Silicon Valley: Arrington’s Twisted View

Yes we all know it is true, when we think “Start Up” we think Silicon Valley. There is no argument there. Here at East Coast Blogging, we often wade in and ponder this what’s and why’s that make the valley such a special place. We also look at the other areas that are smaller, yet very good tech hubs where startups seem to gravitate and thrive.

I was reading my feeds and came across Michael Arrington’s response post to a post by Glenn Kelman, CEO of RedFin. Glenn’s point was

None of us thinks Seattle is ever going to be much like Silicon Valley. We believe instead that what other cities can learn from Seattle is how to be different than the Valley, not the same.

It is a good post and I invite you all to go check it out. But this post is not about his post, rather the Arrington response. More specifically, one statement he makes in the post

But the best of the best come to Silicon Valley to see if they’re as good as the legends that came before them. It’s a competitive advantage to be here. And if you aren’t willing to take advantage of every possible advantage to make your crazy startup idea work, perhaps you shouldn’t be an entrepreneur.

I have one question (and excuse my language) but who the fuck does Michael Arrington think he is? I will give him the first thought , I agree, there is definitely an advantage to being in the valley. But honestly, who is he to question peoples motives and abilities to be entrepreneurs ? Does he have some insight into the will and motivation of people scattered across the world who have great ideas and are working to build something of them ? No he does not. There is not a cookie cutter for an entrepreneur. Some have time and resources to dedicate and maybe move to the valley, but others like myself, have a family, a sound job, and roots in the areas we currently reside in, and we have to make do with the resources available to us. How dare he question peoples will ? Sure I have the will, Ann Bernard certainly has will, as do the thousands of other out there who have a passion for their ideas and are striving to reach their goals. Michael Arrington does very well to show his true colors and prove what many call his over arrogance.

Michael, I am an entrepreneur. I may not live in the Valley, or the promised land that you seem to have ordained yourself “god” of out there, but I will do what I can to make my ideas come to life. Is entrepreneurship about a location ? No. It is all about people working on their dreams, and in my dream the background is the Capitol, the White House, and the Smithsonian, not an arid valley in central California.

Another East Coast West Coast Thing

I am always fascinated about the talk of the differing cultures between the east and west coast tech scenes.  There are many posts about this phenomena.  I saw one shared in Google Reader today, by the way the shared items in reader is awesome and I always get to read great stiff shared out by my friends.  Anyway, today Andrew Wright pointing to an article in Valleywag which referenced a Forbes list of the tope venture capitalists.

According to the post, New York VC’s only made up 2% of the list.  They had an interesting take on some reasons for this:

asked many VCs why East Coast investors don’t prosper to the same degree as those based here, and the answer is consistent: Back east, VCs are too focused on the downside, on squeezing something out of a startup that has failed, on turfing out entrepreneurs when a young company hits a bump in the road. In the balmy clime of northern California, venture capitalists are a sunnier lot: They’d rather have a small piece of a large pie, or so they claim.

So is it patience ?  Is that the reason VC’s on the east coast do not fare as well as their west coats counterparts ?  Maybe this is true.  The east coast VC’s are obviously a bit more conservative with the $$ and maybe they do pull the string a little too early.  Any thoughts on this out there ?  Whats your take on the east vs west coast vc scene ?

DC Reminder: Social Matchbox DC

Just wanted to give everyone a quick reminder before we got to the weekend about a cool event taking place next Monday, January 28th at 6-8:30 PM.

The event is a great idea that plans to

bring together DC startup community members to discuss jobs, ideas and collaborative opportunities.  Participation is free.  Registration is required.  This event is not open to staffing agency representatives.

I am looking forward to going and getting a glimpse of the DC startups that are out there making things happen.

Here is an update we received today from the event organizer

With eight days to go before the event more than 20 companies from the startup community have signed up and plan to send representatives.  Among them are: ClearSpring, CrossMine, CustomInk, HotPads, iBelong, Hungry Machine, Intridea, Mixx, Ozmosis, Positive Energy, Razoo, Visual CV, WorthPoint.  comScore was also invited and will be joining us.

Over 100 people are expected to attend.  Registrants include at least: 41 developers, 2 development managers,  1 user experience designer, 1 QA engineer, 5 systems engineers, 5 marketing and PR professionals, 3 sales reps, 4 operations managers, 10 executives, 3 corporate recruiters, 2 data/business analysts, and more than 31 others who we can’t classify based on their registration information.

