It occurs to me that a lot of things are left unsaid in even many of my closest personal and professional relationships.  Maybe that says more about me than the world as a whole, but I do think it’s a general issue.  So although I should be working right now, I got to thinking about why this deficit exists.  A few thoughts to start with:

• People don’t know what they really think or feel.  There’s something there, but they haven’t thought it through enough to figure out what it really is.  You can’t verbalize what you don’t consciously understand.
• People avoid conflict.  You decide it’s not worth the possible reaction, or perhaps being wrong, or whatever.  Being open with someone is a sign that you really care about your relationship with them, and by this metric a lot of “close” relationships really aren’t.
• People don’t want to hear it.  If you react over-the-top negatively to certain things, you can bet people will shut up about them.  This is the flip side of the previous point.  If you don’t want to hear what someone really thinks, what does that imply about your working or personal connection?
• People don’t know how to approach sensitive topics well.  This is a big one for me.  I’m not particularly gifted at broaching tough subjects well.  I’m so used to being tactful that when I do feel the need to speak up, sometimes it’s way too blunt.
• There are lots of hidden landmines.  To one person, it’s a matter-of-fact conversation about how to run a meeting or where to go to dinner.  To the other, it’s an implied judgment on their abilities, lifestyle, character, or whatever.  Everyone has topics that for them symbolize much larger issues.  And they often don’t even know what those are or care to talk about them.
• People don’t ask enough questions.  It’s often easier to draw your own conclusions than to ask, but it means you tend to be wrong more often.

So yeah, there are lots of reasons why communicating is hard.  But I’ve realized that the best friendships and relationships are the ones where you share more of yourself.  This is something I want to get a lot better at.

I’m on a bunch of startup networking lists, so I get lots of emails that go something like “Hey, we just won the Timbuktu award, please comment on our blog or tweet about it!” WTF?

Just because I’m doing a startup too doesn’t mean I know what the hell you do or why I should care.  I also don’t have time and reputation to burn tweeting or otherwise promoting random stuff unless I actually think it’s cool and that people I know will care!

I know you’re all trying to be polite by keeping your emails short, but please give us something to work with. Tell us why you’re special, who your target market is, and how we can help you reach them.  A random retweet or TechCrunch comment generates squat in terms of real business results, so give me something meaningful to do instead (like telling specific people who might actually want to use your service). You might only get 10% of the response rate, but if you create genuine engagement and/or focused activity, it’ll make a $*<&load more of a difference than a million color-by-numbers marketing.  You’re putting shotguns to shame with this stuff.

Ok, I’m glad I got that off my chest. Feel free to tell me I’m an idiot.

When I first read Mark Suster’s post, Invest in Lines, Not Dots, it rang true to me. How can an investor accurately judge an entrepreneur’s progress (and more importantly, demeanor and working style) at a single point in time? And as we’ve all heard, VC investments are like marriages - they last a while, there will inevitably be friction, and it’s best to avoid a break-up! So why would you want to get married after a single date? This is true for founders and well as investors.

Since then, I’ve seen the same idea echoed in a few places. And I’ve been trying to put that tactic to use, doing a lot of investor networking over the last six months even though we’re not planning on raising a seed round until September or so.

But an interesting segmentation has started developing. Some investors are happy to do a quick meeting or call based on an intro (even if the intro is a bit distant at times since I’m not incredibly networked in Europe… yet), while from others I get: “I’m too busy to talk unless you’re raising now” or “Get back to us when you have revenue.” I consider the revenue point a sign that these “early-stage” investors may not really be early-stage, which is fine.

The “too busy” point is a bit more puzzling. A few hypotheses come to mind:

• These investors are essentially maxed out on investments and board positions already.
• I didn’t do a good enough job of selling myself, and this is one of those polite outs that investors use when they’re just not that into you.
• There’s simply too much to do, and they need to manage their time ruthlessly even if they see the value of relationship building.
• They don’t think a pre-pitch relationship adds value.

