have our vision combine with new blood and push the product forward. We are going to grow as aggressively as possible.

May-July – Heyzap Payments

Heyzap payments launched this month. There is a lot of engagement in flash games both on the Heyzap platform and thousands of portals, we thought there was a huge opportunity to integrate virtual goods in a better way and monetize users directly. Launch has been great, here is a game with Heyzap payments that I love: Mobster Defense

Conclusions

Albert and USV have really exceeded my expectaitions in terms of intelligent support and advice they give us. I have learnt a lot about investors in this time and I am pretty much certain we chose the best investors).

Heyzap goes through phases of working very hard on a given objective. It really is exhilarating.

The list of things I have learned and what I want to talk about in the future include understanding press, how to raise funding, how to iterate. A lot about partners. How to build scalable systems. How to burn the fire when it is in place.

Heyzap launches! The forming of Heyzap and some lessons learnt

noreply@blogger.com (Immad Akhund) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 21:02:00 +0000

As most of you already know I recently just launched my latest start-up Heyzap.com with Jude Gomila.

Heyzap is Y Combinator funded (like my previous start-up Clickpass).

Since Clickpass has been in acquisition discussions for some time I have been unable to talk about most of what was going on in my life publicly. I left Clickpass in September and setup Heyzap with Jude , and its been crazy with exciting developments and learning experiences.

For me personally the team is far more important than the idea and I have known Jude for 10+ years. His skills fit great with mine, he has a brilliant product+design sense and works like a machine. We brain-stormed quite a few ideas and quickly decided that we both really wanted to work in gaming. After a few iterations and lots of thinking, the idea behind Heyzap was born.

Since the conceptualization of Heyzap, about three months ago, we have been working non-stop. After launching the work has increased by several orders of magnitude, and the hours I work have become insane. Before a product is launched there is always a little hesitation and concern, regardless of how bullet proof all your assumptions are.

The response has been amazing. We were covered by Techcrunch, Mashable, Venturebeat, TinyComb, Geek, as well as many of other websites in various languages (heyzap.com/docs/press).

It has now been two weeks since we launched but the excitment is still pumping in our veins.

From my experience at Revmap and Clickpass and most stories I have heard from entrepreneurs, I was expecting a big fall in traffic post launch and that we would have to fight our way to growth. But for Heyzap it has been completely different. The longer tail Blog pick-up (google Heyzap) and the hundreds of Heyzap installs has seen us sustain the game play tempo.

As of last week we were almost catching with our launch traffic which is impressive enough. Since last week however we have seen some astronomical rise in growth and are now doing approximately 10 million minutes of game play per month! Yes I know that is a crazy big number. Heyzap has not only seen a lot more uniques than I expected but we have seen great engagement per user.

(I would be more specific but that is probably going to be on our Heyzap blog when we are ready to release figures.).

Here are some places you can see us in action

My blog side bar :)
Cooliris - Great integration with their addon. Looks amazing
Weebly - Drag and drop module on their site.
Wireclub (requires signup), http://gattune.blog.br/jogos, http://www.6-eren.dk/spil, Dhingana
and many many other sites and blogs.

So here are some lessons learnt about things that we probably did right.

When to launch

Don’t launch in December. We were probably ready to launch from the 17th of December, but decided against it. That was a good decision.

Launch Early! I know everyone says this and I am contradicting my first point :). But we could have build a few more features and waited for some partnerships that were in the pipelines. The launch has brought us a lot of opportunity, traction and coverage. It has also directed the company to work in the right direction (that last point is probably the most important)

Press

Get as much press as possible. Talk to as many blogs and media as you can (obviously don’t spam). The emphasis varies from start-up to start-up.

Distribution and marketing is a major part of start-up success. Press can definitely play a part in that, and in this phase of Heyzap it has worked really well for us. Partly because our Heyzap’s publishers are tech blog readers.

Mashable was very good for creating a lot of follow-on non-US blog posts. This press part could have a whole blog post about how we contacted press and what we prepared, I will leave that to Jude to write about.

Another thing about getting multiple press articles is that they talk about you in different ways and help you understand better how to market your product.

Other things we did right.

We kept to minimum feature spec. I think that is always very important. It is hard to determine what to do until you launch.
This is the first time I have worked on a big project with Jude. Definitely happy with the co-foundership.
As usual we learnt a lot and adapted.

Things we can learn from

Keep admin work to a minimum. We did a lot of stuff at the start that wasn’t strictly product. Focusing fully on product would have been a better strategy because once its out it develops itself and admin can always be slotted into smaller time spaces.
Don't spend too long on technology that you aren't making progress with. Stick to what you know and keep executing fast.

Conclusion

I want to thank everyone for their support and feedback. I encourage you to go and waste at least 30 minutes on Heyzap right now :P

Synthasite acquires Clickpass!

noreply@blogger.com (Immad Akhund) — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 11:54:00 +0000

Just in case anyone missed the news, my previous company, Clickpass, was acquired by Synthasite. This is great news for everyone and I am happy I can finally talk about it :).

