Startup2Startup

Our speaker for July will be Geoff Ralston, CEO of Lala Media, and formerly Chief Product Officer at Yahoo. Geoff will be speaking about “Selling in the Age of Free”.

Geoff Ralston is the CEO of Lala, a music startup in Palo Alto. He is also an investor, board member, and advisor to several companies. Geoff worked at Yahoo from 1997-2006 after the 1997 acquisition of Four11 Corp where he was VP Engineering and led the creation of RocketMail (which became Yahoo Mail after the acquisition). At Yahoo Geoff was SVP and General Manager of the Communications Business Unit, and then served as Chief Product Officer from 2003-2005. Prior to Four11, Geoff was the creator of the popular LookUP! Internet white pages and do-it-yourself home page service.

Geoff holds a BA in Computer Science from Dartmouth College, an MS in Computer Science from Stanford University, and an MBA from INSEAD. He lives in Atherton, California with his wife and three children.

Our speaker this month is Mark Pincus, co-founder and CEO of Zynga. Social gaming site Zynga is one of the largest application developers on Facebook, with more than 40 million monthly active users and top games such as Texas Hold’em and Mafia Wars.

Previously, Mark was also the founder and CEO of Tribe Networks, and a serial entrepreneur with a track record of growing venture-funded technology companies. Prior to founding Tribe Networks, Pincus founded and served as CEO of SupportSoft, a provider of service and support automation software. Prior to SupportSoft, Pincus co-founded Freeloader, the first consumer push information service, which was acquired in 1996 by Individual, Inc. for $38 million.

Before becoming an entrepreneur, Pincus worked in venture capital where he led investments in new media and software startups at Columbia Capital Corp. and at Tele-Communications, Inc. Before getting involved in new media, Pincus was a business consultant for Bain & Co. and an investment banker at Lazard Freres & Co. Pincus graduated Summa Cum Laude from University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School and he is a graduate of the Harvard Business School.

Retired serial entrepreneur Steve Blank was joined by IMVU co-founder Eric Ries last night at Startup2Startup in Palo Alto to discuss how startups should couple customer development with product development from day one.

Blank began by describing how the product development process used by most entrepreneurs is ill-conceived. Instead of continually reassessing their product designs in light of customer feedback, companies tend to follow a linear development path that takes them through four main stages: 1) conceptualization, 2) product development, 3) beta testing, and 4) launching.

Ries argued that this strategy only makes sense when both the problem and the solution to that problem are fully understood. Most startups, however, cannot readily conceive a good solution to the problem they’ve identified. And many others don’t even have a clear idea of the problem they are trying to solve. Particularly in the latter case, startups must continually reevaluate both the problem and the solution by consulting their potential customers and developing a thorough understanding of those customers’ needs and behaviors. And this reevaluation leads to lots of product iteration that turns the development process into more of an ongoing cycle.

While we tend to think that the technology behind a startup determines whether it succeeds or fails, most startups actually fail from a lack of customers. This is especially true on the web where the risks to technology are relatively low, while the risks to customer acquisition and retention are relatively high. Therefore, it’s crucial for a web startup to incorporate processes that help it to develop a promising customer base while it builds out its technology.

Blank emphasized that there are no magic solutions for customer development; it simply takes a lot of focus on customers and the market at hand from the very beginning. When startups continually focus on their customers, they tend to fail fast and often because they discover a need to realign their efforts. But this is a good thing since lean startups with the ability to adapt (and “get outside of the building” to talk with customers) end up creating products that customers are actually willing to pay for. After all, earning revenue from the start is the best signal that you’ve stumbled upon a real solution to a real problem.

Our speaker for April is Steve Blank, founder of E.piphany, author of Four Steps to the Epiphany, and creator of Customer Development methodology (slides). Steve will speak about Speed & Tempo for Startups, a discussion about decision-making.

Steven Gary Blank is a retired serial entrepreneur with over thirty years of experience in high technology companies and management. He teaches entrepreneurship at both Stanford and UC Berkeley, and his Google Tech talk “The Secret History of Silicon Valley” (video) is one of the definitive views on early Silicon Valley innovation (updated clip from Computer History Museum).

Steve has been a founder or participant in eight Silicon Valley startups since 1978. His last company, E.piphany, started in his living room in 1997 and went public in 1999. His other startups include two semiconductor companies (Zilog and MIPS Computers), a workstation company (Convergent Technologies), a supercomputer firm (Ardent), a computer peripheral supplier (SuperMac), a military intelligence systems supplier (ESL) and a video game company (Rocket Science Games).

