Archive for 2007

FilmLoop – A Further Caution to Entrepreneurs

I wrote earlier about the costs and benefits of taking venture capital funding (or any outside funding for that matter). It basically boils down to control of your company. Obviously outside investors want to be compensated for their investment in your company, and you satiate them with equity. However, by giving up equity, not only do you give up a portion of the business’s profits, you also give up control. Not only do larger stakeholders control more votes, outside investors may also require you to sign special agreements that give them first rights to the proceeds if your company is ever liquidated or sold. This means that if they invested $10 million, and your startup is liquidated for only $3 million, you don’t get anything, the entire selling price goes to recoup the outside investment.

FilmLoop.com provides a horror story about what can happen if you give up too much control to outside investors…

Over the past year, 3 year old company FilmLoop experienced first hand many of the worst case scenarios an business risks when they sign on the dotted line with a venture firm. FilmLoop raised $12.5 million in funding through two rounds, the first with Guy Kawasaki’s Garage Ventures($5 million), and the second, a $7.5 million round, with ComVentures in May of 2006. Things were going well in August 2006, when the company launched version 2.0 of their web app.

However, in November of 2006, ComVentures received pressure from it’s limited partners to consolidate its portfolio and squeeze cash from non-profitable startups. This seems to have included FilmLoop. ComVentures needed its money out of FilmLoop, and the only way to do that was through a sale. They told FilmLoop they had to sell by the end of the year, leaving the team only 6 weeks to find a buyer, negotiate a deal, go through due diligence, and finalize the sale. Not surprisingly, no buyers stepped forward on such short notice. Except one.

Fabrik, another one of ComVentures portfolio companies, was suggested by the ComVentures partners as a possible acquirer. With FilmLoop unable to find any other interested parties, the venture capitalists on FilmLoop’s board force its sale to Fabrik for just over $3 million – only slightly more than FilmLoop possessed in cash – in December, 2006.

Because of the equity and influence FilmLoop’s external investors received in exchange for their investment, the FilmLoop team was able to do little to prevent the sale. But that’s not the worst of it. Because of a liquidation preference agreement FilmLoop had signed when it took ComVenture’s investment, the founders and employees walked away with nothing. ComVentures took the entire $3 million to recoup its investment, and Fabrik (ComVentures owned) got FilmLoop’s technology.

So what can we as entrepreneurs learn from FilmLoop’s loss?

When you sign on the dotted line, don’t let the venture gold blind you to the fine print. Most term sheets have a number of trapdoors and parachutes to allow the investor to bail early and as safely as possible. Always be sure exactly what you’re getting, and exactly what you’re giving up to get it. When picking an outside investor, don’t just examine their offer’s monetary value. Make sure you know and trust everyone that will have a hand in your business.

Thanks to TechCrunch for the scoop on FilmLoop.

February is Blogtipping Month

Inspired by Ben Yoskovitz mentioning Ready Fire Aim in his blogtipping post, I’ve decided to catch the bug and do one of my own. Blogtipping is a simple concept -

1. Choose 3 blogs (I’ve chosen 4 though)
2. Make a list of 3 things you like about each one
3. Make one tip as to how each blog could be improved

Most of the blogs listed below are entrepreneurship focused, however, I’ve included a web design and technology related blog as well. Hopefully I’ve included one or two you haven’t heard of before…

Blog #1: OnStartups by Dharmesh Shah – Feed

• I love Dharmesh’s writing style, it’s very hands on and direct. I find it easy to immediately apply his tips in my day to day life.
• The “Pithy Insights” posts are brilliant. Often lists like these are generic, but Dharmesh’s are always unique and on point.
• Dharmesh writes regularly, and his post length is long enough to be thorough, but not so long that he drones on.
• Tip: Work a little on your design. The header is excellent looking, but once the reader gets down to the content of the blog, things are a little muddy. The tags and social bookmarking links are kind of jumbled, and it looks like you’re not exactly sure where they should go.

