Concept to Contender Overnight
Business 2.0 had a great article back in June about how entrepreneurs are creating instant companies by coming up with great ideas and outsourcing just about everything.
Here’s an excerpt:
In sum, four guys with a great idea, some good contacts, and a loan to cover initial inventory figured they could go head-to-head with Nike (NKE) in just 60 days.
Two months later a factory in China was churning out the clogs, the slip-ons, and, yes, the Mary Janes — 16 styles in all. The rest is footwear history. According to Van Dine, in 2004 Keen sold $30 million worth of shoes — around 700,000 pairs — with Mary Janes and other nonsandals accounting for 45 percent of the total. To put that in perspective, it took Teva three years to reach just $1 million in annual sales. Within months of Keen’s launch, some of the most highly trafficked hipster websites and outdoor-gear blogs were singing the brand’s praises, generating free buzz worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. “You could say we were birthed full size,” Van Dine says.
Keen’s overnight rise reflects many elements of traditional brand building: a product customers love, a talented management team, even old-fashioned tactics like telling retailers the shoes are sold out just to stoke demand. But the company’s swift transformation from industry nobody to brand somebody also makes Keen something else: an example of a new breed of product-oriented startups that’s going from concept to contender at warp speed.
In apparel, toys, sports equipment, electronics, motor vehicles — you name it — small but savvy new companies are wedging themselves into established industries, unburdened by the fixed costs of infrastructure past. They’re doing it with the help of resources never before available so cheaply to startups, like outsourced manufacturing, Internet-powered publicity, and robust design tools. To get to market fast, they farm out everything they can, from logistics and billing to sales and support. “This,” says Timothy Faley, managing director of the University of Michigan’s Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies, “is how the manufacturing moguls of the future are getting started.”
The keys to success in fast company building seem to be:
1. “some good contacts”
2. powerful design tools
3. outsourced manufacturing
4. internet-based publicity
The author quotes a business professor who says these fast moving companies seem to “farm out everything they can, from logistics and billing to sales and support.”
I’m trying to figure out how Provo Labs, my newly christened internet business incubator, will be able to start and fund at least a dozen successful internet companies in the next three years.
I think this Business 2.0 article contains several keys and definitely reflects the kind of mind-set that our small internal team needs to have.
Some good contacts. I have about 3,000 contacts in my Blackberry and Yahoo Mail database. My assistant and I are going through all of them to categorize them, list their talents and skills, and to identify contractors and potential employees that could meet current and future needs.
Phil801, our COO, has relationships with scores of developers. By using Monster.com, elance, local recruiters and our own blogs and email lists, we should be able to identify skilled people who can meet any need, quickly and cost-effectively.
So our Provo Labs weekly meetings might look something like this:
Paul. Worldhistory.com needs a multi-user blog functionality and we need to recruit 100 history teachers to blog on different topics.
Amy. We’ve got 12 open source developers in our talent database that can do that.
Phil. Trent is available and he can do this in a few hours.
Amy. Done.
Phil. Why don’t we ask Dave to do a fax campaign to 10,000 public and private schools and offer a bonus to history teachers who run the most popular blogs during the next three months.
Paul. Okay. Have him run the creative past Bruce before he goes live.
Amy. I’ll take care of that.
Phil. Blastyx needs 100 gb of storage space for the new video streams we’re going to be hosting once our contract filming teams visit client X and client Y.
Paul. Call Erich, ask him to add a new harddrive to our server. Dan just bought a bunch of hardware on eBay, so have Erich check with him first and bill us for this.
Phil. I just emailed him.
Amy. We need 4 more contract writers for ConstantPR because our press release demand is really picking up.
Phil. Danny can hire 4 more people for us within a week in the Phillipines office.
Paul. Do it.
Paul. We’ve got to get our traffic up on directory.net. I think we should bid on another 10,000 or so keywords.
Phil. I’ll ask John to send us a list of the next best 10,000 keywords using his keyword analysis tool, and I’ll send them over to Jim to upload them to Google and Yahoo Search.
Paul. We also need to test new landing pages on the sponsor sign up page.
Amy. I’ll email 3 landing page designers and ask each one to submit a new design by tomorrow evening.
Phil. Jimmy can roll them live so in two days we’ll have some data.