I wanted to congratulate my co-founder, Peter Nixey, on this great accomplishment and his hard work. I moved on to pastures new a couple of months ago, and he is entirely responsible for the Clickpass acquisition. He is a smart guy and Synthasite is sure to benefit from his expertise and what we have worked on at Clickpass for the last year.

We have had a crazy ride at Clickpass for the last year. OpenID has gone from strength to strength, though for most Internet users it still remains a major uptapped opportunity. I want to thank our partners: Plaxo, Scribd, Disqus, Backtype, Ma.gnolia, LittleCarbonFeet, Skribit etc. These guys joined us very early on and to trust us to help them in such a crucial part of there service (login/registraion) is obviously a big step. We would definately not be where we are today without their support. Here is our compete graph, Clickpass is distributed so we get a lot of hits, but clearly we are doing well and the trend should accelerate!

A lot goes behind the scenes in a start-up and that is even more true in the middle of an acquisition, I sometimes think its a shame I can't talk about some of the things that happen. Once everything settles, and provided everyone is happy for me to do so, hopefully I will be able to talk more about the details.

We were thinking of and working on several things internally at Clickpass and it would be great to see how Clickpass and everything we have done grows and integrates within Synthasite. Peter has a great title as Vice President of trust, identity and reputation and it goes to show that Synthasite is ahead of the pack in taking a close look at identity and what follows from identity.

Synthasite is a great service, in a big market and I have every confidence that Clickpass and our users have found a great home.

On an unrelated note, stay tuned to learn more about what is next for me! ;)

Press and Viral aren't the only two marketing and distribution strategies!

noreply@blogger.com (Immad Akhund) — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 01:20:00 +0000

I have been thinking about how my way of thinking about web entrepreneurship has changed since I started (two years ago). One of the biggest changes has been in how I think about marketing and distribution.

When I started this subject was more about luck, but like with most things in doing business as you learn more you realize it is less about luck but positioning and thought, obviously with some serendipity thrown into the equation.

Press is not a sufficient distribution strategy

I don’t think many people have made a successful business just relying on blogs and other media coverage. This might give you your initial 1000 or maybe even 10k users but then how do you get to 1k users a day consistently, or if you really want to be successful at least 3k users a day? That is more than a Techcrunch articles worth of users a day

(side note: TC gives you something like 10k uniques, Digg can give you something like 100k, which is an absolute maximum, but neither of those convert that well.).

Press has many uses;

it is a nice way of gaining brand recognition,
it can give some seed users,
it can be useful for getting investors' attention
it can create opportunities as new people in your industry find out about you.

So press is definitely important, but it really can’t be everything, because it does not scale.

Some assumptions

I am making various assumptions and also I am using a specific definition of distribution so I would like to talk about that briefly.

A lot of my experience and knowledge is in the consumer web. It may not apply directly to b2b plays, or non-tech industries.
Obviously all of the things I come up with here should be adapted to your particular product and I am sure there are far more creative ways that I am missing.

In general I consider the words distribution, marketing, route to market and some other terms pretty similar. They are a general way of describing how you get your product to be used by people and how it will then continue to grow in user/customer base.

So if press is not enough, how do companies get to millions of users?

The main methods I can come up with are as follows (these have some overlaps):

Word of mouth and social
SEO
SEM and Web advertising in general
Viral
Distribution channels
Distribution partnerships
Guerrilla marketing
Niche marketing

Some of these are more obvious than others so I will talk about those less.

One could imagine drawing another matrix, which shows how easy these things are to achieve, how effective an important they are and what attributes the product requires to tune for them. I would recommend you do an analysis like that if you are thinking about distribution and marketing your product.

Word of mouth and social

Make something good that people like and they will talk about it. You can tune this better by making something which is easy to talk about. For example people love talking about youtube videos, but if you make a porn website than its harder to get word of mouth traffic. Websites that target niches are easier to achieve these affects in.

You can create word of mouth affects, you can tune for them, but its something fairly obvious I think.

SEO

I think its one of the most important distribution strategy. SEO is Search Engine Optimisation, but I tend to use it in general to denote distribution through organic (non-payed for) search results.

Some ideas are very SEO friendly. Anything where you are creating unique user-generated content works pretty well for SEO, because people will search for it and that is how they will find you.

SEO is strong because if you take a few basic measures, you can for no extra work ensure a consistent level of traffic. The other interesting thing to me about organic search traffic is that often users from search results are most likely to click on well positioned relevant adverts on your website.

I know a lot of start-ups that get most of their traffic through SEO. User Generated Contents and blogs are perfect for SEO, sometimes I think many ideas in Web 2.0 were a direct reaction to Page Rank :).

SEM and Web Advertising in general

SEM or Search Engine Marketing and paid for advertising is interesting.

This only works in certain circumstances but when it does, it is very good because you don’t have to rely on anyone else. Here are a few factors

• If you directly monetize users, and the ROI (Return on Investment) on adertising is more than 1. For example if you make $2 per user and it costs you $1 to acquire that user than you have a scalable business.
• This is also a great way to test out ideas, and possible seed them. You can target a niche and see how many people convert and what they like
• This is very experimental for the right words or targeting at the right kind of site can literally lead to factors of improvement in conversions or ROI.
• If you rely completely on SEM, your position may become untenable as Google would squeeze your margins. This is more of an abstract concept, but in general if this is your strategy you should be diversified.