Blog #2: Bokardo by Joshua Porter – Feed

• I like the 3 column layout. Most of the time I think 3 columns is too much for a blog, but Josh’s flow together nicely, and contain relevant information.
• The “Colophon” box in the footer is an excellent touch. It makes me feel like Josh is not only instructing me in design with his content, but also wants to use the design of his blog as a teaching point, and exposing his color and font choices makes it easier for other designs to be inspired by his.
• Josh seems to make an effort to write to promote conversation. Almost all his posts either ask questions of his readers, or express his viewpoint, while leaving the topic open for discussion.
• (Bonus praise) Josh includes a RSS subscription link at the bottom of every post, prompting readers to subscribe if they liked his article. A good way to grab subscribers.
• Tip: I’m not sure I’m a fan of the excerpts on the front page. Some of them aren’t long enough to indicate the subject of the article. I’d suggest reducing the number of posts that appear on the frontpage, but including their full text.

Blog #3: WorkHappy by Carson McComas – Feed

• I love that Carson prominently displays a “submit” link where readers can submit content to his blog.
• The “Happy Quote” feature that is sprinkled throughout the content provides great quotes (I love quotes) amd breaks up the long blocks of text.
• Normally I skip over recommended reading sections, but Carson’s caught my eye. Most of his selections are extremely relevant, and I’m tempted to grab one or two on them from Amazon on his recommendation.
• Tip: I’d like it if your design was centered on the page. To me, it feels as though the whole site is sliding off the bottom-left of the page (especially at higher resolutions). Don’t change your design, just center the whole thing on the page, to distribute the whitespace evenly on either side.

Blog #4: The Entrepreneurial Mind by Jeff Cornwall – Feed

• It’s great to read about entrepreneurship from someone who’s made it his career to study and teach it. Jeff’s posts have an educational quality to them that is really unique, and I feel he’s writing to teach, not just to garner page impressions.
• I enjoy that Jeff occasionally strays from purely entrepreneurial content, sometimes writing on politics, economics, and world events. However, he always brings it back to how it affects the entrepreneur.
• I like the list of the 5 most recent posts at the very top of the homepage. It makes it easy to read the headlines and jump to a post I may have missed, without scrolling.
• Tip: So much great content, and unfortunately not a lot of feedback. Try to make an effort to encourage discussion in the comments section. Leave part of the issue open for debate, or ask a question of your audience. After all, what teacher doesn’t like a little participation!

That’s it for this time, I hope I’ve opened your eyes to some new voices, and been helpful to those blog authors highlighted above. See everyone next time.

Why Net Neutrality is Crucial for Entrepreneurship

If you’re not familiar with net neutrality, read up on Wikipedia.

I wrote before about the defeat of Senate bill HR5252, which would have dealt a major blow to network neutrality and changed the internet as we know it. There is still an uphill battle to be fought, however things are looking rosier. The November elections ousted many of the congressmen and women that were against net neutrality, a bipartisan neutrality bill has been introduced, and Ed Markey, chairman of the senate subcommittee that oversees telecommunication, has promised to keep the net neutrality ball rolling.

So why does this matter for entrepreneurs?

If the internet becomes a privileged medium, accessible only to those with deep pockets, then the traditional and unique equal footing that has been the hallmark of the internet will be lost. New companies will find it much harder to break in and thrive, reminding me of more traditional media outlets that are dominated by a few players, with high barriers to entry (see television, radio, publishing). Many of today’s most successful Internet companies (Amazon.com, eBay) began as small independent start-ups that thrived because of the Internet’s inherent freedom. Without that freedom, America’s small businesses will suffer.

Startups are small, cash strapped entities trying to pick themselves up by the bootstraps and wrest a market segment away from the big boys. Often those big boys have names like “Google”, “Yahoo”, “Facebook”, and “MySpace”. On a non-neutral internet, these big boys would have plenty of cash to play by the telco’s new rules, and ensure that their content continues to get served up at top speed to the web surfing public.

Your startup already has enough trouble hiring developers, creating buzz, drawing users, paying lawyers, and putting food on the table. Now not only do you have to do those things, you need to match Google and Yahoo’s tithe to the telcos to ensure that people can even access your site. And I hope you can pay for the same level of access they can afford, because we know web surfers aren’t going to wait more than 5 seconds for the next great thing, when the same comfortable thing loads instantly.

As the world’s last truly free and equal communication medium, the internet must remain neutral. I’d encourage all entrepreneurs (not just American, it’s not called the world wide web for nothing) to contact your political representatives and encourage them to vote for network neutrality.

