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AlwaysOn Venture Summit West, Dec. 6-7

November 29, 2007 by paulballen · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Families, Genealogy, Social Networking Watch, Venture Capital, World Vital Records 

I missed the Stanford Summit (AlwaysOn) this July, but I am registered for the Venture Summit West coming up next week. I look forward to catching up with some friends on the VC side of things and comparing notes with some friends who are CEOs who will be at this conference. I usually attend the AlwaysOn Summit in July at Stanford, but I missed it this year, being in the intense startup mode still at WorldVitalRecords.com.

This will be a fun conference, partly because social networking is all the rage, and my company has launched a social network for genealogists, FamilyLink.com, that is getting increasing traction, but far more because our We’re Related Facebook application is getting serious traction, and even though we launched it later than I had hoped (5 months and 2 days after the Facebook Platform launch, which I blogged about), it has far surpassed our expectations.

Our strategy is to aggregate and provide genealogical databases to customers worldwide through our paid service, worldvitalrecords.com, and to attract millions of users through viral marketing, utilizing our own social network and building apps for other social networks. Both aspects of our strategy are now working.

WorldVitalRecords.com hits record traffic numbers every month and our subscriber numbers are really starting to climb. (The monthly option at $5.95 per month seems to have helped.)

For viral marketing, we love Facebook. But we also love the OpenSocial concept (which I have not yet blogged about) and providing our apps wherever users are. If we end up with apps and widgets on every major social web site, the big question is will our family users be able to interact seamlessly with each other and share family content and communications as easily as if they were all using the same dedicated social network? During the Social Networking 3.0 panel at the July Stanford Summit, I think the answer from the Facebook panelist sounded like a “probably” but from MySpace it seemed like a no. They were discussing how portable individual profiles would be on the social networks, and whether apps would be interactive with apps on other social networks. Of course social networks (like MySpace) probably want to “own” their customers, but I believe customers won’t allow for that, and will demand portability of profiles and interoperability of apps/widgets.

If you are going to Venture Summit West, and would like to meet up to discuss the future of online genealogy and family social networking (or social networking in general), drop me a line.

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Genealogy in India

March 9, 2007 by paulballen · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Book Recommendations, Genealogy, India, International Business, Venture Capital 

Oh yes, I forgot to mention that World Vital Records’ India page ranks #3 in MSN for "india genealogy." I’m still trying to convince FundingUniverse.com to roll out 6 regional web sites in India, as suggested by an Indian entrepreneur who explained to me how startup funding might naturally happen in that country. I don’t know if I’ve blogged about it, but 3 years ago I read "India Unbound" by the first venture capitalist in India, Gurcharan Das. It is an absolutely incredible look at the economic revolution that has been occuring in India since 1991. I am very optimistic about the future of India, which will be the world’s most populated country by about 2030.

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FundingUniverse Speedpitching Events: Raise Money for Your Startup

December 12, 2006 by paulballen · 5 Comments
Filed under: Advice for Startups, Angel Investing, Entrepreneurship, Provo Labs Companies, Utah Events, Venture Capital 

FundingUniverse.com now has about 1,000 angel investors in virtually every state. The company, which I helped found in early 2005, is holding its 5th speedpitching event today in Sandy, Utah. It has held events in 6 or more states and has plans to continue to expand.

I’ve attended several of these events representing the small fund we have at Provo Labs, as a potential investor.

The coaching and practice sessions have been extremely helpful. Imagine trying to get your entire business plan onto a 1-page summary that will be distributed. And then imagine being forced to tell your story in 4 minutes. That’s what all the entrepreneurs learn how to do.

After the 4 minute pitch, the investors get 3 minutes for Q&A. Then you go to the next table and give your pitch again. You do this 5 times before lunch, and then 5 times after lunch.

The goal is a followup meeting. The staff at FundingUniverse say that the vast majority of companies that have attended these meetings have had follow up meetings with the angel investors who heard their initial pitch.

One of my friends who has done two of these events said the most important advice he has is to memorize your pitch word for word. He and his co-presenters did this but the passion for their business still came through loud and clear.