Update: Joe pointed out in the comments that Affiliate marketing would fit under this section. See cj.com for a website where you can manage affiliate marketing campaigns.

Viral distribution strategies.

This is kind off an old concept now and fairly well talked about. Look at Andrew Chen’s blog for more about viral than you can imagine.

Some quick thoughts on it.

It is possible to build for viral but it helps to have products which are inherently viral
You don’t get viral unless you build for it
Viral strategies become all about tuning and A/B testing. The aim is to get one user to invite more than one user. So you track where your users come from how you can incentivize them to invite someone. Try out different strategies, track their affect.
Certain environments are very conducive to virality, like Facebook.
There are many types and many definitions for viral. I guess an overarching one would be that your product is built in such a way that it distributes itself. This is inherently true in applications that become more useful the more users you add to them such as social networks and instant messaging applications.

A lot more can be said I am sure, this is one of the most interesting strategies. As strategies are used more they become less effective, so you have to be cleverer in how you go viral and probably create more value than previously required but its very clearly still possible.

Distribution channels

This is very interesting. Some technologies and applications have good distribution channels in place that they don’t have to do any extra work. Some examples of channels that have developed recently.

Facebook Applications pages.
IPhone App Store
Mozilla recommended addons
Yahoo directories – an oldy.

If you catch distribution channels very early on or with the right product than the highly targeted traffic they receive can create snowball affect that give you very fast and effective distribution.

Distribution partnerships

In the distribution channel section I was thinking about channels that are inherently available to you for whatever reason. Distribution partnerships however are harder to get but they can give you a lot of power. What distribution partnership makes sense for your product depends strongly on what you are doing. The biggest and most obvious distribution partnership that lead to success was Google’s partnership with Yahoo!, that gave shit loads of traffic to Google.

There are a lot of other partnerships some of which are paid for, some are just mutually useful or strategic. Some more examples

Default Google search in Firefox.
The Times newspaper in Starbucks
AT&T in Apple Stores and vice versa
Clickpass with all of its great partners :)

VCs tend to like ideas that can be use distribution partnerships to get scale. If they can see a story where they can apply $x millions of and use their contacts to get a distribution deal done and generate a company instantly worth $20x million than it’s a no-brainer.

Guerrilla marketing

I used to be more excited by this. Not that interesting any more. I think its hard to scale doing quirky things. I am sure there are some examples of very effective guerrilla marketing to achieve a seed userbase. 37Signals did a good article on some things that did, which might be classified are guerrilla marketing.

If you are creative it is possible to come up with a lot of these. I think it is very dependent on the industry you are in and I am sure it does not work for everything.

Niche marketing

Niche marketing is not a strategy like the others, it is more like a paradigm that you may use in conjunction with the above. Lets say you are a video website and your target market is every Internet user in the US; that is a 120 million people. If you are a start-up you may have a hard time getting in front of 120 million people. So what you do is segment the users and find niches that would be far more reachable, while keeping your product basically the same. So in the case of the video website you may decide to target sports, or even better football in the bay area. Now you have come down a very easy to target market segment.

This is similar to the way that Facebook expanded from University to University starting with the Ivy League, which is obviously a great place to start from.

Conclusion

As an web entrepreneur, you generally don’t have the luxury of a big budget and often throwing money at the issue does not necessarily give the best result.

That was not everything. I am sure I am missing some strategies. In general most people achieve success using only one or two of these strategies. Also your idea/product will definitely lend itself heavily to a strategy, so it is worth understand and experimenting with different strategies to get the best results.

Cash cows: large markets and opportunities

noreply@blogger.com (Immad Akhund) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 06:01:00 +0000

I feel like I often discover things, which seem obvious and perhaps I have always known them but something suddenly re-crystallizes them in my mind.

One such realization was that when a business, especially technology business, reaches maturity, they often have only one or two cash cows. These continue to bring them large profits every year with very little real innovation. Some obvious examples:

Google – Adsense on search engine traffic
Microsoft – Windows and Office
Ebay – auctions
Experian – credit reporting

I guess this fact should be fairly obvious, but it does lead to a couple of interesting things. Firstly these guys will not do anything new that might rock their cash cow revenue stream. This means that they are often not as innovative as startups even with their much greater resources. Also they collect so much money that it is relatively easy for them to just buy new startup that prove a point in their space or threatens their cash cow.

This is a short post. I feel like the whole cash-cow analysis could go a lot further. I would personally love to come up with a way of attacking a large, non-innovative companies cash cow.

One way of attacking cash cows is by using new trends and advancing technology to find an exposing weakness. For example Office could be attacked by the emergence of more advanced browsers, standards and broadband infrastructure through creating web office. This kind of trend based disruption has probably mean the main downfall of cash cows (this is mostly my definition of disruptive products but I know people have other definitions as well).

The entrepreneurial ladder

noreply@blogger.com (Immad Akhund) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 10:39:00 +0000

One of the benefits of getting out of the normal career is that you are no longer being constantly judged on stupid criteria, like what grades you got, how many years of experience you have in blah, etc etc. I once had an interview where they asked me in 5 different ways about my team working experience, does that really give them that much insight?

