Last week, I had the pleasure of attending Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford on Monday, Essential Mediatech at the BFI IMAX Theatre, London on Tuesday and the Oxford Private Equity Conference on Friday. The week contained too much free coffee and not enough sleep, but I’ve listened to and met some pretty inspirational people. In the next couple of posts, I’ll share my experiences and thoughts from the more tech- & entrepreneurship-oriented conferences of Monday and Tuesday.
So on Monday I attended Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford for the second year running. Last year’s conference was held on 20th November 2006 – just after we launched the first version of ClickUni. I found the event particularly enlightening. The masterclass from Matt Cohler, VP Strategy & Operations, Facebook stands out. He gave a talk entitled “What is Silicon Valley?” which was my first proper insight into the place and culture that has spawned so many of the successful technology companies in recent years.
It was also the first time I met Bob Goodson (former President, Oxford Entrepreneurs) Chris Sacca (Head of Special Initiatives, Google) and Reid Hoffman, the world’s most successful investor in consumer Internet. Reid’s LinkedIn profile alone names some 44 companies in which he’s angel invested including Facebook, Digg, Friendster, Ning, Flickr, Last FM and Six Apart. He claims to have help finance over 60 companies in total.
This year, the 7th year of the event had an exceptional list of speakers as always – Reid Hoffman, Chris Sacca, Bob Goodson, Kirill Makharinsky and also Auctomatic boys Kulveer and Harjeet Taggar were back again. New appearances were made by Biz Stone (Co-Founder, Twitter), Kim Polese (CEO, SpikeSource) and Bill Byun (MD, Samsung Ventures) but the highlight for me was Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston from Y Combinator. Having keenly watched their scheme develop over the last couple of years, and written about it in a recent post, it was great to see the people behind it face-to-face.
More on what happened when I met them coming soon…
Charlie Osmond (30) has just been crowned Young Entrepreneur of the Year in Esquire magazine’s “Man at the Top” business awards. Other notable finalists include Michael Birch (Bebo) and Richard Branson (Virgin) in the Most Influential Business Thinker category and Simon Woodroffe (Yotel) who just pipped Artemi Krymski (Extate) to win Best New Idea.
In June 2000, Charlie graduated from Worcester College, Oxford with a degree in Engineering, Economics and Management. Subsequently he co-founded FreshMinds with Caroline Plumb, a St. John’s College graduate. They started up with £500 of their own money and worked out of a spare room at Charlie’s parents’ house. The money allowed them to buy a Web address, a telephone line in the spare room and some business cards. This saw them through to January 2001 at which point they received £100,000 angel funding.
The business initially carried out bespoke research projects for management consultancy firms and other large companies, but over the last few years FreshMinds has evolved into a fully fledged research and recruitment consultancy with a talent pool composed of some of the UK’s top students and graduates. They work with the full spectrum of clients right through from small start-ups to the largest blue chips. FreshMinds now has a £5M+ turnover and over 70 full-time employees.
Facilitating the talent acquisition process for FreshMinds is their Ones to WatchTM (OTW) scheme which annually rewards 50 of the most promising students in the UK:
“Every year we ask students at the UK’s top universities to predict who out of their peers will go on to become the business leaders of the future. FreshMinds picks out the nominees who we think really have the wow factor.”
I first met Charlie at the 2006 Oxford OTW party. Both Andy and I, along with 4 of the students who have worked on ClickUni over the last year (AJ Asver, Jamie Harvey, Sagar Shah and Ran Wei) have now been given the accolade of “One to Watch”.
Charlie also regularly speaks at the Said Business School – usually sharing his experience of shunning the City jobs in favour of entrepreneurship. Hopefully success stories like this will inspire more Oxford students to take the leap of faith in future years:
What the chance encounter with Eddie Codel and the subsequent LunchMeet interview interview really highlights is the way that things “just happen” in Silicon Valley. Due to the higher density of people working in start-ups, the probability of randomly bumping into someone useful is higher than anywhere else in the world. Whether it’s funding, a new employee, press coverage or just good, solid advice that one is looking for, it might well be waiting just around the corner. This is not to say one can’t start companies elsewhere, it just means that it’s often easier in the Valley.
Accelerating the start-up process is early-stage investment fund Y Combinator, set up in 2005 by Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris. The concept is that around 8 founder teams are selected to work in Cambridge, MA each summer and Mountain View, CA each winter. They then embark on a 3-month process involving a “Demo Day” in week 6 and an “Investor Day” in week 10. During the 3 months, the participants are networked in with many of the top Internet entrepreneurs through master classes, dinners and various other events involving product, marketing and legal experts. Invariably, this results in all the teams receiving substantial funding and going on to form successful companies.
A prime example of this is Zenter, a company which came out of the first class this year . Their vision was to build a product resembling Microsoft PowerPoint (but online) and after 6 months work, they were acquired by Google for an undisclosed (allegedly 8-figure) sum. More recently Xobni (it’s inbox backwards), received $4.2M funding from Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Baseline Ventures, Atomico Ventures, Ariel Poler from StumbleUpon, Paul Bucheit (Creator, GMail) and some other angels. Eddie Codel also likes what they’re doing and recently shot their ‘corporate’ recruitment video. It was produced by their Co-Founder, Matt Brezina who I met at the Y Scraper back in August:
The first UK-based team to get on the program was Kulveer and Harjeet Taggar back in January this year. They started off with the largest online marketplace for students – Boso.com and following the launch of Facebook’s marketplace amongst other things, realised that pursuing a new idea – Auctomatic, which makes selling on eBay easier would be more fortuitous. Having got Paul Graham, Evan Williams (Founder, Blogger), Paul Bucheit and Chris Sacca (Head of Special Initiatives, Google) amongst their Advisory Board, and also joined forces with new “Chief Bottlewasher”, Patrick Collison, a former European Young Scientist of the Year, many would bet on Auctomatic having the legs to go all the way.
