Summer Internship at KeyBanc Capital Markets

Again I find myself making excuses for not blogging frequently, but this post is just that: The reason I haven’t blogged recently is I’ve started as a Summer Analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets in Charlotte. I’m working specifically with the Industrial Group, dealing with Industrial Technology and Transportation & Logistics. Through KeyBank, we are able to offer a full range of investment banking services, including M&A advisory, credit, equity underwriting, and more.

Specifically, my ~70 hour weeks are spent making pitch books, models, doing equity research, and developing value added ideas for our clients. Almost every day I deal with a new company, a new deal, a new industry segment. I’m learning a lot, not just about the sectors we deal with, but about investment banking in general. So I’m creating a “Finance and Economics” category here on the blog, where I will post general tips, lessons learned, and my own distilled experience.

I’ll do my best to post regularly, both for my own benefit and everyone else’s. Hopefully this category can become a reference for college students wondering what investment banking is like.

Use your “What” to find your “Why”

Recently, Philip Kaplan (aka “Pud”, founder of Adbrite and FuckedCompany.com) was emailed a question by a single mother looking to get her life back on track. Philip answered the question on his blog, and I found his answer particularly fascinating and relevant. The full text of Philip’s answer is replicated below:

Some people know what their passion is. Unfortunately, you do not. But I’m going to help you find it.

Here’s what you do:

Ask yourself, if you could do ANYTHING in the world, what would it be? What’s the ultimate fantasy that you’ll probably never actually achieve, but would be awesome? Rock star? Movie starlet? Teacher? Birthday party clown? Brad Pitt’s wife? That’s the “WHAT.”

Now ask yourself, “WHY?”

For example, my “WHAT” was “be a rock star heavy metal drummer!” Upon further analysis, my “WHY” was “I want to do something creative. I want freedom. I want to affect lots of people.”

As it turns out, there were about a million different more tangible things I could do, that would satisfy my “WHY.” That’s why I became a freelance web programmer: creativity, freedom, and the opportunity to reach the masses.

What’s your “WHAT?” What’s your “WHY?” You’ll be surprised how easy it is to satisfy your WHY, once you’ve figured out what it is.

I found that, as a college student rapidly approaching graduation, Philip’s advice to identify your “why” instead of focusing on your “what” was especially pertinent as I considered my long term career and happiness goals. I also think that his advice is helpful to entrepreneurs casting about for some direction in life. Many are so focused on becoming the next Web 2.0 darling, that I think they may have lost sight of why they embarked on an entrepreneurial career path in the first place.

Do what you love. Follow your why. The rest will fall into place.

How To Get Rid of Snap! Link Previews Forever

I hate Snap! Previews. You know, those little bubble icons like this that appear after every link on so many blogs (most notably TechCrunch). Their uselessness has been pointed out before by such big name blogs as Lorelle on WordPress and Performancing. Lorelle says “Personally, I consider these Snap Previews a blight on the web” and Performancing’s David Krug says that Snap Preview is ruining your blog.

Snap Previews take extra time to load, are not accessible, and are generally annoying when they popup under your cursor. So, here’s how you can disable them for good, across all the sites you visit:

1. Find a website that uses Snap Previews. If you can’t think of one off the top of your head, use TechCrunch.
2. After the page has loaded completely, trigger a snap preview by hovering over a link or Snap Preview icon. If all goes according to plan, this is the last Snap Preview you will ever see.
3. Click the “Options & Disable” link in the top right of the preview (see screenshot, click for larger version)

4. Click Bubble Disable for “ALL SITES” (see screenshot, click for larger version)

5. Click “Close Options” and click off of the preview. You’ll never see another Snap Preview again!

StumbleUpon, Spam Comments, and Why I Haven’t Blogged in a Month

Let me start with an apology for my, how shall I put it … less than prolific blogging over the past month. Ironically, I released the Ready Fire Aim RSS Widget, and then didn’t follow it with any content in my feed! I’ve been extremely busy with mid term exams (thank you, WFU Calloway School of Business and Accountancy). After two weeks of 5AM bedtimes and 9AM alarm clocks, I took a week off and headed to the beach to relax and catch up on sleep.