When I first became an entrepreneur, I thought that would be the end of being judged, from now on I was to make my own destiny, and that has been true to some extent. But you find that here there is a different ladder to climb. Being an entrepreneur is a lot to do with selling yourself, whether it is to investors, clients or potential hires, you have to impress them to succeed. The difference is that the levels are different. Here is the ladder how I perceive it, from the bottom up.

1. Never done any company.
2. No companies but worked for a startup (the more successful the better)
3. Done some small projects
4. Started first company
5, Started a company and have funding.
6.1. Started a company and have well respected investors (first tier VCs being the best).
6.2. Started second company (without the first exiting successfully)
7. Had a successful relatively small exit ($1m plus) or could have took such an exit but are happy making good revenue at that company
8. Had a successful company with a reasonably large exit ($10m plus)
9. IPO!

Obviously those add up and I put two 6s because it would depend on what funding your first company had etc. A lot of gray area but that is roughly how the ladder goes.

Here is something that Kieran said: you can climb ladder by networking and being at all the right events and conferences. But eventually if you go to too many of them you start falling down the ladder because people perceive you don't have anything better to do :).

Another point is that perception matters a lot, some people will value what University you went to and whats jobs you have had. Others will care about how well you are known on the Internet. But you can very much go from zero to the top of the ladder very quickly, which is what makes this exciting. Unlike the career ladder you don't need to have 5 years experience before you are considered for a promotion.

I am aiming for 3 IPOs just so I can be almost unchallenged at the top of my ladder, not for the money at all ;-).

Clickpass launches! Launch story, feelings and post-analysis

noreply@blogger.com (Immad Akhund) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 06:52:00 +0000

So, this week has been completely crazy. Clickpass launched, which was really exciting and things have been going well. We were covered in Techcrunch.com:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/11/clickpass-could-change-the-way-you-surf-the-web/

With a great and positive review. Since then we had some really positive feedback both on the techcrunch comments, across the net and directly to us. Some of the best ones.

*Finally* someone has produced a credible way of implementing OpenID that is simple and straight-forward. This is revolutionary, and I wish them all the very best. – David Weston, tc comment

This is great - finally only one password to remember! We need more sites to take part. Good luck! – Nick Faull, tc comment

Its also been exciting watching the chatter on twitter. My favourites from:

I tried to use Clickpass. It's so simple and I like this concept. - roomrag

http://www.clickpass.com is the nicest OpenID provider yet. al3x

Doesn't happen often but I was blown away by a new startup called ClickPass. Think One-Click OpenID! – Paisano

Actually Paisano is now my favourite Clickpass user, he also blogged about us saying

I truly believe they are on to something big here.
I believe this is something everyone is going to use in the near-future. Why not get on board now?

Paisano, if you see this, thanks for your support and we hope we can live up to and beyond your expectations.

The day of the launch was pretty crazy. I woke at 7am in anticipation and for preperation. Plaxo integration was not yet finished and we were planning to launch at 9am. I found a hack around the issue at about 8:40, and then about 10 minutes later, Peter called me and said that the Techcrunch article was live, but the site was still behind a password! So I had to work frantically to disable that and role out the open version. Then 10 minutes later with only a little further testing Plaxo went live, and everything worked!

In terms of numbers, it’s a bit early to really gather much from the number but we had more than a thousand signups just in the first day! When I compare that to revmap (my previous startup, which didn't go anywhere), its like a different world. At the end of the day we do all this work and if no one uses it, it’s a bit of a let down, and I have been there and it was a good learning experience. But when people get it and use it and talk about it that’s a very fulfilling feeling.

Clearly we have lots to do, I feel like there is more work to do now then there was before we launched! But at least the path is very clear, we need more sites, we need to make installation so easy that its trivial, we need to look at our stats and what our users say to figure out how we can improve the experience and we need to add OpenID 2.0 support, and etc etc… Okay well the list is clear but it’s not short.

Anyway, its exciting. So what I learnt:

Doesn’t matter how long you spend before launching there will always be loads of work to do

It feels good when people use your stuff and like it

I like replying to user feedback, its fun. I like having conversations with users.

Friends made over time help in all sorts of subtle ways. That one is vague but I won’t explain further.

Its more obvious what work you should do after launching.

Its fun, but I knew it would be :)

Trends, gaps and trends

noreply@blogger.com (Immad Akhund) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 06:37:00 +0000

I used to think that focus on spotting trends and following them was shallow, or at least I didn't really get the point. I felt that you could just intuit innovative products and that trend followers would always be behind. However, overtime I have come to appreciate the value of trend watching and what one can gain from it.

I realised this recently when I listened to Joi Ito's talk at Le Web 3. This was probably the best talk I have ever heard. I have embedded a video of it below and I highly, highly recommend you watch it. If it does not affect your way of thinking then watch it again :P.

Joi talks about trends in multiplayer gaming (MMO), as well as gaps in the market where he feels innovation could happen. Mainly between gaps in innovation between traditional media, the web and gaming technology. Its very interesting.