Maybe I’m too pessimistic (my wife is nodding her head at this point), but I tend to gravitate towards the last one. The impression I get is that a lot of these investors are deal-driven rather than relationship-driven. Since they focus on inbound deal flow, it’s usually not proprietary (i.e., deals they’re seeing that others are not). And they don’t get a relationship premium. So in order to perform well, they need to execute the deal better, meaning extract better terms out of the entrepreneur. While I try to keep an open mind, this response always introduces a note of caution into my future dealings with these people. And I find it interesting to see how real-world investor interactions don’t always conform to what I’ve taken as conventional wisdom.

I could of course be reading too much in.  I’d be curious what you think of this dynamic.

I never used to get Dave McClure’s bit about “fuck or kill.”  His point is that pissing your customers off, while not as good as making them lust after your product, is better than leaving them indifferent.  But it’s a weird thought.  Surely inspiring people to hate your product isn’t good? 

Now that I have an alpha version of Brekiri that I’m testing with users, I get it.  The problem is that indifferent users don’t give you any new information.  They say moderately nice or constructive things about your product, but they don’t use it much.  You’re left wondering whether you have the wrong users, the wrong product, or just aren’t far enough along to meet their requirements.  Or maybe you’re even addressing a need that people don’t really care about (although I’m pretty sure that’s not the case for us).  It’s like the fog of war.  You end up making product development decisions based on a combination of intuition, tea leaves, the alignment of the stars, and whatever hints you can drag out of people.  But there’s not much to infer from a “meh,” and if you only have a few outspoken users, it can be tough to tell whether they’re representative of your market or just outliers.

Users who love or hate you, on the other hand, send much clearer signals.  Love is self-explanatory; find more of those people.  Hate is trickier.  They might be the wrong segment entirely, or they might just not be satisfied with your initial product.  You have to make your own call.  It might turn out that some of these users are too sophisticated or not sophisticated enough, not feeling the pain of your use case, or whatever.  But at least love and hate inspire lots of commentary, which gives you more information to work with.  And you know they care about something related to your product!

We’ve definitely gotten some good feedback from our alpha users.  A couple of our top features in development, like financial filings search and better deduplication of search results, are primarily driven by user feedback.  But I know that more feedback will help us understand users’ needs faster.  So here’s what we’re doing about that:

• Getting more users:  Everything else being equal, more users equals more feedback.  A larger number of data points helps iron out any questions about whether the feedback you’re getting is representative
• Targeting more:  Many of our first users were friends other startup founders.  That’s fine to overcome our initial launch shyness, but many of those people aren’t really our target users.  So they don’t feel the pain point we’re trying to solve the same way, and they don’t have the same frame of reference.  We’re biting the bullet and putting our solution in front of consulting, market research, and competitive intelligence people.  If they don’t like it, that’s still very useful information.
• Setting up more systematic feedback:  So far, much of our feedback has been collected from email exchanges and User Voice comments.  Email is ok, but it puts an added burden on the alpha users and results in many of the extremely specific points being lost.  User Voice has been a disappointment.  Not many people seem motivated to add feedback to the system.  Instead, we’re planning on setting up a ton of usability sessions with target users.  That will help us make sure that feedback pertains to very concrete use cases and that we really see all the good, the bad, and the ugly of users trying to make sense of our still very rough product.
• Staying in touch:  As we develop more features and add more polish, we want to do a good job of keeping users informed of the changes.  Some of those “meh” responses or non-responses may evolve into valuable feedback as people have more of a chance to play around with and consider the product.

We’re already getting enough good feedback to know we’re on the right track.  But these steps will help us ramp up the amount of information we can use to better prioritize and define features and usability improvements.  

Apparently, it’s been a month since the last time I posted here. It feels much longer. Creating a startup is a lot of work, and I end every day wishing I could have gotten more done. It doesn’t leave a lot of time for luxuries like personal blogging.