They were followed by another UK-based team in the summer this year – Peter Nixey and Immad Akhund with their company ClickPass, based around OpenID. Immad and I first met in late 2006 at No. 5 Cavendish Sq. in London at an Imperial Entrepreneurs party when he was working on his former project Revmap, a UK-based local reviews site. The line of British founders is now continuing with Sumon Sadhu and Jamie Quint having just been accepted for the first class of 2008. You can read more about Sumon’s experiences applying at his blog Sharpshoot
For me, one exciting thing that Y Combinator does is instilling faith within seasoned 30- or 40- something Venture Capital investors that these teams in their early- to mid-20’s are genuinely likely to execute upon world-changing ideas. I’ve just finished reading a remarkably inspirational book called Founders at Work, written by Jessica Livingston. It contains a series of 32 candid interviews with the most successful tech entrepreneurs of the last decade including Steve Wozniak who started Apple, Max Levchin who started PayPal and Slide, James Hong who started Hot or Not and various other big names. I’d strongly recommend it to any young entrepreneur – the book highlights many common pitfalls and it’s also a great way to obtain an intuitive feel for the common thread running through all of these successful entrepreneurs.
Earlier this year, Saul Klein (former VP, Marketing at Skype and now a partner of Index Ventures had been thinking that Europe also has the potential to create more of these world-changing companies. Looking at Skype, acquired by eBay for $450M in 2005, Lastminute.com which was sold for $1.1bn earlier this year to Travelocity and also Last.FM which was acquired by the US television network CBS for $280M in May, there is evidence that it’s definitely possible. This vision led Saul to set up Seedcamp with Reshma Sohoni.
I was recently asked to write a post for the Seedcamp Blog expressing my hopes on how the initiative would impact the European ecosystem – I entitled it Silicon Valley is just a state of mind. The first class of chosen founders are now in the midst of their 3-month program and I’m looking forward to seeing how this scheme progresses.
Here ends my series of Silicon Where? blog posts, and to finish, I’ll leave you with a fly-on-the-wall documentary, Clicky Business which (rather amusingly) follows our whole trip back in August this year:
At 6.15pm on Monday this week, Andrew McCollum, Co-Founder of Facebook spoke at the Said Business School in Oxford. Afterwards, I had the honour of meeting him along with Andy Young and some other Oxford students.
Andrew first introduced the genesis of Facebook referring to 3 founding members: Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Andrew McCollum. In Andrew’s words:
“Mark was the high-level thinker, Dustin did operations – stuff like looking after the servers and communicating with the users, while I did all the graphics for the first version of the site, lots of backend development and also built up a reputation as ‘the solver of hard problems’.”
The majority of Andrew’s talk focused on product strategy. With Friendster and plenty of other social networks already up and running when thefacebook.com was launched on 4th February 2004, many people have wondered what led to Facebook’s ridiculous penetration of well over 50 million people’s lives. Andrew explained that it came down to what is called the “social graph” – a notional graph of everyone in the world where each node is a person and each edge is a connection between two people. By trying to simulate pre-existing relationships and interactions in the offline world, they were making it easier for users to carry out tasks they wanted to do anyway – except it was more efficient and easier on Facebook.
Another key to Facebook’s success in the early days was that they only implemented what Andrew described as “everybody features”. Things like profiles, private messaging, the wall, photos, groups and events. Despite receiving many requests from people to implement them earlier, features like videos and notes (a.k.a. blogs) were deferred because they wouldn’t have been used by a particularly high proportion of users. They were trying to keep the user interface as clean and intuitive as possible for everyone.
However, Facebook don’t always mollycoddle users. Their implementation of the News Feed on 5th September 2006 is a good example of this. Product managed by Ruchi Sanghvi, release of this feature totally disrupted the user experience for everyone on Facebook and within two days the backlash from users led to over 1 million people joining groups in rebellion. This even included one entitled “Ruchi is the devil” – an issue Mark clarified in his first apologetic blog post in response to users. But Facebook didn’t remove the feature, they improved the privacy settings, stood their ground, and today most users probably regard the News Feed as one of the most useful features on the site. I certainly do.
The point Andrew illustrated when he talked about this was that you need to push users in the direction you know they want to go in – even if they don’t yet know it themselves. Why? Because it will ultimately lead to a better product.
The final part of Andrew’s talk I’ll mention is about the key form of virality – word of mouth. He said the correlation between:
success of a web application, and
probability of a user telling a potential user about the application
is close to 1. And what is it that will cause someone to tell someone else about a website? A compelling experience. Whether this is using a feature that makes your life so much easier, or even being bitten by the zombie reincarnation of some guy you went to primary school with, working out how to provide compelling, emotive experiences is the key challenge for anyone looking to build a viral Web application. It’s something that Andy and I have recently been focusing on with GroupSpaces, and we’re just beginning to see some results from our e-mail newsletter feature.
Last week, I had the pleasure of attending Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford on Monday, Essential Mediatech at the BFI IMAX Theatre, London on Tuesday and the Oxford Private Equity Conference on Friday. The week contained too much free coffee and not enough sleep, but I’ve listened to and met some pretty inspirational people. In the next couple of posts, I’ll share my experiences and thoughts from the more tech- & entrepreneurship-oriented conferences of Monday and Tuesday.
Posted by davidlanger 
Charlie Osmond (30) has just been crowned Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 
Posted by davidlanger 
Posted by davidlanger 