David Armand does “Torn”

I have to take a break from practical fare to share these two videos from mime and comedian David Armand. Normally I don’t get this excited about mimes, but Mr. Armand’s rendition of Natalie Imbruglia’s hit song “Torn” is amazing. Words do not do it justice, you need to see it to understand the genius. This is Armand live with Natalie Imbruglia at Amnesty International’s Secret Policeman’s Ball. Watch Natalie closely at the end…

Continue reading…

Resume Tips

Here are a few tips for composing and designing your resume. Most of these come from my own experience, some come directly from the advice given to me at the WFU career center.

1.) Be accomplishment-driven not responsibilities-driven
Eliminate phrases like “duties included” and “responsible for” from your resume. Most employers can easily infer from a job title the basic responsibilities you had. Instead of listing them, describe how you applied your personal skills on the job – your work ethic, ingenuity, etc. These are the skills that translate across jobs, and that employers are looking for.

2.) Focus on describing skills demonstrated, not activities done
When writing about your past experiences, try to focus on the skills you demonstrated at that job, rather than just describing what you did there.

3.) Use powerful verbs
Don’t start sentences with “I”. Rather, begin with an action verb such as “managed” or “coordinated”. The noun is unnecessary, clearly you’re describing yourself!

4.) Justify your text, don’t use left align
Justified text looks better on the page, because it fills up the entire line. It will also help your resume stand out from everyone else’s with left aligned text.

5.) Use a standard font, but not Times New Roman
Another tip to make your resume stand out in the pile. Don’t be temped to use any curly or outrageous fonts. Pick something businesslike and relatively plain, such as Georgia, Arial, or Trebuchet.

6.) Send your resume in PDF format, not MS Word
When sending your resume electronically, make sure you save your resume as a PDF file. The best advantage to you when using PDF is that you ensure your formatting remains intact. Spacing, fonts, emphasis, margins, everything is preserved when you convert to PDF. No matter what, your resume displays the way you want it to. The only exception to sending in PDF is when a company specifically requests a resume in a certain format (usually because they plan to process it electronically).

I hope these tips are useful to all the job/internship seekers out there, especially college students who may not have written a resume before.

Almost Every Sports Logo Ever

At first I was just going to add this to my link feed in the footer, but I think it’s cool enough to deserve it’s own post. If you visit SportsLogos.net you will find high resolution logos from almost every sports to to ever play. Not only do they have all the major sports like football, basketball, baseball, hockey, and more.

In addition, they’re not constrained to only logos from the major leagues (NFL, MLB, etc), they have logos from smaller and more obscure leagues like Roller Hockey International. They also have a full catalog of logos from defunct leagues like the XFL.

The catalog isn’t constrained to pro leagues either. College sports are well represented by past and present NCAA teams, in all divisions and conferences, in lots of sports.

And as if that still weren’t enough, they also have a chronological history of all the logos every team in their massive database has EVER used throughout their history.

The archive also contains logos for sports related events or groups that aren’t teams per say, for example every games’ Summer Olympics logo or the NBA’s Eastern Conference.

All in all, it’s a fun browse if you’re a sports fan, or even a designer looking for artwork (remember copyright laws if you use them for commercial purposes).

Highlights of 2006

OK, so this is two weeks late, but here are my blogging highlights of 2006:

1.) Entrepreneurship Series – A series of posts detailing various facets of entrepreneurship – Finding and Taking Venture Capital Funding, Web Design Tips for Startup Companies, Exit Strategies, and a study on “What Makes a Successful Entrepreneur?”.

2.) Verizon Wireless Cell Phone Internet Walkthroughs – A very popular pair of posts detailing how to use your Verizon phone to get internet anywhere you have a cell signal. Windows or Mac OS X.

3.) Total Redesign – I completely redesigned the site (which obviously includes this blog) based on the Hemingway theme for WordPress.

4.) Featured on startupspark.com – Benjamin Yoskovitz listed Ready Fire Aim on startupspark.com as one of the best entrepreneurship blogs, and my post on Exit Strategies was mentioned in his article “You Need an Exit Strategy Before you Even Start”.

5.) I also dipped my toes into politics and government (thanks to my Comparative Government professor Dr. Siavelis for inspiring me) in my post on two round election systems, an American third party, and how both could improve our political climate for voters and politicians of both parties.

Those were pretty much the highlights of my first year of blogging (not bad for only starting in August!). I hope everyone enjoyed reading Ready Fire Aim, I enjoyed writing it. I hope 2007 is just as rewarding.

PS – You can see a preview of some things I’m planning to cover in 2007 in the Merry Christmas post and the post announcing the new design.