Location:
TeqCorner, 3rd Floor, 1616 Anderson Road, McLean, VA 22102

Schedule:
6-7 networking
7-7:30 startups get 2-3 minutes to talk about who they are and what they are looking for (no demo)
7:30-8:30 networking

Let us know who plans on going ?

Mixx Hits 100 Days, and Going Strong

I had totally missed this news on the Mixx blog, but was reminded of it when I saw this post over at Centernetworks. But it seems that our local DC startup Mixx hit the 100 day mark and has good news to report. According to the blog post:

• We’re now averaging hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each month
• There are tens of thousands of registered Mixxers – 78% of whom have personalized their Mixx pages with more than 10 category tags
• Mixxers have created more than 700 groups, and counting
• So far, more than 5 million votes have been cast
• We now have a library of more than 50,000 tags submitted by Mixxers
• Mixx buttons have been found on the websites of some of the biggest media companies, including USA Today , Reuters, The L.A. Times, Slate, Forecast Earth from The Weather Channel, and Kaboose, with more on the way
• And it’s not just the big dogs! Many very cool and interesting blogs have added a Mixx button, allowing Mixxers to get great information from diverse sources

I am confident they will continue to grow and prosper in this space. They have some good plans moving forward to include an API, a Facebook application, and most importantly SCHWAG ! Yes, we can pimp our local friends over at Mixx as we are out and about around town and the world.

I Would Define a Startup As …

Well actually that brings up a good question. Last week, Allen over at Centernetworks had a post “How Do You Define a Startup?” . He laid out a few criteria, or questions rather, to get us thinking about what qualifies as a startup:

• Is it based on funding? If a company has funding of any size, can they still be considered a startup? Angel round = startup, Series A = not a startup?
• Is it based on level of “live”? If they are in pre-alpha, alpha or beta, are they automatically a startup?
• Is it based on employee count? If the company has more than x employees - Erick on TC called a 14 person company yesterday “tiny”
• Is it based on time? If the company is in business a year or more, no longer a startup?
• Is it based on revenue? If the company generates over x amount in the first year, no longer a startup?

I had to chuckle a bit at this post. The other day I started a DC Area Startup Wiki where I wanted the DC community to be able to go in and add local startups. One reason was to bring together the community with the hopes of further building said community and also to let people know some of the great things that are taking place in the local area.

What was funny was that the night I created the wiki, there was a ongoing conversation between a couple of us, Nick O’Neill, Peter Corbett, and myself, as to what should be considered a startup to put on the list. We came to the same conclusion Allen came to, it is hard to define a startup. So I decided to let the list speak for itself. Let it grow organically and let it sort itself out. My intent is to showcase local companies really, “startup” or not.

There was a pretty funny response post to Allen’s post over at The Drama 2.0 Show.

So what about it ? Leave a comment and simply continue the sentence I started as the title, I Would Define a Startup As … and lets see what we can come up with.

Are You Backing Up Your Backups

I came across this post “Who Protects Your Cloud Data?” by Mike Gunderloy over at Web Worker Daily.  It really struck a chord with me since I am developing a service that rides on top of one of the mentioned storage providers (its not quite ready so more news on that to come).  In any case it appears that OmniDrive, an online storage provider, may have go offline and joined the so called “deadpool”.

How sucky is that.  I started to wonder just how many customers of OmniDrive, who have been trusting their data to OmniDrive, now have not only lost the trust but also their data.  How many have been using OmniDrive to protect their cherished family photos that are gone.  How many have used OmniDrive to store important business documents they no longer have access to ?  It pretty sad, an unfortunate tale of the technology and the companies providing that technology we have come to rely on.

The post points out we need to be selective in trusting our data.  There are other providers out there that are backed by big named companies that will not be going anywhere.  Mozy is backed by EMC and Amazon has their S3 storage platform.  These are sound companies, not a “storage startup”.

Does this affect any of you out there ?  We would love to hear your thoughts.

Utterz: A New Social Tool With Business Possibilities

Last night I was once again treated to a great great show from Jonny Goldstein.  His guests last night were Chris Parandian of mobilediner.com and Sim from Utterz.  Chris gave some great insights on the happenings on the mobile space over the past year and where he sees it heading in 2008.  We are looking for more open platforms and a more seamless experience between mobile and the web.