Things are going reasonably well. The product is getting better and better, although there are definitely hurdles here and there. But there’s so much more to do. So it might be another month or two before I make it back here. Consider this a placeholder in the meantime…

I should know better than to read TechCrunch, but what can I say? I followed a Twitter link. As a result, I came across a paper arguing that too many engineers going into finance is dampening entrepreneurship rates in the US. That may be true, but unfortunately the paper doesn’t clarify the situation at all. Rather, it assumes a conclusion and then spends a while dancing around it.

The biggest flaw is that it compares rates of finance employment with overall entrepreneurship. Most new businesses are things like restaurants and construction companies, not high-tech firms. So until you separate out the companies that hedge fund quants might otherwise be creating, using an overall entrepreneurship rate is BS.

There are a bunch of other issues, but I don’t have time to go into them.

Finally, the writing. Here are a few phrases that I consider red flags in academic or think tank papers:

• “It is conceivable that”
• “If we presuppose”
• “We can imagine perhaps”

And here’s a paragraph that uses them in context.  I’ll let you be the judge.

…it is conceivable that some degree of talent allocation between entrepreneurship and employment was affected by the rise of finance… If we presuppose that some fraction of those scientists and engineers working in the financial sector would otherwise have started companies, we can imagine perhaps a slight effect of financialization on potential entrepreneurship. This also points to a question of the quality of companies being started, which we discuss below. It is difficult, again, to make firm statements as to causation, but the historical data seem to suggest that a two-way feedback effect exists. 

Also this.  My response: what? I’m pretty sure a shortage of opportunities to do business doesn’t cause a sector to expand.

Conversely, an underlying decrease (or, at least, not an increase) in entrepreneurship creates a shortage of new financing opportunities for the financial sector, meaning the sector must find other outlets in which to be innovative and make money from money—causing the sector to expand.

Source: http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedFiles/financialization_report_3-23-11.pdf

Entrepreneurship:

• The unique feeling that you have five separate things you absolutely must be doing right now.
• Not having enough time to blog.
• Knowing that there’s a problem out there, and that you can solve it… but not knowing exactly how.  Being willing to figure it out.

More to come as they occur to me.

Jeff Clavier has a great little essay in Do More Faster about the Three Asses Rule:

• Seeking the perfect combo: “a smart-ass team with a kick-ass product in a big-ass market.”

Officially or unofficially, that’s what most seed investors are looking for. Not to mention that it’s the combination that propels companies to outstanding success. And I’ve been working hard on building that at Brekiri.

In the last few months, progress on getting our asses together has been amazing. First, I say “our” because Jochen Maes joined Brekiri as technical co-founder in January. We met in late 2010 through what I think of as “six degrees of Quora” and hit it off. Since we started working together, I’ve been amazed by how smart, skilled, and practical he is, not to mention his otherworldly work ethic. And if you know me, you know I’m not easily impressed by work ethic. So now we have domain expertise, business experience, and excellent technical execution – starting to sound like a smart-ass team.

We’ve been working hard on the product, and it’s coming along really well. Progress on the business meta-data and the search platform is excellent, and we’re looking forward to doing some alpha testing with potential customers before the end of February. I’m excited about the product, but in the end only customers will be able to tell us whether we have a kick-ass product.

And finally, market. The online business information market totals about $25 billion (according to a market research report), and we think our immediately addressable market is about $2-3 billion. We also think we can get people who are just using Google now to upgrade to a paid business search product, so we’re planning on expanding the market rather than just capture share.  It’s a big opportunity.

So yeah, we’re looking forward to proving that all the pieces for an amazing company are in place. We’re working very hard to create something that’ll be useful and meaningful.

Marco Arment has a great blog post up about the fragmentation of the Android platform.  Despite Android hardware getting better (as all smartphone hardware is doing), the number of different models is confusing for consumers, a problem for accessories, and a general drag on the platform.