Crucial WordPress Plugins

I’ve promised a post on all the plugins I use here on Ready Fire Aim, and that every blog should use to increase traffic and usability. I won’t focus as much on SEO in this post, however, some of these plugins will certainly help readers not only discover your blog, but encourage them to click around once they’ve arrived, increasing pageviews and ad impressions. Some others on the list exist only to make your job easier as a blogger. So here we go -

• Akismet

Yes it comes with newer versions of WordPress, but it’s still worth highlighting. Akismet will almost eliminate spam comments on your blog. It does this by checking all submitted comments against a common database shared by all Akismet users (read, almost every WordPress blog in existence), so it’s extremely accurate. TechCrunch has caught over 1,000,000 spam comments with Akismet. Enable it if you haven’t already.

• Custom Admin Menu

This plugin allows you to organize your WordPress Administrator menus in any way you like. This becomes especially useful as you install lots of plugins, each with a separate configuration page.

• deli.cio.us cached++

Automatically grabs your latest tagged links from Deli.cio.us and displays them on your blog. Great for links that don’t deserve their own post, but are worth sharing with your readers. You can see it in action on the bottom right of my footer.

• Firestats

Simply the best statistics package for WordPress I’ve come across. Tracks all referring links, so you can see where your traffic is comings from. Also breaks down your visitors by operating system, browser, and country. Extremely useful, in a narcissistic way.

• Feedburner Feed Replacement

Another stat tracking plugin, this one ensures that all your feed subscribers go through FeedBurner. If you don’t use FeedBurner, it’s something you should look into. It gives you total control over your feed, the option to add some extras, and the ability to track how many feed subscribers you have.

• runPHP

A little more hardcore than some bloggers may need, this plugin allows you to run blocks of PHP code inside your posts. I use it to generate the direction listings in my Files section.

• Similar Posts

You can see this post in action in the sidebar of every post on this site. It compares the text of the post currently being displayed with all the other posts on your site, and displays links to those it deems most relevant. This is a good way to make your site “sticky”, so visitors will click around, instead of just reading one post and leaving.

• WordPress Reports

Another statistics package, which compliments FireStats very nicely. Whereas Firestats gives a nice view of the past 24 hours, WordPress Reports integrates with Google Analytics and Feedburner to provide all kinds of useful stats for the past week and month, and shows you how they compare to the week or month before that. Lets you see which posts are “hot” and which are cooling off.

That’s pretty much everything I use here, I’ll probably post again on this topic in a few months, as I find more useful plugins. Until then, enjoy these, I hope they make blogging easier and more fun for you and your readers.

WordPress Plugins for SEO

Almost everyone has heard of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). What is it? Wikipedia defines SEO as “…a subset of search engine marketing that seeks to improve the number and quality of visitors to a web site from “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.” Put in plain english, SEO is anything you do to your website to maximize it’s visibilty in Google, Yahoo, MSN, and any other search engine spider that comes crawling your way.

So what are some things that you can do to move your site up in the rankings? If you use WordPress, as many blogs do, you can start by installing the following plugins to give yourself a leg-up on the competition. You can see them all in action on billda.com.

• Google Sitemap Generator

This plugin will automatically generate a Google Sitemap for all the pages in your WordPress database, and resubmit your sitemap to Google whenever you post something new. A sitemap tells Google where all the pages on your site are, and increases the chance that Google will fully index all your content.

• Head META Generator

Automatically inserts a meta description tag for your blog, inserting a dynamic description depending on the page being viewed. Search engines use this tag to link your site with search keywords, and to generate a short summary of what your site is about.

• Optimal Title

Replaces the default wp_title() function that generates titles in the form “Blog Name -> Post Name”. This format doesn’t put your content first, and can be confusing in search results. The plugin changes the default behavior to generate titles in the more readable “Postname -> Blog Name” format.

• Permalink Redirect

Ensures that there is only one URL for each blog entry. By default, WordPress with accept URLs with or without a trailing slash. However, this means there are actually two URLs for each blog entry, and your hits and linkbacks will be split between the two. Permalink Redirect uses a search engine friendly 301 redirect to ensure your site isn’t penalized by Google or sabotaged by your competitors.

That’s all I’ve got in terms of SEO, however in the next few days I’ll have a post detailing ALL my favorite WordPress Plugins (and everything I use on this site).