Launch means Birth: Parent your Infant
Thanks to Ohours and the time I’ve had between startups, I’ve been meeting with many, many founders who seek insights into youth media, the restaurant space, or the movie industry.
Clearly the flavor of the latest Internet epoch (circa 2009-present) is the platform. Today I met with a company that has not launched, has no users, but does have the requisite API. At one level, I understand. Our industry is deeply interconnected. Platforms have greatly lowered the cost of entry for startups and certainly Facebook Connect and Oauth have made it faster to launch dozens of services.
But what might be lost in this rush to be a platform is a startup’s birth and obsession with that other constituency that is even more important than developers: USERS.
My former colleague Nate Westheimer wrote an excellent and under-read post on the importance of the first 100 users and if you are launching a service you should read it. Paul Graham has written extensively on the importance of obsessing over building something people really want.
Your startup is an infant at launch. You have to nurture it and care for it round the clock. It’s not self-sustaining. One developer told me,
I know what you mean. Sometimes I feel like my code just pukes on me.
Funny.
Startups need to narrow your focus to making your infant love you by giving the early members tons and tons of love. For every Twitter or Instagram (insane growth rates), there are dozens (Foursquare among them) of companies that took considerably longer to engender a robust following.
- Carefully select your first users.
- Develop real relationships with them.
- Figure out what works and doesn’t work
- Start to spread the word
- Don’t lose site of these users
As your userbase grows and reaches adolescence (1mm-5mm active monthlies), then maybe it’s time to give that startup some room to grow and be more independent. Maybe that’s the time to roll out the API.
Look at it this way: FourSquare is very hot and has 7mm users+. They held a huge hack day at General Assembly and many people hackers (looked like 100+ to me showed up). I’m told by numerous developers that they have a great API.
Still, how many apps have you added to FourSquare?
If Foursquare, is struggling at 7mm to get huge app traction then early stage startups should not expect to create a developer community or momentum. Spend your energy focused on your the equivalent of your infant, toddler, and child — your first 100, 10,000 and 100,000 users.
My New Dream Job
In November of 2009, I was walking on 5th Avenue back to the office when my phone vibrated. The weather was brisk and I stopped just in front of Mesa Grill.
“Aaron,” said my mother, “I just wanted you to know we are at Georgetown Hospital. As you know I’ve been so itchy and I was starting to turn yellow as if I had jaundice. Anyway, it appears that I have hepatitis,” she sighed with relief and continued, “I was getting nervous, but we seemed to have dodged a big bullet. Thank God.”
The diagnosis was wrong.
After 6 weeks of trips to Georgetown and Johns Hopkins, countless tests and pictures, we learned that my mother had cholangiocarcinoma, a rare, advanced, and difficult to treat cancer. The oldest of 6, my mother is exceptionally close to my grandmother who turned 100 in May. Understandably, my mother reacted to the news of her cancer with the admission that she assumed she would “live forever like (her mother) Deedee.” Anxiety prevailed at our large family holiday gathering. At my mother’s request, it was not discussed.
In January, my father, sister and I gathered in a townhouse for long-term visitors across the street from Hopkins to wait out my mother’s operation. There were 2 “everything’s going fine phone calls” (the surgery was scheduled to be 8 hours), and then my father’s cell phone rang a third time. This time the nurse requested we come to the Operating Room. This was not a good sign. My father, who strolls a New York City block in about half an hour, nearly sprinted to the room for families outside of the surgery.
Mom’s surgeon, Dr. Wolfgang, still wearing his operating green requested that we take a seat in a soothingly furnished conference room steps from where my mother lay anesthetized with her stomach still open. It was only 3 hours into the procedure. His explanation was comprehensive and clinical. He illustrated the bad news, pecking tiny dots with a ball point pen to indicate the metastases that he had found on her gall bladder. The cancer had begun to spread. Removing the tumor was no longer the prudent course of action.
My sister Eve, a hospice nurse and Hopkins alum, wept telling us this was the worst possible outcome. I finally understood what “ashen” looked like as I watched my father. My voice quaked as I asked, “how long?” Dr. Wolfgang spoke of chemotherapy, radiation and quality of life issues, but then he had to tell us. His inhalation was long and notable, “The median survival rate is 8 months from the time of discovery (November) for her inoperable cancer.
When I returned to New York, I called Mickey Schulhof a director at AnyClip and told him that my mother had terminal cancer and not very long to live. I had to consider stepping down from AnyClip. “Nonsense,” Mickey responded, “You will need the job more than ever. You need the distraction. And you’ll find time to be with her.” Perhaps he was right. And with that I started riding the BoltBus and the Amtrak very frequently.
In order to prolong my mother’s life the statistically intelligent course of action was chemotherapy. Doctors warned it would be rough, and would get worse as time wore on. However, this could (maybe, we think/but don’t know) buy her 6 or 12 extra months. My parents were determined to try it and so it began.