Total score: 2 large craters (Rocket Science, Ardent), 1 dot.com bubble home run (E.piphany) + several base hits.

Steve is on the board of CafePress.com, an on-line marketplace, and IMVU, a 3D IM social network. Steve was appointed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to the California Coastal Commission and is the Chairman of Audubon California and on the board of the Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST).

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are often criticized for seeking quick exits instead of building companies with long-term value. However, Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com for over nine years now, is immune to this criticism having built an online retail business that strives above all for customer loyalty and the sale of “happiness”.

In a wide-reaching talk at Startup2Startup in Palo Alto last night, Tony explained how Zappos doesn’t try to extract the most profit out of every transaction that’s made on its site. Instead, Zappos makes the experience of buying merchandise on Zappos as pleasurable as possible so that customers will refer the site to their friends. This word-of-mouth marketing strategy is bolstered by a well-funded call center (a so-called “customer loyalty center”) that uses the 10 minutes or so it has with each captive customer on the phone to make the best impression possible. In effect, Zappos takes a lot of the money it would have put into advertisements and channels this money into providing great customer support.

To ensure that Zappos provides the best customer service, the company is intent on developing an extraordinary corporate culture, one that recently earned it 23rd place on Fortune’s 100 best companies to work for list. Employees are hired and fired based on their appreciation of customer service, and all employees – regardless of their rank – are required to undergo the same training program, which puts them in the call center and on the shipping floor for two weeks. Zappos holds its employees to 10 core values (which include principles like “Be Humble”) by applying these core values to its performance reviews.

Zappos may be best known as an online shoe retailer, but Tony says that the company actually has plans to become a multi-purpose corporation, one that’s in the business of selling happiness in a variety of ways. Like role model Virgin, which is in the business of selling “hip and cool” products and services in several industries, Tony expects Zappos to move into other verticals. More clothing and electronics listings are coming in 2009, and Tony only half-joked that perhaps by the year 2019 Zappos would have an airline focused on helping passengers enjoy flying again.

ur speaker for March is Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com. Tony will speak about building amazing company culture and customer service, and why it’s important for startups.

Tony Hsieh got involved with Zappos as an advisor and investor in 1999, a few months after the company was founded. He ended up spending more time with the company because it was both fun and increasingly successful, and eventually joined Zappos full-time in 2000. Under his leadership Zappos has grown gross merchandise sales to over $1B in 2008 by focusing relentlessly on customer service.

Prior to joining Zappos, Tony co-founded Venture Frogs with Alfred Lin. Venture Frogs is an incubator and investment firm that invested in Internet startups, including Ask Jeeves, Tellme Networks, and Zappos. Prior to Venture Frogs, Tony co-founded LinkExchange, an advertising network that was successfully sold to Microsoft for $265M in 1998.

Tony graduated from Harvard University with a BA in Computer Science. He also met his co-founder Alfred Lin at Harvard, where Tony was running a pizza business and Alfred was his #1 customer.

Our speaker for February is Jeffrey Veen, previously of Google and Adaptive Path. Jeff will speak about designing for websites and social media applications, why web design is different for startups, and how to know when you’re doing it right.

Jeffrey Veen has designed websites and applications both large and small: from massive data-driven apps like Google Analytics, to Fortune 500 sites while at Adaptive Path, to social media startups like Blogger, Flickr, and Technorati. He is a founding partner of Adaptive Path and was project lead for Measure Map, a web analytics tool acquired by Google in 2006. Jeff spent five years with Adaptive Path, then two years at Google where he led the redesign of Google Analytics and managed the UX team thru May 2008.

Previously Jeff served as Executive Director of Interface Design for Wired Digital and Lycos, where he managed look & feel for HotWired, the HotBot search engine, and Lycos.com. Jeff is also author of The Art & Science of Web Design and HotWired Style: Principles for Building Smart Web Sites.

Our speaker for January will be Amy Jo Kim, co-founder/CEO at ShuffleBrain, a startup building smart games for social networks. Amy Jo will be speaking about why certain games and social networks have a “fun” and engaging user experience, and how to apply these concepts in building consumer internet startups & applications.

Amy Jo Kim is an internationally recognized expert on community architecture and game mechanics. She has been involved in the design of social architecture for numerous games and online communities, including Rock Band, Ultima Online, There.com, Family.com, eBay, Adobe, and Nokia.

Amy Jo is also the author of Community Building on the Web, a design handbook that has become required reading in game design studios and universities worldwide. She holds a PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of Washington, and a BS in Experimental Psychology from UC San Diego.