The rest of the discussion revolved around Utterz and its recent rise.  I have signed up for Utterz, but have not used it yet, although I do see the draw and the possibilities for it.  Twitter has become our micro blogging text tool and Utterz could very well become the audio equivalent.  While it seems to be a social tool now, as the conversation progressed I started to realize some other possibilities for Utterz.  There are definite business uses for this tool.  Imagine the following:

• A weekly sales goal utterz
• A weekly status utterz
• A corporate message utterz
• and so on …

These days, people and the teams they work with are scattered around the world doing business.  Wouldn’t it be great to be able to use Utterz to reach them.  That way, through RSS, they don’t have to come get the message, it goes to them.

The other day, I touched on the possibilities of using Twitter as a disaster communications tool.  Utterz could perform in the same fashion.  Remember those “This is a test” things on the TV ?  In the event of an emergency, those would notify us of what was going on.  As our networks between mobile and legacy become more and more seamless, as Chris mentioned, we will have more and more data pushed to us.  We are spending more and more time shifting our habits of media consumption. Tivo has changed our TV viewing.  So if we are never watching “live” tv, we need something different and a tool like Utterz could fill that void.  Literally, it could become a “quasi” emergency broadcasting system, pushing those important emergency details out to us in a timely manner to our mobile platforms or wherever to we may be.

Just a thought.  Great work again Jonny, and thanks to the guests Chris and Sim for some terrific insights.

DC Startup Wiki: Please Contribute

The other day I posted about a cool Seattle startup index I came across and wanted to do something similar as we all grow this tech community here in the DC area. I got some comments to add and was about to start on a page when Zvi Band came up with a better idea, a wiki we could all contribute to.

Wow what a great idea, thank you Zvi ! So I went over and signed up for one. Nothing fancy of course, but a page we can all contribute to and add in value. There is also a discussion forum on the wiki to start any relevant threads.

Please head over to the East Coast Blogging’s DC Startup Index and edit away ! I look forward to everyones contributions and ideas.

UPDATE:  There was a bit of a conversation on Twitter about our definition of who is a startup and belongs on the list.  Nick O’Neill found this definition we will go by:

A company that is in the first stage of its operations. These companies are often initially bank rolled by their entrepreneurial founders as they attempt to capitalize on developing a product or service for which they believe there is a demand.

Capital Cabal: Networking DC Style

I had the pleasure of attending a really nice event last night. It was the Capital Cabal 2nd Tuesday event in Arlington.  I had heard Ann Bernard of WhyGoSolo went last month and said it was really a good time.  So I decided I was going to give it a go.  I was really impressed with the turnout, there was a lot of people there and a wide range as well.  My only criticism would be that they may be outgrowing their venue.  It was a bit crowded and loud.  Not the best environment to explain your startup concept to people who are asking … as you are leaning to them screaming in their ear.

Of course it was great to see a lot of my local DC friends there to catch up with them.  Let see (please forgive me if I miss someone) there was:  Shana Glickfield , Leslie Bradshaw, Nick O’Neill, Zvi Band, Eric Blair, Ann Bernard, Andrew Wright, Jared Goralnick.  I also met some great people and had some really interesting conversations.  I had a good chat with Julie A. Barko Germany, the Deputy Director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet at The George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management.  They were one of the sponsors last night.  The Institute is holding the Politics Online Conference 2008 in March :

The Politics Online Conference sits at the intersection of smart politics, good governance, transparent democracy, and innovative technology, spotlighting tools, applications, strategies, and ideas that affect a range of functions, from writing policy to organizing democratic movements to running a smarter political campaign to building dialogue with your constituents.

People come to the Politics Online Conference to learn about cutting-edge trends and to gain access to the visionaries who make those trends possible. They come to find solutions. They come to discuss their ideas with other experts in the field and outside the Beltway. And they come to network.

For more information, please visit http://polc.ipdi.org/

I have it on the schedule and hope to be able to check it out.

Overall it was a great time and enjoyed seeing everyone and meeting new people.  There was a good mix of people from many fields. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to get out there and chat with interesting people and share their ideas or look for new connections.

DC Needs a Startup Index

I came across this post today where Marcelo has taken time to list all the Seattle startups and their ranking on the various Internet ranking sites, Alexa and Complete are what he used.

My first thought when I saw it was “holy s?*t, there are a lot of startups in Seattle !” Scroll down and you will see he has 243 listed.  That is a lot of startups.  My second thought was we need to start on of these lists for DC startups.  I know there are not that many as of yet, and there may not be great rankings, but we gotta start somewhere.

So I am asking for anyone who knows of a DC startup to please leave the company name as a comment.  I will start to aggregate them in a table and make a page off the blog to keep track of them.  Hopefully adding to the list as we  start to build our tech community here.

Thanks for everyones help.

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