Our speaker for August is Naval Ravikant, an experienced entrepreneur and startup investor, and occasional contributor on the Venture Hacks blog (which he co-founded). Naval will speak about startup financing & term sheets, and present a Top 10 list of startup finance tips from the best of Venture Hacks.
Naval is currently an active investor in early-stage ecommerce and social media startups via his angel fund The Hit Forge. His areas of expertise include viral marketing, seo, monetization, general management, and (of course) fundraising.
Previously he was a co-founder or investor at Genoa Corp (acquired by Finisar), Epinions.com (IPO via Shopping.com), Chainn, Hive7, and Vast.com; also an advisor to Bix.com, iPivot, and XFire, among others. Naval graduated from Dartmouth College with a BA in Computer Science and Economics.
Our speaker for July will be James Hong, co-founder of the popular photo rating / casual dating website HOTorNOT. James will speak about his experiences as a scrappy entrepreneur, how to bootstrap a startup, and how he built a very profitable, subscription-based web business.
James is a creative, unorthodox, and scrappy Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He came up with the idea for HOTorNOT while drinking (heavily, we suspect) with fellow co-founder Jim Young in October of 2000. In its first week the site topped 2M daily pageviews, and became an immediate cult hit. With *zero* angel or VC funding, HOTorNOT grew quickly to a multi-million dollar subscription business. After operating profitably out of a living room for much of its first eight years, the company was sold in early 2008 to an investment group for a rumored $20M. If there’s a shrewder entrepreneur in the valley than James, we’d like to meet ‘em.
Since the acquisition, James has been on temporary sabbatical from entrepreneurship — in other words he’s at home watching television, where his latest indulgence is MTV’s America’s Best Dance Crew. James also enjoys spending time with a few of his angel investments, including Slide and Mochi Media. He is currently waiting for the economy to completely tank before embarking on another venture… or until Boogie Bots is voted off the show. James is a graduate of UC Berkeley, where he earned a BS Electrical Engineering and an MBA from the Haas School of Business.
YouTube Co-Founder Chad Hurley spoke to a packed house at the latest Startup2Startup event. Chad gave a very candid recount of his time starting YouTube.
Although originally aimed at online auctions or meeting new people, they eventually moved toward a general online video solution. Chad described the idea as branching out from their experiences at PayPal and their own complications with online video. The idea was to create a video experience that users could take with them similar to the way users could take the PayPal experience with them.
They started out of their garages, eventually taking up residence inside of Sequoia before taking a round from the same firm.
Chad confronted one of the chief criticisms raised against the site, that the site achieved much of its growth from illegal content hosted on the site. He pointed out that although other sites face similar problems, they haven’t achieved the same growth, because they weren’t able to achieve the same community as YouTube.
Although the choice to sell was hard, Chad said they eventually decided to sell to Google as the best path to growing and supporting the service.
Liz Gaines at NewTeeVee has more details and a video from the event.
Chad leads business development, marketing and operations for YouTube. He was also responsible for the clean, simple user interface that makes it easy for people to upload and share videos around the world.
Prior to YouTube Chad was the first UI designer at PayPal, where he created the familiar PayPal logo still in use today. Following PayPal’s acquisition by eBay, Chad consulted for several tech companies and for the hit movie Thank you for Smoking.
Chad received a BA in Fine Art at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Update: here are links to summaries of Chad’s talk, as well as a few video clips.
Mike Cassidy gave the keynote at our last Startup2Startup event. Mike preached speed as an integral part in creating over three quarters of a billion dollars in value from the three startups he’s founded (Xfire, Direct Hit, and Stylus Innovation).
He highlighted four main benefits of speed: beating the competition to a product, increasing morale, generating buzz, and generating advantageous investing terms. Most of his companies started off bootstraped and prototyped within weeks, and expected to launch within 4 months. He spoke of locking down office space while picking up funding. His biggest hit, DirectHit, sold within 500 days of launching.
When Cassidy spoke about business deals and financing he also touched on flexibility. He suggested getting all the decision makers and following a strategy of if/then contracts that make deals a no brainer if both sides meet metrics. He also spoke about aiming your first deals at secondary players more willing to get in on something new. Don’t waste your time on clients that don’t have a history of dealing with startups. And put a time table on closing deals. The prospect of closing a deal declines drastically with each passing day.
A corollary to Mike’s push for speed, was experience. Mike highlighted how most of his startups consisted of employees he’d had experience with. For people he didn’t know, his companies would hold one day hirings, where they’d interview the candidate, huddle to talk over the prospect, and have an offer out by the end of the day. Also, when you have a new employee, make sure they’re prepared for their first day.
Mike tempered his push for speed with a pop quiz question to the crowd over whether launching soon and iterating was a better strategy than taking your time. Mike moved quickly in each case (3.5 months), but acknowledged not all startups have the ability to iterate on their products in the wild.
After the speech, the mix of entrepreneurs and venture capiltalists at the tables swapped stories and advice.