Outsourcing almost everything. If our small team can get to know the customer needs (based on customer feedback and management input) for all of our companies as well as the skills sets and availability of hundreds of outside web designers, back end developers, hardware engineers, web analysts, search engine marketers, copy writers, email marketers, recruiters, and business development people in dozens of large and small companies, then our planning meetings will be rapid-fire.
First we’ll brainstorm for each of our companies. “Of all the things we could be doing to increase revenue, grow traffic, or cut costs (improve efficiencies), which should we try?”
Second, we’ll ask ourselves, who can do this quickly and well?
Third, we’ll make decisions and communicate them.
Fourth, we’ll use Tadalist.com (or maybe we’ll upgrade to BaseCamp after reading this Business 2.0 article again) to keep track of who is doing what and when.
Our core competencies need to be:
1) creativity and vision. We get that by attending all the best conferences, networking like crazy, brainstorming often and sharing freely with everyone we meet (not holding our cards to our vest), and reading all the best books and blogs.
2) talent scouts. Every one we meet is a potential contributor to one or more of our companies. We must always capture contact information and categorize the individual so they show up in our talent database. We’ll flag contractors differently than potential full-time employees.
3) clear communication. We need to be crisp about communicating expectations, deadlines, and compensation.
Internet-based marketing. Three years ago we started 10x Marketing with a vision that every internet based company that we ever start in the future will likely be successful if we can have world class internet marketing available to us instantly.
So Provo Labs can outsource internet marketing to the team at 10x Marketing, or we can find independent contractors or other agencies that we can mobilize instantly around any new idea or web site that we launch.
One of our companies, Blastyx, will focus on internet-based publicity generation that will reach out into the blogosphere as well as capture the attention of traditional media. This is going to be hot.
So we’ll utilize Blastyx to help launch each new company.
Conclusion. We live in an exciting era where great knowledge and empowering tools are available from sources worldwide.
But most workers today, even though they use email and the Web, are not really knowledge workers.
The mindset discussed in Business 2.0 is radically different from what people are accustomed to.
Most businesses have tons of unproductive employees.
The Entrepreneur’s Manual published in 1977 by Richard White Jr. discusses this problem:
“Scientists and engineers have a way of measuring a machine’s actual output against what that machine would do if there were no frictions, inefficiencies, or lost potentials. They call it effective output. If a machine’s effective output is too low, the engineers redesign it to lower its frictions, improve its inefficiences, and realize more of its lost potentials.
There is no “machine” with greater capabilities or more flexibilities than the people who will work with and for you. What percentage of output would you guess that most companies realize from their people with respect to what they could realize if everyone gave his fullest to the company? Would you believe that the average large company realizes between 1% and 3% effective output efficiencies? According to the Institute of American Business Consultants, the average bureaucracy realizes between 0.25%-0.50% employee effective efficiency, the average industrial firm with greater than 10,000 employees between 0.5% and 1.5%; the average firm with greater than 500 employees, 1.0%-3.0%.
We’ll discuss ways of rigging your company so that you’ll incorporate the incentives and the systems to increase your team’s output efficiences to between 10% and 15% later, but for right now it is important that you realize that your start-up can work extremely well with from 1/4th to 1/10th the number of warm bodies that your competitors must carry.”
I think the Business 2.0 article and the hypothetical meeting I described above (where we rapidly match ideas with people and make assignments quickly) could describe companies that may achieve output efficiences approaching 50% or higher, if that is even humanly possible.
I believe we at Provo Labs have the proper mindset; let’s hope we also have the network and the skill set to pull this off — to become the Idealab! of Utah.
Alan Hall speech at E Station ceremony
(Note: these are my notes from Alan’s Hall speech at the E Station ribbon cutting. They are his words, as well as I could capture them, not mine.)
I hope that in the future we’ll look back on this date and realize that this initiative has been a success.
If just one great company comes out of all this investment, perhaps the size of MarketStar, then we would count this as a great success. But we think we have a secret sauce and have the ability to create many successful companies.
My wife and I have been blessed by the Lord with financial resources. We feel a need to give back. The IRS says we own these assets, but we believe they belong to the Lord, and we are stewards over them.
We hope to build many companies and create many new jobs here in Utah.
Our goal is not to take the money after a harvest and keep it.
After a liquidity event, the money will go back into the fund. It won’t inure to our benefit. It will be an economic engine that can keep helping the Utah economy.
