On crashing markets, common sense and obvious things.
By now most everyone that reads web blogs has heard about the leaked Sequoia deck.
And then there was the Benchmark memo from Bill Gurley.
The moral of the story? Slim down or die.
I’ve since received copies of these slide decks from at least 15 different sources over the last week.
Little wonder given the week we just had. The Dow industrials finished down 128 points, or 1.49%, at 8451.19, the lowest finish since April 25, 2003. Some investors who normally would be jumping to buy beaten-down stocks after a 22% drop over eight trading days just weren’t convinced. And the reason for that is because this downturn isn’t like all the others. If you haven’t already taken a look at the Sequoia presentation you really should. Most Americans just don’t get this kind of perspective emailed to them. Something of a perk for those of us who work with smart folks in the tech sector perhaps.
The challenge that I had with this material is that I just really didn’t know what to do with it. I’ve always believed in doing as much as you can with the least amount of money. I never spent salaries on staff that we didn’t need. I don’t buy software we don’t need. I don’t hire people to do work that I think we can do ourselves. That includes hiring PR and tradeshows. We don’t pay rent for more space than we need.
I don’t know that our perspective is the right one but it’s one that I’ve always been very proud of nonetheless. By spending only the money we need we feel that we provide more opportunities for our investors and our employees. Even though Pressplane recently closed $1.7 million in Series A venture financing we still only have 4 full time people on staff. One of the reasons that I’ve been attacted to start-ups is because I enjoy working in a more disciplined atmosphere that is largely governed by the limited resources we have available to us. The start-up game usually involves uncertainty around revenue and when that revenue stream kicks in to start offsetting your burn rate. Interestingly, most people actually believe their projections. Don’t! Your initial streams of revenue will always be lower than you projected and your growth will be slower than you predicted. With the credit market getting tighter and tighter it isn’t hard to see that it may not be easy or possible to raise more money. And, go ahead right now and assume that future funding will come at a price.
Slide decks like this make me sleep better at night. Do you know why? Because it feels obvious. That’s right. This stuff should feel obvious. It should BE obvious. More start-ups go out of business for really stupid reasons than for really good reasons. People built really dumb things. People hired too much. People spent too much on PR and advertising. People spent too much on tradeshows. How many times have you heard about a start-up that went out of business and the reason for it was something that was really incredible - something you never might have caught yourself? Not that often right? Usually the clues were obvious. Really ornate offices with front desk admin, Aeron’s for everyone, free bowling and beer in the basement are always a sure sign that a pre-revenue start-up is probably not appreciating every dollar they have in the bank. This last summer I visited a Silicon Valley company that had virtually every kind of cereal and granola bar you’d see in a Safeway for free to all employees inside their 1,000 square foot kitchen. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out.
In many ways that’s exactly what this game is about. When your car isn’t running right do you immediately tear the engine out and rebuild it? Or, do you check the tank first to see if you’re just running out of gas?
Use your head.
Get the basics right.
Don’t believe your own BS.
Ask common sense questions all the time, every day.
Don’t assume any little detail is too little to stop caring about.
The rest of the things you probably couldn’t have prepared for anyway.
Charity Code Jam
Ali Daniali isn’t a guy that I’ve had the pleasure of meeting personally but I see his name around Seattle quite a bit. I really commend his efforts. He’s found a tremendous way to use his technology experience to give back to those less fortunate. Watch this video. A varied and diverse group of technology folks gave their time to develop a new web application for Second Harvest Food Bank in San Jose CA. There isn’t a lot of glory in these types of projects. The hours are long. The work is hard. These guys just believe in supporting those less fortunate.
Just another Wednesday in the office
The wishpot, pressplane, zooppa office.
Welcome to the office of the ad network
Sound familiar?
View Photoshop files in Safari? Yep.
Our designer here at Pressplane figured out that you can view Photoshop files from right within Safari. Pretty crazy. Never knew that was possible. Makes sense though. Who likes to export all their working .PSD files into a different format before uploading them to a server for review with remote team members or clients?
Batch resizing images with Photoshop CS3
We all have to batch resize images for Facebook or even Flickr sometimes. There are many decent ways to do it with Photoshop CS3. There is one incredibly easy way though. Just select File/Scripts/Image Processor. There is nothing else to do. Choose the file size and compression rate and batch resize hundreds of images automatically!