Imagine my surprise when I came back today to find that this post had received over 2,500 hits in just a few days. This seemed strange to me because the Windows version of the walkthrough had always been more popular. After checking my referrer logs, I realized that almost all of the traffic was coming from StumbleUpon. I’d heard of StumbleUpon before, but had never actually tried it. Spurred by this influx of traffic to my blog, I installed the StumbleUpon toolbar. This thing is addictive. Every time I press the “stumble” button, I’m presented with a new site I’ve never seen before. I can even customize which types of sites I’m interested in. At first I had expected that the service would be vulnerable to spammers and commercial sites with no real content, however, I learned that there is an approval system for paid content, and user feedback is also considered when displaying sites (similar to Digg). What a great time waster!

Speaking of spam, in addition to the 2,500+ hits on the Verizon/OS X walkthrough, I also received just over 800 pieces of comment spam, all of it caught by Akismet (and with no false positives too!). This means that 30% of all the visits to that article during the past week were by spam bots (and that’s just the ones that figured out how to leave a comment). This seems a huge number to me, especially when it seems that the spike in spam was correlated to the spike in traffic from StumbleUpon. The reason I find it strange is that I cannot find a link to my site anywhere on StumbleUpon.com – it seems the only way to find my article is by pressing the “stumble” button on the toolbar. This means that typical web crawling spam bots wouldn’t find me, and that those bots that did must somehow be surfing through the StumbleUpon service.

Can anyone that uses StumbleUpon take a guess as to why this might be? Is there an HTML link somewhere on StumbleUpon’s site that I missed? Let me know in the comments.

Ready Fire Aim RSS Widget Released

I few days ago, there was a post on Digg highlighting a Digg-style WordPress Admin Dashboard theme. It was by aspiring designer Teddy Hwang. Curious after reading the Digg story, I found my way over to Teddy’s site, and was immediately impressed with his blog’s design. I noticed Teddy had just begun something called Project Widget. In an attempt to further hone his design skills, Teddy is creating OS X Dashboard widgets for free. The widget conveniently pulls in all the most recent articles from your blog (via RSS), and displays them on the OS X dashboard. Teddy will create a custom themed widget for any webmaster that asks him, so if you want a custom-designed widget of your own, use the Project Widget link above to request one. Here’s what the Ready Fire Aim widget looks like, you can download it here.

OpenID is so cool – what’s the holdup?

If you’re unfamiliar with OpenID, read up on Wikipedia. Side note: It’s really amazing how many times I start a post with that phrase and a link to Wikipedia…anyway…

It seems as though OpenID has achieved (or is on the path to achieving) that which Microsoft Passport could not – a widely accepted, trusted, and easily integrable single sign-on solution. It’s seeing adoption from the likes of Yahoo, AOL, Digg, Firefox 3.0, and more (links are to announcements of support). Why? Probably because people are unwilling to give Microsoft any more control over their digital lives than it already has. It’s also probably because Microsoft had a habit of charging expensive licensing fees to any sites wanting to use Passport authentication. Furthermore, OpenID is decentralized, meaning every sign-on system in the world doesn’t go down or get compromised if Microsoft gets hacked.

The benefits of OpenID are obvious and exciting. A single user/password combo that you can use all over the web. Automatic transfer of all your registration data to new services you sign up for, without you having to type everything in again. Never have to remember which of your 10 different user names or passwords you used to sign up for a particular site. One-click ordering from an online store, even if you’ve never purchased from there before.

OpenID has the potential to revolutionize the web, so what’s the hold up?

OpenID’s biggest problem at this point in the game (aside from widespread adoption, which takes time), is that OpenID seems to function as merely a really complex auto form filler. Most OpenID providers only store basic demographic and contact information, meaning having an OpenID often only saves me from typing my name and my birthday. There is currently no way to store my credit card and shipping information in my OpenID, meaning using it at an online store is pretty much out of the question.

I’d also love it if OpenID providers would do a better job letting your OpenID URL truly personify you on the web. What do I mean by that? What if, when you actually visited your OpenID URL, you were presented with an aggregate display of all of your “tracks” around the web. Your Flickr photos, Del.icio.us bookmarks, Facebook profile, etc could all be pulled in via RSS and displayed. Then with one click, you could jump to over to those sites, and be automatically logged in via your OpenID.

ClaimID is trying to do something similar, including integration with OpenID, however, the implementation isn’t really there. At present, they just provide a place to post links to your various profiles around the web. Granted, once OpenID spreads around the web, ClaimID has the potential to become exactly what I described – your one stop online identity shop. Keep your eye on them.

I’d like to wrap up by pointing you to a site where you can get your own OpenID, as well as links to a method of using your blog’s URL as an OpenID, and a number of code libraries that will let you run your own OpenID identity provider.

• Get an OpenID
• Use your blog as an OpenID
• Run your own OpenID provider

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.