The governor has a vision for economic development, and we think there is nothing wrong with private individuals contributing where they can. Our expertise is in entrepreneurship, so we want to help where we can.
We are not here to take any credit to ourselves. We intend to deflect it to others.
We have a good team of people. Craig Bott, CEO, Chuck Duncan, Gary Winger, Greg Warnock, Sherm Smith, Chris Anderson, Kent Thomas.
Our five year goal is to see 100 new companies from Provo to Logan that are helped by Grow Utah Ventures. Besides the GUV dollars we have to invest, we are looking for other investors. $15 million to me is a lot of money, so we need partners to help generate this funding.
How will we find 100 companies to invest in?
1. Conditioning: we want to let entrepreneurs know the resources that are available to help them.
We already have 2 companies a day looking for money on our GUV web site.
2. Investing. We will put our money into these companies, but we want to own no more than one third of the company.
I’ve learned that the moment you take control away from the entrepreneur that you lose some of their vigor.
3. Rallying Others. I’ve noticed that I will run out of money personally if I keep investing, so we are looking for 100 other accredited investors in the state that will invest.
We’re also trying to rally other financial institutions, education, and government to the cause.
We have partnered with Lumin Publishing (publisher of Connect Magazine) to sponsor 5 events attracting about 1,500 people.
Greg Warnock came up with a Junto program about a year ago. Junto means together in Spanish. Benjamin Franklin had a Junto group that met to discuss political issues.
In our Junto program we meet for 8 weeks, 3 hours a week, we teach them how to be entrepreneurs.
Some come away having learned that they are not entrepreneurs.
But we take 10 each year whom we think can be serial entrepreneurs, and we invest $50,000 in them.
Bill Gates was student age when he came up with his great idea.
We have invested in 15 students to date.
We have already invested $3 million in 15 companies from Provo to Ogden.
As part of our rallying, we’ve formed angel investor groups in several places.
Jim Ellsworth here is the head of Olympus Angels. They have about 20 members.
Our goal is at the end of the first quarter, we’ll have 100 investors to invest $25,000 each per year over ther next five years. That is $12.5 million.
We want to support other incubators in Utah as well. The Simmons family is honoring their parents with an incubator building, at the Davis Applied Technology College. The Hall Foundation is making an investment there as well.
Sent wirelessly via BlackBerry from T-Mobile.
My Three Week Absence
I miss blogging.
Three weeks ago my blogging software stopped working. I tried a bunch of things and couldn’t get it to work. So finally I called in my COO and asked him to manage my transition from Userland to WordPress. Phil Windley switched from Userland to Moveable Type, but Richard Miller convinced me to go to WordPress instead.
So I’m finally back.
And I am amazed by the things that have happened during the last three weeks that I’ve not blogged about. The pace of technological innovations continues to accelerate.
Here are a few headlines that I’ve missed commenting on:
1. Microsoft actually woke up. They actually finally get it! Apparently Bill Gates and Ray Ozzy are now leading the charge — they realize they are going to have to go head to head with Google. In fact, they have to adopt Google’s business model.
Microsoft’s Windows Live and Office Live announcements and their clear reliance on AdCenter for (their pay-per-click advertising engine that will do demographic targeting, something that even Google doesn’t do yet) has convinced me that they finally understand. Before Google can own the software world by building all the applications we need and giving them away for free (all subsidized by the super-efficient Google advertising machine), Microsoft is going to play the same game.
What this means for consumers is that most of the software we use in the future will be free (like web based email is today) and will be subsidized by advertising. Most of the ads will have to be unobtrusive, or else consumers will switch from Google apps to Microsoft apps to Yahoo apps. Whoever is less intrusive will probably get the most customers. This is all good news for consumers, but bad news for almost all other software companies.
2. Sun’s podcast announcement. I was amazed to read last week that Sun will be offering a commercial service within the next 2-3 weeks that will convert any document you send them to a podcast. I can’t wait to see this. I hope the computer voices are decent.
Combined with the analyst forecast that 945.5 million mp3 playing devices will ship in 2009, the Sun technology will make it possible, I believe, for knowledge workers around the world to identify all the content sources they want to master — most of it is in print format only right now — and consume it in text or audio format whenever and whereever they want.
I think the days of broadcast television and radio are numbered. I think it will become easy for consumer to customize own our reading, listening and viewing experiences. If the average person in the US spends 6-7 hours per day with media, over time we’ll migrate from watching or listening to what the broadcasters want us to consume, to creating lists or channels or sharing ideas with all our friends and family or coworkers about the best stuff that we want to consume.