A week after the February 2006 speedpitching event, he gave the pitch again to a strategic investor and raised $4.1 million. He credited going through the process of boiling down the company’s story into its very essence and memorizing it and giving it so many times for helping him close the deal.

I know 3 entrepreneurs who are presenting today, and I wish them all well.

I’m going to invite the staff from FundingUniverse to do some training for the 30+ companies at Provo Labs Academy, since many of them will one day seek funding from angel investors. Hopefully we’ll get that scheduled in the next week or two.

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Investor Meetings: by Referral Only

October 6, 2006 by paulballen · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Angel Investing, Provo Labs Companies, Venture Capital 

Most VCs don’t have time to look at the thousands of unsolicited deals that are sent to them "over the transom," an interesting phrase defined by Wikipedia. Most only look at deals that are referred to them by people they know and trust.

So when VC Forum comes to your town looking for local deals that are promising, the Forum requires them to be submitted by a local VC firm that has of course screened the deals.

So local companies that want to pitch at the VC Forum events will need to have already gotten in front of credible people and started telling their story. You have to get noticed, you have to have a good team and a good story, and then you get the referral you are looking for.

The team at FundingUniverse.com has been very grateful for the support of hundreds of angel investors, VCs, sponsors, and entrepreneurs in Utah that have turned its online angel investor matching service and its Speedpitching events into key components of the Utah funding scene.

We heard today that all of the deals but one that were featured at Utah VC Forum event last week had previously attended FundingUniverse.com Speedpitching Events.

Many of the best deals that I have seen at the Speedpitching Events were looking for more money than is usually available from angel investors; so I’m glad to see that some of these are moving on to the VC arena. I hope the coaching and feedback they have received at the Speedpitching Events will help them land the venture capital they are looking for. I bet that it helped some of them get the referral they needed to present at this prestigious VC Forum event.

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Top Writers Move to Startups

June 13, 2006 by paulballen · 1 Comment
Filed under: Blogging, Venture Capital 

I thought it was interesting to learn on the same day that both Robert Scoble, the pre-eminent Microsoft blogger, and Om Malik, the top writer at Business 2.0, were leaving their positions to join startup companies.

Robert Scoble will join venture-backed podtech.net (I first learned about them when they did a great interview of Paul Ahlstrom from vSpring a few months back) and Om Malik has received funding from True Ventures, a San Francisco venture fund. Jon Callaghan, one of the CMGI venture guys who invested in MyFamily.com in 1998, is with the fund and will be on the board of Om’s new company Gigaom. Cool name.

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v|100 Meeting Today — Ellen Levy from Stanford

June 6, 2006 by paulballen · 6 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, Utah Entrepreneurship, Utah Events, Venture Capital 

vSpring Capital’s top 100 Utah venture entrepreneurs (the v|100) met today at Thanksgiving Point’s Garden Room for a lunch and social.

I saw dozens of people that I know (what a powerful gathering!) but only had a chance to briefly chat with a few: Dennis Wood (the most LinkedIn person in Utah), Phil Windley (the man who inspired me to start blogging!) John Pestana, Josh James and Brett Error of Omniture, Glen Mella (Control4), Cydni Tetro (NextPage), Brent Bishop (Dollar Tree and Content Watch), Gavin Christensen. I met Scott McDonough, now with vSpring, who was the President and COO of LoveSac.

I think the v|100 would have even more value if Corporate Alliance could introduce its learn-serve-grow philosophy to this group and if we were guided in our networking and given more time to network. We had only about 15-20 minutes before lunch and maybe 10 after before everyone was gone.

The invited speaker was Ellen Levy, a well-connected Silicon Valley entrepreneur turned VC who now runs the Media X program at Stanford and consults for DFJ, a top Silicon Valley VC fund.

Ellen came at the invitation of NextPage’s Tom Gno. They worked together at Paul Allen’s Interval Research Group as the internet was emerging. Ellen left and founded WhoWhere, sold it to Lycos, and has done a dozen interesting things since, including NeoCarta Ventures. I sat at Ellen’s table. She and Tom were apparently laughing at my name.