That got me thinking.

Firstly my thoughts: Startups are generally most successful when they are innovating something at the edge of a trend. So for example, trying to do a startup in car technology right now would be very hard. You might have something innovative to do there but most of the easy innovations are already taken and you would need lots of money to make and market something significantly better than what exists. Compare this to a 100 years ago ( I don't know anything about car history :) ), a 100 years ago it was possible for an enthusiast to really understand cars and push the technology of the age and even make a very successful company out of it. Even then I am sure it would have taken a lot of money and infrastructure to start a car business, but the cost of starting up a website is much smaller, and the only thing holding one back is a team, creativity and time.

I see innovation on the web like thousands of little ants attacking every single aspect of the web sugar hive. Some get through and make it big, some die in the fight, some make it big and then die from obesity, but generally its all so young that its still there for the taking.

Even within the bigger trend of life moving more online there are many many micro-trends. I think a powerful one that is now springing up, and one that Clickpass is part of, is the distribution of developer work to third parties. This is happening at every level in the stack from Amazon Web Services taking away the need for managing static file storage, and server clouds, to the various javascript and web frameworks and the usage of platforms, like Facebook. Essentially you have to do less to build a fully featured web consumer product and you can do it for cheaper than ever before and make it scale to your needs. I think that's a great and interesting trend, which should lead to further and fast innovation.

There are of course trends happening outside the web that lead to some interesting opportunities. Take for example the trend in the UK for healthier, higher quality groceries. This lead to the rapid rise of Innocent fruit smoothies, which probably at most other times in UK history would have been a complete flop.

So coming back to the web, since I know slightly more about that. Some other interesting trends.

- Virtual Goods. I love these. If you think about it we are all very familiar with virtual goods, music is a virtual good and so are movies. They are packaged up with materials that cost money but essentially we are used to buying virtual goods. So it should not be that surprising that people are actually willing to pay people to buy a powerful sword in a game or to send virtual gifts to people. But having said that I still find it amazing and equally amazing how much money is being made here.

People spend over $1.5 billion on virtual items every year. Pets, coins, avatars, and bling (from tc)

That to me is just astounding, and so out of my world. In some ways I feel that all things with zero marginal costs tend towards becoming free and ad-supported, but maybe I am wrong.

- Mobile. Here is something that for some reason has never really interested me. I think its because the experience is not fulfilling enough compared to the Internet. But it should be fairly obvious that a lot of innovation is happening on the mobile web. There are a lot of mobile web users in the world, with many people in Africa and Asia only experiencing the Internet on there mobile phones. That's pretty crazy.

- China in general. Enough said. Interesting trends. Most Internet users than all of the US shortly (or maybe its already happened).

I am sure there are a lot of other trends. But hopefully I have conveyed to some extent the value of watching your trends. And you should watch this video if you haven't yet ;-)

Me on Intruders.tv!

noreply@blogger.com (Immad Akhund) — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 23:02:00 +0000

I have been meaning to blog about this for ages but you know how busy things can get. I met Vincent, one of the founders of http://intruders.tv towards the end of my time with revmap.com. He did an interview of me and I really liked his attitude and have kept in touch with him since.

When I was going to move to San Francisco, I told him he should get a Valley correspondent, and he asked me whether I would be interested in doing it. I love doing new things and especially things that would make me uncomfortable and expand my horizons, so I jumped at the chance. This has meant that I have had to find interesting people and ask them some interesting questions (isn't life hard :-) ).

About 5 of my interviews are up at the moment at http://us.intruders.tv, but my favourite so far is still my first one, with the founders of Graffiti, the Facebook Application. I am good friends with them and find there story, spirit and drive very inspirational. Here is is below if you missed it:

The Fun of Launch

noreply@blogger.com (Immad Akhund) — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 22:16:00 +0000

There are a few things in life that really excite me, actually a lot of things excite me in life but when it comes to being an entrepreneur the 3 main ones are

having novel ideas,
making something interesting and
launching. Its just so exciting and fun when things I care about launch!

Since Clickpass is yet to launch I have to just get excited about my friends' websites launching. Recently Disqus launched, and since they are my flat-mates I am really excited about their product and how well received it has been. I have incorporated them below, lets see if it works.

Fuzzwich launched a while ago. I was really excited for them as well. Here is a Fuzzwich mini-vid for your pleasure:

Thats pretty awesome. I love those guys. Some other recent launches:

Anywhere.fm - They had like a million songs in a week!
Versionate
Songkick
Draftmix - Is gambling wrong? I don't know.. but I can't wait till these guys are making millions
Bountii
Adpinion
Idiomag - Well it was more of a relaunch but that website is sweet
Academia.edu

I better get back to the very long list of things I have to do today. Have a nice day :)

Tips for founders doing their first tech startup

noreply@blogger.com (Immad Akhund) — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 05:13:00 +0000

After my last post about my first entrepreneurial year. I thought a bit more about what specifically I would tell myself if I could that would have helped in some way to accelerate my learning. Here is what I came up:

Start a blog

It took me about 5 months before I started a blog. I could have started this earlier. It is surprising what I have gained from writing this blog. It has helped me express myself and think things through as well as keep up with friends and others. It also helps to be part of the community to understand it better. Finally its useful to promote your own vision of yourself. Altogether all the reasons and excuses for not doing it that I had didn't amount to anything.

