Joshua Saunders

A lot of you are young professionals, still in college, maybe even some high school readers.  And even if you’re not so young anymore, but trying to make a change in your life, heed this advice.

I have mentored younger people (I’m not so old myself) for a couple years.  On occassion I will get the question.  The one that is so completely broad and generic that most peopel would struggle to offer one piece of advice.  “What can I do to become more successful?”

Here is the one piece of advice I will always offer.  Get Involved!  Philanthropy doesn’t have to mean doing dirty work, although you may have to hit the streets and get your hands dirty.  There are thousands of organizations looking for help.  The key is to find something you are interested in and join organizations related to it.  If you don’t know what you want to do, pick a couple different areas and test the waters.  Volunteer at a homeless shelter, help out at a local art museum, assist the local animal shelter, help with underpriveleged kids, … the list goes on and on.

The value of philanthropy and donating your time to worthy causes is beyond just feeling good.  It will open your eyes to the problems your community is faced with, make you a more well-rounded individual, and hopefully expand your interests.  And it’s great for your personal and business life.  You will be able to meet new people, take on leadership roles, and have the opportunity to play an active part in making your community a better place.

Michael Arrington was on Happy Hour (Fox Business Channel) yesterday talking about the Yahoo layoffs, upcoming recession and it’s affects on online advertising revenue, and availability of venture capital for new startups.  Interesting segment (he claims he was taken off guard on the topic because he was there to talk about the election, but he did alright).

A new startup called ControlC runs all copy and paste functions through a web service.  Essentially when you copy something, a permanent copy is saved to your account.  You can then go back through your permanent clipboard online or share items on your clipboard publicly.

Which brings me to the questions… what’s the point?  I can’t recall any time where I have wanted to share information on my clipboard with the public.  Or anytime I wanted information on my clipboard from 2 weeks ago.  If MSWord ever asks me on close whether I want to keep the contents on the clipboard, I answer no.  If there was a quick button to see your clipboard history, then fine, but logging in to an online account to get this info is a hassle.

But if you want to try them out, they’re in private beta.  Use code beta4040 when signing up.

It’s been speculated for months, the only thing in debate was the number.  Today Yahoo finally announced their layoffs… 1000.  This accounts for approximately 7% of the 14,300 employees at the Sunnyvale company.  The layoffs were announced after Yahoo reported a 23% drop in profit for the fourth quarter.  In turn, Yahoo shares dropped 10% in extended trading (announcement was made after the market closed).  Profit for all of 2007 fell 12% to $660mm.

I’m not going to lie, I am a big fan of Obama.  And whether you agree with me or not, it is clearly evident his supporters are using the net more than any other candidate.  Over the last few years, the role of bloggers and grassroots supporters has opened up a new medium for political campaigning.

A few days ago, Christopher Pedregal and Eric Park, two Stanford grad students, started the website YouBama.com.  The website allows users to upload videos talking about why they support Obama.  Viewers can rate videos up or down.  Nice and simple concept!

Over the last few weeks, I have received more emails from blog readers about virtual assistants than anything else.  So thought I would provide an update on how everything is working out and provide some advice on the best ways to handle a virtual assistant to maximize your time and money.

Here is how my assistant has done on some of the following tasks:

Task: Find software vendors with experience in a specific niche of online gaming
Result:  Quickly sent me a spreadsheet of over a dozen companies with contact people, information and websites for each.  Good job.

Task:  Detailed research on the liquor industry including trending, growth, sales, margins, legal implications and licensing, info on manufacturers, etc…
Hasn’t done a good job to date.  The data on sales and growth was very dated (1994, 1995 and 2002) and unusuable.  The information on licensing was too specific to random states, like Alaska.  Information on manufacturers was partially related to wine and beer when I needed it on distilled spirits.

Task:  Catalog products from a website by category into a spreadsheet
Done very quickly and the spreadsheet was exactly as planned.

So as you can tell, he hasn’t done well with research and information gathering, but does a good job with word processing type tasks.  Unfortunately, I need more than this, so we’ll see how he holds up with some more challenging tasks.