Speaking of my name, I’ve dropped to #6 on Google for “paul allen”, even though I recently switched domain names for my blog (from infobaseventures.com to paulallen.net), which should help my rankings in the long run.

What I really need is for a few hundred of my friends and readers to please link to my new blog site at www.paulallen.net, so that I can regain my former #3 position. Maybe even sometime, if my blog gets enough incoming links, I’ll be the #1 Paul Allen in Google. And then I’ll have to change my name from “The Lesser” to something else, maybe “The Prominent”. (I’ll accept nominations for a name change if and when this happens.)

Ellen said some very interesting things. First, she said that as a Silicon Valley VC she really thought she had her ear to the ground and knew everything that was going on. But in her role at Stanford as a “connector” between students, faculty, industry partners, and VCs, she actually feels that her access to information is even better. She encouraged everyone to do something in social entrepreneurship, such as teach at a university, or work with non-profits or do community service. (Because there is more to life than making money.)

She told us about the mission of Media X at Stanford and mentioned some of the 25 affiliates (almost all were very large corporations) who are interacting with Media X in order to map their R&D interests with the projects that are being done by the Stanford research community. She feels that she has made many connections that were win-win.

(I had hoped she would talk more about how small technology companies — not just huge corporations who can afford the annual fees — could partner with Stanford’s Media X.)

Ellen said Media X is sometimes described as an “intellectual match making service” and she seemed to like that.

She mentioned several topics that seem to come up frequently these days in conversations with industry:

  • Technology and the Aging. For example, how the aging population will change automobile transporation and health care.
  • Distributed Media and Online Content. This includes trying to understand consumers as publishers, the role of big media companies, how copyright should work, how people consume and manage information.
  • Human Machine Interaction and Sensing Technology. She mentioned sensors and RFID and the marriage of the analog and digital worlds.
  • Mobile computing.
  • Collaboration.
  • All Things Gaming. She said that the Online Entertainment industry is now bigger than the Movie Industry and that a lot of thought is going into discovering the role of gaming in learning. Should gaming principles be applied into enterprise software? The next generation that grew up on interactive games might not like the limited interactivity of SAP, for example.

Finally, Ellen made some interesting comments about time, which I found very timely, given the stage I’m at in my career.

She says that time is the most important resource of a risk-taking, company building entrepreneur, and that it is very important to be careful about how you use your time.

In 1999 she conducted a year long experiment, by journalling every day for a year about every thing that happened each day. She didn’t make judgements about what was worth writing about–she wrote about everything. She also took a photograph of everyone she met that year.

What she discovered was that she wasted a lot of time on things that she didn’t want to do and didn’t enjoy. At the end of the day she would write about everything she spent her time on and realized she had to waste time writing about things that had been a waste of time doing. She learned how to become a better director of her time.

Ellen believes that how you use your time will determine the level of impact that you will have in your life. She cautioned us against the tyranny of the urgent.

As I listened to Ellen talk about her 1999 life chronicle, I thought if she kept this up, she’d be the world’s greatest blogger.

She talked about how on a plane trip she visited with a man (has never seen him since) and asked the flight attendant to take their picture together since she was “chronicling her life” that year.

He was in magazine publishing and apparently told a friend about this woman, who told another friend, who mentioned it at a party, where a Wall Street Journal reporter found it curious. So she ended up being mentioned in the Wall Street Journal, which led to old friends finding her and other interesting things happening.

Now all of us can blog (chronicle our life) and use social networking services to meet new people and connect with old friends. But Ellen was 5-6 years ahead of her time.

(I found it interesting that she has served on the advisory board of eVite and LinkedIn.)

I also had feelings of regret while listening to Ellen, because I have been an avid journal-keeper since age 15. I have a couple dozen journals and then since 1991 I’ve been keeping my journal using Folio VIEWS software, with it’s amazing full-text retrieval capabilities.

I have found huge benefits from keeping a journal — personal, intellectual, spiritual, social and career benefits. But in the last 18 months, my schedule has gotten so full, that I have probably only written a dozen times in my journal. How ironic that at a time of life where I’m actually working on more interesting projects and meeting more interesting people and having more profound experiences than ever before that my journal writing is suffering for the first time.