Find a 3rd co-founder

Tony and I were the only founders when we started Revmap. The 3 main reasons why a 3rd person would have helped is:

1. Skills - Would have bought more skills with them and be another person you can depend on.
2. Conflict Resolution - Would have helped resolve conflicts. In any situation it is hard for 2 people to always reach a consensus; a 3rd perspective would have helped.
3. Learning - It takes a particular art to work with teams. I think having a 3rd person would have improved me in this aspect. Also you learn a lot about your co-founder working with them solidly for long periods and so it would have helped increase my understanding of the human character to work with an extra person to that depth.

Some of these arguments can extend to 4 or 5 people and sometimes that makes sense. But there are diminishing returns; and at that point you probably might want to consider dilution as well.

Visit Silicon Valley!

I would issue this one pretty much as a command to my younger self. I don't think Tony would have wanted to move here but visiting would have helped in many ways. It would have helped me understand more about whats necessary to build a successful Internet startup, understand flaws and lacking in Revmap. And of course people doing startups in a similar field and investors.

I think if we had come here early on we would have ended up significantly adapting our idea.

Make more friends with people who are where I want to be

I am not sure about this point, in the sense that I am not sure how I could have executed this better than I did. Again visiting SF/Valley would have helped. But I do firmly believe that the best way to learn is to meet people who are further towards the goal that you strive to achieve.

Conclusion

I have no regrets and I did what I needed to do to. I only write this to better understand what I could have done differently and help others. I still have a long way to go so I will probably be writing something similar next year :-).

My 1st Entrepreneur Year

noreply@blogger.com (Immad Akhund) — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 02:41:00 +0000

It occurred to be me yesterday that it has been 1 year since I started my entrepreneurial adventure. I quit my job on the 2nd of October last year, with a lot of hopes and aspiration and the thought that I could go back to my previous lifestyle if things didn't work out.

A lot has changed in that one year, and happily everything for the better.

A quick summary of what happened, some of these dates might be off:

October '06 - Tony and I quit our jobs and started work on our original idea, a property website. We never really chose a name for it, but lets just call it shadymap.com because we had bought the domain and we were close to using it.

Mid-October '06 - After working on shadymap for a short time, Tony and I decided that for various reason the idea was not going to fly. We started on our first iteration of revmap.com

Mid-November to December '06 - Revmap was initially going to be a yelp for the UK except much more map based and feature-full. In the end we changed our idea because we had a competitor show up on the radar and also we realised that we would probably end up making something that we had no intention of using. We switched gears and started working on what revmap.com eventually became.

January '07 - Revmap was launched to great applause.

Jan - April '07 - Revmap hobbled along, it took a very long time before I was happy that we had all the things we required (and I am still not happy). The marketing never started, the viral growth never came and the motivation evaporated.

May - August '07 - Joined Peter and Pete to do Clickpass.com. Went through Y Combinator and the rest is the present.

That turned out to be more of a story of Revmap than anything else. There is an underlying story that would probably to intricate and subtle to articulate about the friends I made, the things I learned and how I improved as a person.

(On a slight aside; right now I am reading a book and I am finding it hard, to not write this blog post in the style of book, lol)

One of the turning moments for me this year was the point that I came to realise with reasonable certainty that I would never have to go back to a normal job again (excluding acquisitions). After interacting enough in the tech world I came to realise that:

They (we) are all human, with few exceptional skills apart from some common traits like adaptability and "out of the box" thinking.
The fact that I was good at programming and studying CS made my talents relatively rare even amongst entrepreneurs.
I knew enough people I respected and wanted to work with in the future
Once you immerse yourself in this world coming up with ideas stops being the hard part. The ideas are trickling all around me, if I can't come up with one, I can probably speak to 10 people who have their own ideas that they don't have time to do or need an another person to work with them on.

With no shortage of ideas and people, and with the skills that I have. Its pretty clear that I don't need to go back to a job. I also don't see why I would ever want to.

San Francisco finally

noreply@blogger.com (Immad Akhund) — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 05:52:00 +0000

We are now in San Francisco. I have been much worse at updating this blog then I intended, but from now on I won't apologize about that and just post when I can :-).

We are now in the YScraper, it's a pretty crazy place, the view is amazing, this is what I wake up to every morning (that picture doesn't do it justice the panorama is stunning).

I am living on the 12th floor with a couple of guys from the Disqus team. There are also 2 other teams from my Y Combinator batch alone on this floor and I think 4 others from previous Y Combinator batches in the building. We haven't had a chance to hang out much since its only been a couple of days but the atmosphere in here is very friendly and fun.

We (as in clickpass) are just trying to settle into a rhythm and get some work done. We have another 3 months of intense work ahead, should be launched in a couple of months max. Back in the UK after that probably till after Christmas, I apologize to all those people that I didn't get a chance to meet up with while I was in the UK, 1 week is really not very long.