After 1 month and two treatments, my mother was far worse than exhausted. Catatonic, unable to eat, hold a conversation, or even smile she was unrecognizable. I called my sister to say that I thought Mom would not survive the chemotherapy.
Eve is the hospice nurse and, naturally, carries the most weight when it comes to medical decisions. Read Atul Gawande’s superb study of her job in last month’s New Yorker here. She’s exceptionally knowledgeable and has treated several patients with cholangiocarcinoma herself. When Eve returned to Washington and saw my mother, she agreed with me and lobbied my father the lobbyist to abruptly stop the chemo. It took another month for Mom to start reengaging with her world.
My mother started to get better in May and between travel to Israel and California I didn’t see her for a 4 week period. When I did, it was for her mother’s 100th birthday party. She rose to the occasion and gave a moving speech about my grandmother’s joie de vivre and resilience. In past years, these sibling speeches get deconstructed by various family members for their psychiatric meaning. Everybody is a closet novelist/psychiatrist. But not on the 100th birthday. The party was exciting, good-humored, and, amazingly, at least for me, not overshadowed by my mother’s cancer.
In June, word leaked to the media about her illness. My mother is a Washington celebrity because she and her partner, Barbara Meade, own a very famous bookstore called Politics and Prose. Both women are in their 70s and plenty of people had speculated as to what would happen to this Washington institution prior to my mother’s cancer. Now customer anxiety was surging and the Washington Post, New York Times, and New Yorker all wrote about the coming transition and my mother’s declining health.
Throughout the first 6 months of the year, I considered resigning several times. However, as any entrepreneur knows, it’s hard to leave what you begin. The love for my team and the company drew me back. For better or worse, AnyClip was now part of my soul and I struggled to abandon it.
In June, Mom spent nearly the whole month in the hospital on two separate visits because she contracted a life threatening infection. Her disposition was impressive and her bravery surprised and even inspired. Still, pain began to overwhelm her life. With her energy dipping to a lifetime low and her confusion increasing with each does of OxyCodone, I felt increasingly pessimistic. This was not the “quality time” we had hoped to have as a family in Paris (January), San Francisco (May), or even my parents’ garden (June).
The wireless networks are exceptional at the hospitals, but cell phones are discouraged. I instant messaged with my employees throughout the day, but I felt less present and, at times, disconnected. The feelings were familiar. Vastly over-committed, I was doing nothing to my standards.
In early August I stepped down as the CEO of AnyClip. It’s a complicated story and perhaps one day I will share more of it. For now, I’m no longer distracted by work. I can be in Washington every week. And I still advise the company. My email still works. I’m grateful to my team for continuing on. I believe deeply in AnyClip and its people.
Thanks to the highly competent, empathetic Home Hospice Care we are now receiving, my mother’s situation has stabilized in the past few weeks. She has looked the best she’s looked since her operation and has been to the store 2-3 times per week. She even managed two meals at our old local family spot, Parkway deli, with her grandson.
I love startups, teams, and this constantly reinvigorating digital revolution, but during my 15 year tenure in the internet industry, I frequently forgot that family trumps work. People tell me that my parents need me, but spending this time in this way is my current dream job.
Shanah Tovah and Happy New Year.
AnyClip One Year Later
A year ago, I flew to Israel to make some sweeping changes at AnyClip.
For starters, gone was the two year old company name PopTok along with 4 executives and a bunch of others who had been a part of the very family-oriented culture here. I’ll never forget that morning. Tough way to start a trip.
The next day my co-founder Nate Westheimer arrived and the mood abruptly changed. He was full of compassion for the team but determined to set a new course. We began work that day and when, after 10 more days, Nate departed Israel with the team full of enthusiasm and vitality. AnyClip was on its way.
Without question, AnyClip is the most exhilarating, challenging, and complex startup that I have ever managed. We set a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) to index the world’s entire film catalog. We dream that one day we will see and share any moment from any film.
Some of my most respected mentors told me that it was a naive, almost foolish vision. Pick your poison they claimed: it’s legally impossible, altogether too expensive, and technically overwhelming. To top it off, we would face the complexity of building a cohesive team with 2/3 of the employees separated by 7000 miles, 7 hours, and only sharing a 4 day work week (Israel is open Sunday and closed Friday).
Well, we’re still here.
We went to TechCrunch 50 with a prototype that was completed 4 months after Nate arrived in Israel and emerged a finalist. AnyClip is engaged in meaningful negotiations with almost every major studio. We have completed two still unannounced deals with major indies and are in final redlines with a handful of others. We launched our live product in March and passed 75k users in our first month — this before we have meaningful video content. Our traffic goals are ambitious: grow an order of magnitude every year for the next 3 years. 100 MM users by the end of 2013. Difficult? Sure. But not impossible — this is the movie business. We work here because we believe in the magic.