I know some people keep a journal so their posterity can read it someday. That might happen, but in my opinion is quite unlikely. I think our descendants will be so busy (even more than we are) with what technology and prosperity enables that they won’t be all that interested in our 20th century chronicles. It might seem rather dull to them, compared to what the Always On world of the 21st century will offer.

So while I hope that a few words of wisdom from my writings might someday touch some of my descendants, I primarily keep a journal for personal benefits. It helps me remember people and events. It helps me be more grateful. It gives me perspective during difficult times. And as Spencer W. Kimball said about journalling, it helps me keep the Lord in remembrance daily.

I hope I can arrange my schedule (be a director of my time, as Ellen said) so that I can fit in consistent daily blogging and journalling.

I may have to return fewer phone calls and fewer emails in order to make time for more blogging and journalling. But as Phil Windley said today, I should let those one-to-one communications slip in order to do the more important one-to-many communications. That makes sense to me.

So let me apologize in advance to all the people whose phone calls and emails I might not return …

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Infopia raises $8 million

March 17, 2006 by paulballen · Leave a Comment
Filed under: E-Commerce, Internet Marketing Tactics, Software for Entrepreneurs, Utah Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital 

Congratulations to Infopia for closing on an $8 million funding round from Hummer Winblad and Trident Capital. Infopia is an ecommerce platform that helps customers get their products onto sites such as eBay, Amazon, Google, Overstock, Shopzilla and others. Bjorn Espenes and his partners have made some very powerful breakthroughs in e-commerce automation. This funding round is great to see.

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Your Content Everywhere

February 1, 2006 by paulballen · 1 Comment
Filed under: Gadget Watch, Venture Capital 

Sling Media raised another $46 million to make your home entertainment content accessible wherever you travel.

I wonder what this means to Orb Networks, which I first saw at Always On in 2005, which also offers a way to access your home PC content (including TV) on your internet-connected PDA or mobile phone.

Here’s an Alexa chart that shows how much web site traffic these companies are generating:

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Angel Investors Acting Like VCs

January 4, 2006 by paulballen · 4 Comments
Filed under: Angel Investing, Venture Capital 

A Business Week article (thanks John and Steve!) discusses that angel investors are banding together more often and investing larger amounts in less risky deals. The author mentions that more than 200 organized angel groups exist in the U.S. served by the Angel Capital Association.

I like seeing the growth from the organized angel groups.

FundingUniverse.com (one of our portfolio companies) helps by providing free online software (the DealFlow Suite) to help angel groups find quality business plans and growing companies that they want to learn more about.

But I still think that the vast majority of angel investments are made by individuals who are not part of organized angel investor groups. I think the largest investments are made by superangels who don’t join groups and I think the majority of deals come from angels who aren’t trying to be like VCs–they are helping entrepreneurs that they know and like to try to get something off the ground. They invest anywhere from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of times that amount.

I know quite a few superangels. I wish more of them would join angel investor groups because sometimes angel groups can’t raise enough money to get good deals funded. Superangels could easily solve that problem.

Meanwhile, FundingUniverse.com now has more than 700 angel investors (20 state sites have at least 10) registered on its network of states sites. They collectively have more than $500 million in "available capital." As more and more state sites attract angels, the company will be able to hold speed pitching events and larger regional events in more locations.

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Wikipedia’s New Competition

December 20, 2005 by paulballen · 1 Comment
Filed under: Business Models, Venture Capital 

Wikipedia is providing “semi-protection” to articles that get vandalized often. New users won’t be able to edit these pages.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia co-founder Larry and serial entrepreneur Joe Firmage (who has Utah roots) have raised $10 million to create an expert-driven open source encyclopedia called Digital Universe.

It will be interesting to see if anything can stop the momentum of Wikipedia. I wouldn’t bet that Digital Universe will ever come close to catching up. That said, a commercially funded #2 player in the online encyclopedia space could very well be a financial success. And I think that it will be.

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