Imagine Google Alerts married with all the text, audio and video that is published or broadcast or uploaded on a daily basis. We are entering an unprecedented era where humans will have greatest opportunities to become experts in any subject by being aware of all the best content in the world that is being produced on that subject.
It’s getting really, really close.
3. The Google Urchin announcement today means that any blogger or small web site in the world can now use fairly good web analytics at no cost.
The high end enterprise scale analytics companies, especially Omniture with its powerful data warehousing technology (which goes way beyond web-only data), have a long and prosperous life ahead of them. But Google will take the low end of the market pretty easily from all the small analytics players.
4. I met the evangelist for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an amazing web service that will enable publishers to have massive content projects created by distributing them to thousands of piece-meal workers around the world. Very cool stuff. Just in time for some of our big worldhistory.com projects.
5. Phil Burns, my COO, introduced me to Riya, the photo recognition software used for facial recognition. He is travelling to San Francisco next week for some Riya-related meetings.
6. FundingUniverse.com held its first speedpitching event on Nov. 8th in Provo and got a ton of media coverage (newspaper, radio and five minutes of television!) The press loved the notion of “speed dating meets venture capital.” I’ve gotten positive feedback from many entrepreneurs and investors.
Our network of angel investors and entrepreneurs is growing into the thousands. We are excited to take our speedpitching concepts all over.
6. I’ve also got some personal milestones that I haven’t yet blogged about:
I ran 13.1 miles on my 40th birthday — the longest run of my life — to prove to myself that I’m not too old and obsolete yet, and that, in Robert Browning’s words “the best is yet to be.”
I spoke on “Approaching Omniscience” at BYU’s eBusiness day and also listened to the other keynote speaker Josh James from Omniture give a great presentation about their industry-leading web analytics and online marketing platform.
I’ve hired a COO for Infobase Ventures as well as an executive assistant. We are working on leasing a few thousand square feet of space in Provo for our incubator and research labs.
There are so many other things to blog about, but rather than doing them all at once, I’ll get back into my old daily routine.
It feels good to be back. I look forward to your comments and emails.
Cheers,
P. Allen
Blogger
BYU as an Incubator
My friend Tad Walch wrote an article in today’s Deseret News about the Business Week article that highlights Provo and 4 other cities as great places to start companies. BYU gets a lot of credit, as does the missionary program of the LDS Church, for creating entrepreneurs.
Tad got some good quotes from my other friend, Dave Bateman, who is possibly my favorite bootstrapping entrepreneur of all time–a constant source of inspiration and amazingly smart ideas.
I told Tad I would blog about what a great guy he is . . .
Junto Partners Present at UVEF
Filed under: Business Models, Incubators, Utah Entrepreneurship
Greg Warnock, founder of Junto Parnters, spoke at the UVEF meeting today.
I missed the first couple of minutes, but tried to take notes as best I could on my blackberry. Here they are:
Greg’s background: between 1988 and 1990 [dates might not be right] he started or funded 18 companies, including chemical, computer retail, selling cement edging, techsem(sic) labs which was a byu tech transfer deal, another company was a tech transfer deal from Cornell, another company had technology to monitor high volume freight.
Later, he invested in Knowlix, cofounded vSpring in 2000. This was something of a departure from pure entrepreneurship, but it was worthwhile. Our community needed this. But there were elements of entrepreneurship that he missed.
Without a grand scheme in mind, he invited 15 entrepreneurs to his home to discuss what gets in the way of people being entrepreneurs. He proposed telling them all he knew about entrepreneurship in 8 weeks, thinking that if they could just all work for themselves, this would be a cure for all job ailments. This discussion turned into Junto. Out of that group I selected 5. They named themselves Junto. Its hard to develop a peer group as an entrepreneur.
Failure comes from picking the wrong project, overcommitting to the wrong idea, or the lack of a little lubricating capital.
Q. Who funds the Junto group? A. The first year he did it. Last year he met Alan Hall. He has become committed to the Junto idea, so together they provided the capital for 2nd year’s groups of 10 Junto winners.
Q. What is the deal between Junto members and investors?A. We want it to become a self-sustaining model. When we run out of money, the first years’ should be returning to the fund.