A new company is company to town. Parlate italiano?
For the time being, our new Pressplane offices are being shared with Max Ciccotosto over at Wishpot. Together, we occupy a space in the 911 Western Building wherein the lease holder is actually one of Max’s investors - an Italian company based near Venice called H-farm.
I’m looking forward to having these guys around. For starters, I think Seattle is really short on firms who consistently do really high end interactive design. H-farm’s customer list is like the who’s who of Italian luxury. From Diesel to Gucci to Telecom Italia, these guys have had a hand in some pretty serious web sites and applications. And now they will be in Seattle. Perhaps more interestingly, they will enter the incubator fray with a few of us. Besides spinning off companies, H-Farm seems to want to help its U.S. startups gain a foothold in the European market, while also introducing its broader portfolio to U.S. customers.
Are you a company in need of some serious web app design skills? Or, a company that is beginning to think there is a world outside North America? Come visit Suite 420 on 911 Western and say hello.
Pressplane closes $1.7 million Series A financing!
Pressplane is the latest company to be hatched by us here at Curious Office and we are pleased to announce the closing of our funding today!
Our $1.7 million Series A financing was led by Second Avenue Partners but we have a roster of other great investors:
Mika Salmi (President MTV Networks Digital / AtomFilms founder)
Rich Barton (Founder, Expedia / Zillow)
Erik Blachford (former Expedia CEO)
Andy Liu (BuddyTV)
Alex Algard (Founder, Whitepages)
Geoff Entress (Madrona)
Andy Sack
Adrian Hanauer (MLS Soccer, Curious Office co-founder)
John Cunningham
Dough Rowan (former Corbis CEO)
Unfortunately, I can’t say exactly what we are working on but I can say it is another “buy and sell marketplace” like our last company (Imagekind) but more around designers and creative content serving businesses. We’re obviously not competing with our new Imagekind owners (CafePress) but we are able to take what we learned from Imagekind and apply much of it to this new initiative.
Mika Salmi at MTV joins Mike Slade from Second Avenue on our board and we can be found diligently working away in these offices on 911 Western which we share with Wishpot.com Come by and say hi sometime!
View more photos here.
Icon bookmarks
I love to get ideas from the hardwork that others have invested in their icon designs. The good folks over at woork.com took the time to aggregate a good list of freebies. Worth a bookmark for sure.
A little type helper
Sometimes it is nice to see a bunch of type examples already laid out in CSS for you. That’s what www.typechart.com is all about. Pretty interesting way to remind you how the various combinations of type and size look together. Worth a bookmark.
Another great OSX screenshot app
My friend Issa Breibish over at Veer turned me on to Paparazzi…check it out.
Shelfari purchased by Amazon
It was announced yesterday that Amazon has acquired Shelfari. Over the last year, the team at Shelfari (led by Josh Hugh) positioned the company as a leading online destination for sharing and discovery of books in a social format. The site has received much acclaim for it’s brilliant user interface and its clear that the Shelfari team prioritized high quality execution with this effort and Amazon was obviously impressed enough to feel that outright ownership was best for them.
Hard work and attention to detail seemed to prevail here and we couldn’t be happier for everyone at the company who worked so hard on this project. Congratulations.
6 tools for sharing webpages with your Mac
I stumbled on this blog post titled “6 Screenshot Utilities You Should Know About” while looking for a Mac utility that would let me capture screens even for longer pages that go below the fold.
Finally found a great tool call SnapWeb. Works great on Leopard.
SEO, SEM, marketing and entreprenuer sites to bookmark
The style of this site isn’t my thing but this really is a nice, complete list of sites to add to your bookmark list. All in all, a nice list of informative blogs to help entrepreneurs with their marketing efforts.
Letting grids guide you
So I’m starting out on this new project Presslayer and I wanted to be sure that I chose a screen resolution that was appropriate for 1024 and also easily divisible to support 2, 3, 6 and 8 columns etc.
I wound up using 984 pixels in width and proceeded to make a nice Photoshop template that had a 12 pixel gutter for each of the various column scenarios that I might encounter.
I know a ton of people (like Cameron Moll who loves to “grid the 960″) use 960 but not for me. Not this time. Times they are getting as wider. Don’t want to make your own Photohop guide template? Well, feel free to go ahead and download mine.