Credit for our early success reaches far and wide. The PopTok team never wavered in their enthusiasm. Morale could have plummeted and people could have gone through the motions. Instead, they worked their asses off to launch a new product from scratch. In particular my management team of Amit Kahn and Maor Gillerman kept the team together and focused. We were fortunate to add Eyal Gersht in time for the release of the prototype and eventually the product. But AnyClip is really a team effort and this includes Guy/Dima/Moti//Efrat/Avia/Kfir/Itai/Miriam/Or/Itai/Tania/Yulia and now Sagie. They are complemented by dozens of metadata creators too numerous to mention here.
In America, the Aaron Cohens (Chris and Fisher), Gabi (our hardcore, overworked designer) Greg, and my right hand Jenaveve have formed an amazing culture. We just finished a month in my apartment between office spaces and didn’t miss a beat despite Ry and Georgia wanting to play as with me, them, or their friends from 4pm on. Our itinerant office life now moves to Times Square for the summer and our downtown crowd sucked it up and moved in yesterday. We’re a block from Red Lobster.
Meanwhile we are professionally represented by Hollywood pros who understand their town. The High View Media crew (Rich Goldberg, Rob Jacobson, and Phil Schuman) together with Brad Sorensen (Indie Man) have provided me with an education and a chance to make this work. We’re following the Yellow Brick Road. And we’re aided by Fandango founder and former CEO Art Levitt who has made an enormous, positive impact on the company as an outside director. He’s a true mentor and he believes.
The most credit goes to our founding investors Erel Margalit from Jerusalem Venture Partners and Mickey Schulhof from GTI. They wooed me for 3 months prior to my arrival at Poptok. By then I had some visibility into the challenges of this turnaround. It would have been very easy for them to give up on this investment. Last Spring, the economy was a disaster and venture capitalists were pruning portfolios. Nate and I articulated the vision for AnyClip and on that alone they doubled down. It was a big risk, particularly given the fact that Nate and I were outsiders pitching a completely new company.
And that’s what I love about my investors — particularly JVP. The venture business is hit driven and the partners here know AnyClip could be huge. I always tell VCs we could return your fund. But investors prefer to pay up for more certainty. I get that. So we’ll see.
Finally, I want to single out Nate. He has lead a multi-national team and built the foundation of what we hope will become the standard for sharing film moments. Simply put, without Nate’s vision and leadership, we would not be here.
Startups have risks. Our job as entrepreneurs is often risk mitigation. AnyClip’s challenges are intensely daunting. We must navigate Hollywood, author incredibly complex search algorithms, scale a massive metadata creation factory, and release AnyClip products on many platforms. I should confess I have lost a little sleep this year.
But any moment from any film ever made. Are you kidding me? Now it’s our holy grail. Feels appropriate to have penned this post in Jerusalem.
Master the VC Game
Last week, I interviewed Jeff Bussgang about his first book Mastering the VC Game at the innaugural 0260 Conference. Mastering will become a manifesto for many in our industry. As a veteran entrepreneur, I learned a lot that I did not know and reaffirmed some things that I did. For now, f you are seriously considering raising capital or are running a startup that is backed by investors you should read the book. It will save you thousands of dollars in legal bills and relieve you of potentially crippling decision making.
THE IMPORTANCE OF FACE TIME
Jason Calacanis wrote a great lesson for startup employees that has me thinking about our organization at a time of geographic disruption.
One week ago, we had to vacate our office. For the past week, we’ve been homeless while we negotiate our new lease in the Flatiron District. As a result, my colleagues and I have been shuffling between my apartment, the Ace Hotel (kind of a cliche), other homes and an assortment of coffee establishments. BTW, we’re probably another week or two from moving in so if you have any ideas in manhattan that we could crash at let my main guy Matt Lehrer know.
This first week has been just ok. At one level, the quiet makes me feel immensely more productive. It’s probably no accident that this geographical dissonance has led to some new blog entries. I feel the productivity of less distraction. On the other hand, I miss the continuity and camaraderie established by physical space.
This liminal period raised my awareness of the my distance from our Israeli team. I’ve struggled to get there this spring for some personal reasons and I can feel less of a connection.
I had such a great call with them today, but you just don’t get the spontaneity with the time difference and we only share 4 of the 5 work days together. The overseas relationships need structured management proceseses and that means adhering to a consistent schedule. That doesn’t jive with a startup that is opportunistic about meetings, traveling a lot, and trying to be very open to partner schedules.
Obviously, in this modern, global economy. People are going to work all over the world in different environments. Some work is better completed on Amtrak or my living room sofa than in my office. I feel deeply liberated and grateful for the digital productivity tools from email to mifi.
However, Our community should not underestimate how important human connections and face time can be. People are more likely to find meaning in their work if they treasure the relationships they form inside a company. Happy people and employees generally emphasize the people they work with more than the money they make or the work they do.
Ask yourself how many of your friends say, “I love my job because I make so much money.” How many investment bankers give up because the work is boring or the people are unpleasant? How many waiters and retail salespeople quit for the same reasons? Money is why you accept. People are why you stay.
In this sense, our corporate well-being and my own personal happiness could correlate with signing a lease. Who knew real estate brokers and therapists had so much in common?