Q. Does Junto get debt or equity in the startups?A. Primarily debt, but 35% equity is used to fuel future Juntos.
Introduction of Junto 2004
Brent Davis: His deal is a tool to sell to professional and collegiate sports teams, enabling them to communicate more with fans, and let fans track events they are planning to attend. The Junto model lets us look at a lot of deals, shut them down quickly if they don’t work. This idea works for him because local pro teams liked it, and it’s higher ticket, and it’s face to face sale. We sell it to teams as a subscription. They offer free downloads of our software to their fans. [He hasn't heard of SportsNutz, which Steve Grizzelle said was sold recently.]
Brent Thompson, Agile Studios. He runs a software engineering firm, they do a lot with open source. He already had this going before he joined Junto.
Q. What did he get out of it?A. Four partners that are smartest, brightest people he has met, great networks, plus Greg’s endless network.
Clint Carlos, Garagemahall (sic). They do high end custom garage interiors. Cabinets, flooring, lighting. Has been doing this a few months. He looked at a lot of deals before settling on this. He sent roofers to Florida after the hurricane, trying to put them to work in the winter during their offtime. But there was a major bottleneck in supplies, so it didn’t work out.
Q. What is the consequence of failure to you? A. Probably mostly shame. I want to be one of the first millionaire’s in the group. I don’t want to have to work for one of these other guys. But if wasn’t part of Junto I would love to work for any of these companies because of their growth potential.
Q. If you succeed, how does money get distributed?A. I own majority of my company and a small piece of others, and Junto owns a piece. There is no personal guarantee on the $50,000, which you would never get from a bank.
Will Allred, Firepoll. I was working on a marketing related deal, when a friend told me that the research was taking too long. The internet is supposed to provide instant communications, so they build software that allows them to run surveys quickly and sell data to companies, ad agencies, market research firms, etc.
This week they helped a software company choose a name out of about 12 options. They charge by number of responses, usually $7 per response for a short survey. Most companies will buy 100 responses. Our cost is from incentives. We pay about a dollar (cash, mp3 files, etc.) to our end users for taking the surveys. Our sweet spot is consumers age 13-34.
Ryan Money, HireVue. He worked on this from almost the very start. He saw a report that 50% of people fabricate on resumes. We want to solve this problem. Greg Warnock said he hated job interviews. Sometimes in the middle of them he wants to end the interview so badly he feels like pulling out $100 and giving it to the candidate and just saying, “this isn’t going to work.” HireVue lets you see video clips of candidates before bringing them in. He hired a couple developers to build it, but they didn’t succeed. So in the meantime, while it was being developed, he bought a LoveSac franchise. He learned a ton by running this retail business. First, you get a ridiculous number of tax notices. He has also learned the rule of two: things always take twice as long, and cost twice as much as you think they will. I’ve learned a lot about having employees.
Benefit [of Junto] for me was having someone front the money.
One of our customers is an engineering firm in Canada. They used to fly people up. Now they do video interviews. They send cameras all over. We have a subscription model, like cell phone plan per minutes. We have some pods in call centers. Ave cost of goods is about 30%.
Q. What was the first thing you did when you found out you were a $50,000 winner? A. I saw it in email, I was ecstatic.
Q. What did you spend the money on?A. We are very frugal, free office space, commandeered other resources from wherever we could get them. Later we got some great space at LoveSac for about $200 per month, desks at DI. We got free biz cards at vistaprint.com. I got my software developed for equity, over 8 1/2 months with full time developers working on it.
Q. To Greg: what do you get out of this? A. I enjoy working with these guys, evenings, weekends, vacation time. Think of what happens if you sutract Huntsman, Sorenson, Eccles, Larry Miller from our economy, what happens to jobs, sports, arts, libraries, etc? I hope these guys become the next generation of business people that can benefit the community.
Q. How do you recruit?A. The first year he asked business school professors in the state for email addresses of their most passionate (not their smartest) students. He emailed them and asked them what they wanted to do the next 3-5 years, had them take an online personality profile, asked them if they had ever run a business before. From the responses he chose 15 for his first meetings.
Q. How does this scale?A. First year I had 35 candidates, invited 15 and chose 5 winners. The next year we had 85 applicants, held one class in the south and one in the north. We had 10 winners that year. There are now 15 active Junto partners.
Q. What next?A. It seems like there should be a master plan, but there really isn’t. I’m just taking this a step at a time.