I have had a lot of thoughts about what to blog about but I haven't had time. Right now whats on my mind is how much my body is hurting! I went to the gym yesterday after almost a year of no weight lifting and every muscle in my body is aching! It's a pretty interesting feeling, I am sure all the weight lifters out there know exactly what I mean.

I write in the same way I talk and think. This blog post has bits of it in it which are similar to the way Peter (my cofounder) talks, which is a bit annoying, but spending so long with him means that I start absorbing some of his talking style. I don't think I got a Chinese accent from Tony (my previous cofounder), hehe.

I also recently got an Iphone (not sure if I mentioned that previously) but the prices dropped by $200 today, which is pretty annoying. Also I hacked the phone slightly, and today there was a software update which broke everything and i had to do a hard restore. For me the Iphone has been pretty disappointing in many ways; the battery life is awful, the internet is too slow and the apps are too limited. It is however very cool.

I am going to try to start some cool stuff while I am in San Francisco. I have some ideas but I will let you know how it shapes up. I can say a lot and say nothing at all, its an art really :-).

Current thoughts and what I will be writing next..

noreply@blogger.com (Immad Akhund) — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 16:45:00 +0000

Originally when I started this blog I thought I would blog once a day. I have had a lot of interesting blog worthy thoughts but between working and doing other things I just don't get around to it.

So I am going to post some short thoughts I have had and what I am gonna be blogging in the next few blog posts, that way I will be motivated to do it.

Things I have learnt from Y Combinator dinner speakers - I have not been making notes from what the speakers have said, now I am thinking I should have. Overall similar things are said and I will try to write down a list of things to learn from. It occurred to me that every week we speak to a different millionaire (well maybe not all millionaires, but that's just a number their experience is at least worth that) who give us advise. Thats a pretty rare situation to be in.
Facebook application ideas - Facebook pretty much confirmed to me that they are gonna take over the world with the launch of their platform. At the time I had loads of ideas, and some of them have been done but I will write them down. I know everyones been doing it but mine are better ;-).
40 more things to do in the next few years - I only got to 60. I think I have 10 more now. I am sure if I sat down I could come up with more.
PG Tips - Okay this is not going to be a post, but I just had a cup of PG Tips after 6 weeks and oh my god, its amazing! I can't think of many things more fulfilling than a cup of PG Tips right now. By PG I mean a type of tea in the UK if you thought I meant Paul Graham, then you need to get out a bit more and taste some tea. I offer anyone a cup of proper tea, I make it in a special way so if you think you can do it at home, think again.

I hope everyone who reads this has a lovely day/week/month/life

100 amazing things to do in the next few years

noreply@blogger.com (Immad Akhund) — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 21:51:00 +0000

I keep thinking of and seeing things that I really want to do. I made a list so I don't forget it. Its not completed and I will add to it when I think of more.

Countries to see

Pakistan properly
India
Kashmir
Bhutan
Jordan
Lebanon
Saudi Arabia
Malaysia
Kuwait
Palestine (maybe)
Cuba
Mexico
Peru
Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries
South Africa
Nigeria
Iran
Iraq
Afghanistan
Japan

Great journeys

North Pole
South Pole
Road Trip across america/europe/africa/middle east
Transiberian railway
Orient Express
China to Tibet train journey
Silk Route

Physical

See/Climb the tallest tree in the world in California (what iI saw on TV). If possible rope climb up to the top of one of those massive trees in California.
Bunjee jumping in new zealand.
Paragliding
Handgliding
Sailing
Street car racing in America or Saudi.
Base Jumping of a bridge
Attempts on K2 and Everest

Amazing experiences

Swim with dolphins
Scuba diving over a coral reef.
Horse riding in Mongolia
Camp in the amazon
Working in a service, bottom of the pile kinda job in a third world country. Not cleaning, maybe stall seller or cook
Something culinary, haven't decided quite what. Maybe the most expensive beef in the world from Japan, its made in a really funny way according to Jude.
Seal hunting in Norway (or maybe some other scandinavian country). I have a book on this guy who did it, sounds intense.
Dog racing in Canada. I mean the huskie stuff where you are pulled along.
Riding an elephant on a longish trek. There is a farm somewhere in India where they ride elephants everywhere. Pretty crazy.
Carnival in Brazil
Tomato festival in Spain
Bull race in Spain
Floating on the red and dead seas
Panama Canal
Sues Canal
Island hopping in Greece
Observing a massive huricane in the Gulf of Mexico. With a twister. this ones a bit destructive, but I wanna see it.
Solar eclipse
Going to space
Seeing the plateau in Chille in the Andes
Budhist carvings in Afghanistan
Pyramids in Egypt
Pyramids in Peru
Northern Lights

Things to learn

Flying a jet
Flying a helicopter
Learn Spanish
Learn Hindi and Urdu properly
Learn French (maybe)
Some more dances. Or maybe just get good at Salsa
Kali or Screema martial art. (spelling may be wrong)
I feel like there must be more, but I can't think of it right now

Thats about 60 I think, that was a fun list to make, I recommend you do it for yourself. I am sure a lot could be added and if I think of 40 more I will probably post them. Feel free to suggest things. I have left learning a jet, helicopter and going to space in there, but i don't think I will get around to those for quite a while.