Very few non-geeks know about individual Android handsets. They change so frequently, and are so numerous, that there’s never much of an opportunity for a meaningful buzz to generate around any of them. Nobody’s lining up to buy them. CNN’s not covering their launches. Consumer Reports isn’t vigorously testing their antennas. The Daily Show isn’t making jokes about them. So the mass market doesn’t really respond to individual devices. Even if Uncle Joe brings his fancy Android Something to Thanksgiving and your mother is impressed by it and wants to buy one, by the time her contract expires in two months and she goes to the Verizon store, it’s gone.

Google needs to help phone manufacturers focus, and the best way to do that is with coop marketing.  They could chip in 50% of marketing for phone launches with over a $50 million launch budget, for example.  That kind of initiative would go a long way towards encouraging phone manufacturers to be more selective and strategic with their product launches.  I don’t know the economics of Android for Google, and it’s likely that the product doesn’t generate enough revenue for such big campaigns.  Maybe Google needs to figure out how to get a bigger slice of the pie in exchange for making the entire ecosystem more effective.

This is a post I wrote on my company blog.  I don’t usually bother linking to those here, but this is relevant in an entrepreneurship context, too.  In a nutshell, being the expert at something in your company or organization is often a lot easier than you think.

Just out of curiosity, I thought I’d see what the auto-complete feature in Google Chrome has to say about me.

A is for Amazon

B is for Brekiri

C is for CastTV

D is for DeLijn

E is for ESPN

F is for Facebook

G is for Yahoo Groups (I’m a bit surprised by this one)

H is for ING Home Banking

I is for iStockphoto

J is for Jezebel

K is for Kinepolis

L is for LinkedIn

M is for Google Maps

N is for the New York Times

O is for Orbitz

P is for Penny Arcade

Q is for Quora

R is for RescueTime

S is for Startup Weekend

T is for Twitter

U is for… I forget what U is for

V is for VinoGusto

W is for Wikipedia

X is for xkcd

Y is for YouTube

Z is for Zintro

You can draw your own conclusions – don’t have much time to annotate at the moment.

Did I say that GroupOn might be overvalued?  Yes, I did.  As it turns out, only the last sentence of that post seems correct now.

I say that based on the GroupOn 2.0 announcement today.  The combination of the deal feed and being able to create your own stores and deals is pretty cool, and I think it’s going to have a big impact on the way people shop in general.

More generally, it’s fascinating how easily people are seduced by a deal.  Merchants are realizing that it’s easier to give people X% off, if you know they’ll find out about it through social means, than to spend X% on promoting your list price.  I still wonder if this quirk of human psychology will still work when X% off is the new list price.  GroupOn is taking the price competition genie out of the bottle, and we all know that’s hard to undo.  My new prediction is that this trend will be good for consumers and for GroupOn, but probably bad for the retail sector in the long run.  Still, kudo’s to GroupOn for having a much better game plan than I gave them credit for.

I am building a vertical search engine for businesses that will change the way business people find and use information.  My company, Brekiri, will improve the search experience using innovative information retrieval techniques, business meta-data, and a workflow-specific user interface. 

Me

I have 10 years of experience in strategy and marketing consulting, and I’m part of the first Founder Institute cohort in Brussels.  I am currently completing a prototype working with international contractors, but longer term I need an in-house technical partner to lead development efforts and work with me to generate unique intellectual capital.  Since becoming co-founders is a big commitment, I’d like to work together on a contract basis at first so that we can make sure that we make a good team before deciding on an equity partnership.

You

In a nutshell, here’s the kind of person I’m looking for:

• Love of coding
• Excited about using open web development platforms (Python, PHP, Ruby, etc.) and developing novel search algorithms
• Has the experience and personality to lead a development team and talk to customers and investors as necessary
• Comfortable working in English
• Degree in computer science, software engineering, or similar fields

Contact Me

If you’re interested in finding out more, tweet me (@gentschev) or Skype me at greg.gentschev.  I will also be at the Beta Group meeting November 30 if you’d like to speak in person.  I’ll be the guy in the orange shirt.

No staffing agencies or consulting companies, please.