Q. [Dave Politis] What is the best idea you didn’t fund?A. [Greg] The Junto candidates don’t come with ideas; they are selected for their capabilities, for getting stuff done. We test them on selling stuff (bottled water, LoveSacs), on organizing service projects, etc. Some people just get things done, others don’t.
Greg. Each Junto comes up with their own operating agreement, how much equity to split, how to release funds, where to office, what hours to work, etc. This would make fascinating case study.
A recent survey shows that the average time to rev in Utah startups is 14 months based on responses from 400 entrepreneurs.
The Junto winners know that the future funding for Junto will come from their successes. We can only do this for about 3 years, and then we will need to have funding come from prior years’ successes.
iProvo: Fiber Optic for a City of 100,000
Provo, Utah, a city of more than 105,000 has owned its own power plant since 1940 (see Provo Mayor’s message: November 2000). In 2000, Mayor Lewis Billings began discussions that resulted in decisions to deploy a city-wide fiber optic network called iProvo.
The city owns this network, but leases it to companies who will provide telecommunication services to Provo residents and businesses.
Larry Lessig would be pleased. He slammed the private sector in a Wired magazine article last year for failing to deliver broadband services quickly enough in the U.S. This nation has fallen from 1st place to 13th place in broadband deployment in the last few years.
Today I checked the map to see when my neighborhood will get the services. We are in one of the phase IV sections, so service will get here in July 2005. The entire city will be finished by mid-2006. iProvo claims speeds that are 100 times faster than cable and 250 times faster than DSL. I can’t wait. I’ve had high speed internet since I bought a DirecPC satellite dish in the fall of 1995, but I’ve never had speeds this fast, even at work.
Novell is making 25,000 sq. ft of space available in one of its buildings for an incubator of open source software companies. All the businesses who locate there will be hooked into the iProvo fiber network, given them tremendous bandwidth at a very reasonable price.
Meanwhile, UTOPIA, the largest municipal fiber optic network in the country is now available in Orem and will soon be available in 14 other cities who voted to participate in this project.
It’s nice to live in such a forward looking state. First the Utah pioneers developed irrigation techniques in 1847 so they could raise crops, even in a desert.
In the late 20th century we invented computer graphics at the U. of U. (Evans and Sutherland), digital audio (Tom Stockham), word processing (WordPerfect), and computer networking (Novell.) We also lead the nation in entrepreneurship, with more Inc. 500 companies per capita than any other state.
Now the UTOPIA project and iProvo will help ensure that we maintain an edge in innovation.
Thanks Mayor Billings and whoever championed UTOPIA. With our fastest internet speed, highest birth rate, and the biggest population under 18, we’re going to be a force to be reckoned with for generations.
New Incubator in Southern California
One of the co-founders of Commission Junction, Per Pettersen, announced in July that he was forming an incubator/holding company called Estalea. He planned to start 3 companies this year. I can’t find a company web site and in LinkedIn.com Per is still listed as the CTO at Commission Junction. But I’m always excited to find fools like myself that still believe in an incubator model. Someday some of us will prove that incubators can generate repeated successes, and that core competencies and technologies can be leveraged in multiple companies.
Bill Gross: Extreme Transparency (and Publicity)
Bill Gross, the still reigning king of incubators is pioneering a new concept which maybe we should call Extreme Transparency. I do believe he has guts. Years ago he invented the pay-per-click model where advertising costs were transparent. Anyone could see what other people were bidding on keywords. Everyone criticized this commercialization of search at the time, but that transparency led to a super-efficient auction model and is now making billions of dollars per year for both Yahoo (who bought Overture.com) and Google.
Now he’s getting a bunch of publicity for being transparent about the daily revenue numbers of a recent search engine startup called Snap.com. People think he’s crazy because the daily revenue right now is between $50 and $100, but I think he is smart, a) because of all the free publicity this is generating and b) because he and I have both watched web companies hit the J-curve. It’s not hard to believe that Snap.com will start with a small trickle of customers but over time it will achieve some scale with advertisers and customers and its numbers will explode. (Remember the e-business commercial where the few transactions start turning into hundreds or thousands per second? It doesn’t happen that quickly, but it does happen. It certainly happened with Goto.com, Bill’s first search engine company.) This could be the most closely watched J-curve in history.
Kudos to Bill for his innovative ideas and courage.
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