Who wants to join me?

Boston and Beyond

noreply@blogger.com (Immad Akhund) — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 02:46:00 +0000

So finally I have some time and feel like writing something on this blog. I feel very good and everything is going well, which is pretty cool.

Its been 2 weeks since we have been in Boston, the first week seemed to take a long time to go through but this week was a lot faster, presumably because I am getting into some rhythm.

I did a lot of shopping in the first few days. Combine, cheap products, great currency exchange, the feeling of being on holiday and having a salary after 7 months, meant that shopping was actually quite fun. Also Heathrow lost my bags for 4 days so I had to buy some clothes. I even got trainers (sneakers here :) ) for $17 with my other $80 trainers, nice ones.

A lot of people eat out everyday, kinda gets a bit sickening. I have got myself a cheap bike (from Target), which is really useful but gives me less of an excuse to not go to the supermarket.

I slept on Pete’s bed for the first week, I would have slept on the sofa bed but he loved the sofa bed. But now I am living in an amazing place with another Y Combinator team, Crystal Ballers (picture dedicated to them). These guys are from Microsoft, and are pretty cool. Right now I am sitting in their lounge and they are talking in a very involved way about guids, I think they have said the made-up word guid at least 20 times in the last 2 minutes.

Enema, does everyone in the UK know what this means? Savraj (a Crystal Baller) wouldn’t tell me what it meant so I was forced to ask him loudly in a supermarket many many times, hehe.

We have some pretty cool offices and have made really good progress on our prototype in this week. The first week was slow with loads of distractions, no server, general lack of rhythm and it seemed to take forever. Now I am waking up at 7:30, going for a run, getting in the office for 9:15 working staying till on average 8:30pm, getting home, having dinner with the either Pete*2 or Crystal Ballers. With regular entrepreneurial meet-up and some random events distributed throughout. Its actually a massively immersive experience, everyone is talking about their ideas, we are always talking about our ideas, very few distractions.

A lot can be said about immersive experiences, it is possible to reach a reasonable immersion in London but this is far more extreme. I think immersion does speed up the learning experience a lot. I think its possible to have immersive experiences in things apart from entrepreneurialism, such as art, sport etc. Although I haven’t really cared about anything else as much for as long a period.

Having said that, I have actually stopped reading tech news as much as I was before. I think I reached the point where I realised I was spending a lot of time on it and not learning that much. Tim Ferris in his book recommends that you limit reading news to less than 4 hours a month and instead just ask knowledgeable people for news, that seems like a sensible plan, although I am still going to read 15 mins or so every day.

Is it weird that I like people that are similar to me? Actually I don’t mean “I like them” I mean respect. I think its because I try to aspire to qualities that I respect and develop them in myself so I have assimilated these qualities to some extent over time. Therefore if I see them in others I like them and they are generally similar to me.

Paul Graham is pretty cool, he seems to have a celebrity status with a lot of people and I have never really felt the whole celebrity thing for anyone, but here is a rough quote from Paul Graham that I liked:

"If you have something that will excite some people and piss off others, do it, because most startups go through their life and never excite anyone"

My interview on intruders.tv!

noreply@blogger.com (Immad Akhund) — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 12:20:00 +0000

This has been up on my Facebook for a few days so a lot of you have probably seen it. I did an interview with Vincent Camara from intduers.tv about a month and a half ago, while I was still with revmap.com.

Its pretty interesting, sums up my time at revmap and my thoughts for the last 7 months quite well. It is weird listening to your own voice. The bit about investment is amusing.

From learning to intuition

noreply@blogger.com (Immad Akhund) — Mon, 21 May 2007 10:30:00 +0000

"Countersteering is the name given to the counter-intuitive technique used by cyclists and motorcyclists to turn corners. It is the only way a rider can cause a single-track vehicle to turn."

In order to turn a motorcycle that is going even slightly fast you have to turn the handlebars very slightly in the wrong direction! I have been riding a road race bicycle for a long time and I never really noticed this phenomena because on a light bike you can just force a turn using body weight, on a motorbike that's pretty much impossible.

When I was first told about it, I was a bit skeptical but having tried it out a lot I have figured out the logic and its actually become very intuitive. The first few times when I didn't get it I managed to steer in the wrong direction and almost hit a van, which was pretty scary.

Whats interesting about things that become intuitive is that we often forget why we get them or why they work. I have always been bad at things I can't intuit and I have to just learn, art (as in paintings), quantum physics and the y combinator (the concept) are examples of things I never really got a true intuitive grasp of.

What would be really good is if I could come up with or find a method of being able to convert any concept from learning to intuition very fast. Or maybe that's just the process of learning and takes time.

I have never been very good at languages, mainly because I just don't get them intuitively, its a lot of hard work in learning a bunch of vocab, but it would be nice if I could just get it.

I recently watched the video below (saw it here), I really liked what Tim Ferriss said, what particularly peaked my attention is his ability to learn languages very fast, he says it takes him a month and he has a technique of focusing on the most used 20% of the vocab. I bought his book, will read it soon.

http://www.youtube.com/v/UcqcWVZJPb0