Some advice on how to get the most of your VA (if they’re from another country):
1)  Speak clearly and succintly.  Give direct orders.  Do not worry about coming off sounding rude.
2)  Tell the VA specifically how much time you want them to spend on the task or a time limit.  Otherwise they may be off spending 20 hours on a simple 2 hour task.
3)  Give a firm deadline.
4)  Give feedback after tasks are completed.  Let them know if something isn’t exactly to your liking or not what you were looking for.
5)  On more complicated tasks, make sure they understand the background of how and why you need the information you do.  This will help them deliver better results.

Semantic search companies have been clawing at the major engines and niche engines on sites related to travel.  Websites such as Semantinet.com, Powerset.com, TrueKnowledge.com, and now Circos.com try to provide more valuable information.

How they work:  The semantic engines browse the web for more in-depth information than regular search engines.  For instance, Circos has just come out in the hotel and restaurant categories, where you can search for places in a given location that have certain attributes.  I searched Chicago for trendy and cheap restaurants with a good ambience.  The first result is Quartino, which is a place I actually like (good work Circos!).  They take reviews from all over the web, aggregate the information into their own ratings and spit out the results.

I think semantic search is great, especially for finding restaurants.  But what these engines need to do is integrate with strategic partners that can find these useful.  Who is going to leave Orbitz or Travelocity or Hotels.com to go to another search engine?  Semantic search needs to be integrated into these sites, or places like OpenTable, if they really plan on getting the traffic they need and deserve.

An article last week stated that VC investments in 2007 were at the highest level since 2001, with forecasters predicting this will grow.  Recently we have seen tons of funding rounds close, some of them seem like incredibly bad investments.  Such as the recent $6 million Series B for MixerCast.  I mean, they have a cool little piece of technology, but no revenue model, no users, and repeatable code (it doesn’t take a genius to make a copycat site).  Flashbacks to 2000!  The liquidity is flying for any piece of technology written in the trendiest programming language (today that’s AJAX).

And it’s not the VC’s to blame.  They are making good exits.  Large companies are buying up any piece of technology or code they could find.  The problem lies shortly down the road when these companies realize they have a portfolio full of crappy tidbits of technology no one is interested in anymore and have no promise of generating revenue.  Once this hits, the money will slow down.

Are VC’s moving to later stage investing already?  Index Ventures just started a $577 million late stage growth fund called Index Ventures Growth I.  From a company who has mainly invested in seed and early stage, such as MySQL and Skype, this is a pretty big shift.

This week has been big for the Chicago tech scene and entrepreneurs in the midwest.  A couple big stories coming out of the Windy City.

The first big one is TicketsNow (announced 2 days ago) which was bought by InterActiveCorp (Ticketmaster) for $265 million.  TicketsNow is the second biggest secondary market ticket seller website.  A great exit for the Rolling Meadows based company that received over 1.5 million unique visitors in December.  They will now have to battle it out with the largest secondary seller, StubHub.

A few weeks ago I wrote about a new website called Songza, which was created by the guys at Humanized.  The team was snatched up by Mozilla in a sort of talent acquisition.  Congrats guys on your success!

I thought I would follow up my last post about the value of an advisory board, by throwing out a little feeler to any of my blog readers.  I have started a new venture recently which is related to online multiplayer software, in-game advertising and product placements, and the gaming industry.  At the present time, I am trying to raise the necessary seed funding of $600,000.

If you are interested in helping out an entrepreneur and acting in an advisory role, I would really like to talk to you.  The time committment would not be great and you would really be playing an instrumental difference in getting a new business venture get off the ground.  Ideally, I am looking for people with significant experience in sales and marketing, current or past executives, successful entrepreneurs or past successful early stage investors, or someone with a strong familiarity of the gaming industry (or poker industry).

If you are interested in joining my advisory board or helping out in any way (even if just to talk on the phone for some advice), I would love to talk with you or grab lunch or drinks some time.  Please email me at josh at joshuasaunders.com.