Category: Startup Life

Developing in Romania (Qloud 5 of 12)

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This is post #5 about the Qloud experience.  The previous post was about launching our first product – a music search engine.  

When we started building Qloud we found some developers in Romania.  This wasn’t just Bucharest, this was a town 8 hours NW of Bucharest in the mountains of Transylvania.  We started with 3 or 4 developers and they fit our budget nicely ($15/hr back then).  The early guys were Luci (team lead), Sergiu, Mitza, Dragos and Szaby.  The owner of the company was Dan Masca.

Dan is a fatastic guy.  He also sort of runs the town.  It seems that he employs about 1.5x more people than he needs to just because he wants them to have jobs.  He also buys computers for many of the local business and schools.  Walking the streets with Dan, you get the idea that he’s something of a saint in that town.

The developers were also great.  We talked with them every morning at 8am EST for about 2-4 hours about what we were building. There was no language barrier.  In fact, when we started Kapost in 2009 we started it with Szaby and Mitza.  Those two are studs.  Mitza left Kapost after 4 years to start his own company and Szaby is still with us and one of our most trusted and senior developers.

In 2006, once we raised money, we thought it’d be good for the team if we all met in person and got to know each other.  Thus, Toby and I flew to Romania to see them.  We flew into Bucharest and then took a train to Targu Mures.

Continue reading “Developing in Romania (Qloud 5 of 12)” →

Launching the world’s first real music search engine (Qloud 4 of 14)

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This is post #4 about the Qloud experience.  The previous post was about our getting funding from Steve Case.  

Qloud’s initial product was a music search engine.  It was based on a few assumptions.  

  1. Consumers have unlimited music at their fingertips
  2. With this amount of supply, they are overwhelmed and not sure what to listen to
  3. There is no way to easily find music.  Almost all discovery is social and person-to-person

Our solutions was to provide a music search engine.  All existing music search engines then (and today) are based on song title and artist name.  So, if you search for “dance” you’ll get Steve Miller’s “Dance Dance Dance” which isn’t actually a dance song. 

So, how were we going to do this?  We were going to capture demographic, play counts, and tag data from users from an iTunes plugin.  Then with that data, we’d allow people to search for music.  You do a search like “What is the most played song tagged ‘dance’ by 24 year olds?” and we’d display the results.  It was pretty damn cool.  You could find lots of good music and really see the different music being played by different groups. 

We launch in the fall of 2006 and we were excited to see what happened.  Ultimately, like many startups, we thought it was cooler than everyone else.  We got thousands of users but none of them stuck or were passionate about it.  Why?  There was one problem – the users wanted to play the songs that we delivered.  We just listed the songs and provided a 30-second preview.  That wasn’t even close to being enough. 

You could search for Music, Tags or People using a variety of parameters

Back in 2006, you couldn’t easily license full tracks of music to be played in the browser.  There were a few companies (like Muse) who had 30-sec clips but nobody had full tracks.  That’s what people wanted.  Eventually we gave it to them, but that’s a later post.

Ultimately, it was a disappointing launch and our investors started to lose faith in us and our vision.  I think we were victims of not thinking large enough.  We set out to solve a problem, but that problem wasn’t big enough.  Providing a good music search was cool, but what people wanted was a more complete solution.  We were a bit naive. 

On the Case: Getting Investment from Steve Case (Qloud 3 of 14)

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This is post #3 about the Qloud experience.  The previous post was about our initial fundraising experience in Silicon Valley and DC. 

Seven months into the Qloud process we secured financing from Steve Case’s fund called Revolution.  We were psyched and pushed ahead on the product.

A couple of cool things happened with this such as we got to work in Revolution’s office.  The office was right in Dupont Circle (walkable for me) and was really beautiful. Super pimped out.  We worked on the same floor as Case and the Revolution team.  Other people on that floor were folks running Club Med, Fannie Mae, and Carly Fiorina who had just left HP.

We had one big office in Revolution

I thought at the time that signing on a big name like Steve Case would help in our product adoption and marketing (“New Music Service from Steve Case!”), but it didn’t work that way at all.  We weren’t allowed to use his name as PR.   Similar to how VC’s don’t want to invest/help until you show traction and growth, Revolution didn’t want to associate themselves with us until we had some success.  It’s funny how that works.  Only once you’re loved will others express their love of you.  Continue reading “On the Case: Getting Investment from Steve Case (Qloud 3 of 14)” →

Qloud Fundraising: Striking out in Silicon Valley (Part 2 of 14)

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This is post #2 about the Qloud experience.  The previous post was about jumping ship and starting the company. 

Once we started Qloud, we started building the product and also started fundraising.  From day one, looking at our finances, we knew that we had 6 months to get the company to a place where we could raise outside capital.  Not only did we need to get the product built and working but we needed to hone our pitch.  We came up with what we thought was a compelling vision and set out to talk to investors.

Our pitch was that what we learned at Ruckus was that music discovery was a huge problem.  Talking to students it was clear that all discovery was word-of-mouth.  Qloud was going to be a way to allow people to find new music without having to ask your friend down the hall.  We were going to do that in 2 ways:

  1. we would offer a music search engine where you could search by tags and by demographic.  For instance, i want all the music tagged “happy” that is being listened to the most by men age 18-20 who live in Los Angeles.  This would return a list of songs that you could then sample.
  2. we would allow people to tag music inside their iTunes.  By creating a tag cloud, we would enable on-demand playlists for “happy” or “summer” or “breakup” inside the player.  This tagging and information from the iTunes would power the search capability provided in step 1.

Continue reading “Qloud Fundraising: Striking out in Silicon Valley (Part 2 of 14)” →

From VP to the Futon: Living in the Basement (Qloud 1 of 14)

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This is the first of some posts about the story of Qloud.  It’s now been over 8 years so I should start sharing the stories.  This first post is about how Toby and I made the leap to quick our jobs and start Qloud. 

Leaving Ruckus

Ruckus, a music startup, was failing as a startup.  Mostly because music subscriptions weren’t something that University students wanted.  They wanted music for their iPod.  We were giving them free music that didn’t work with their iPod.  So, it was time for a pivot as a business.  Toby and I did some research and found that music discovery was a big missing element in these student’s lives.  With unlimited music, they didn’t know what to download.  They couldn’t think of anything.  So, we wanted to give that to them.  And we wanted to do it on our own.  The fact that we came up with this idea while at Ruckus led to them trying to sue us later, but that’s another blog post.

I had started a company in college (HanoverDelivers.com) but i was a student then and starting it carried no risk.  I was now a 29-years old and leaving Ruckus meant leaving a good salary and a good job in a VC-backed startup.  I debated it for a while.  Ultimately, I ended jumping because it was a challenge that I wanted to take on.  Naively, it seemed like fun. 

The Basement

So, I jumped.  Toby and I started Qloud on Jan 1, 2006.   We had no office, no revenue and no product.  I had to reduce my expenses so I sub-letted my apartment and moved into Toby’s basement.  

Qloud office
Here's our basement office

Toby lived in the ‘burbs and had two young kids (age 3 and 5).  Every day, I would wake up early, work all day in the basement with Toby, come up for dinner with the entire family, play around for a little while and then retire to the basement to read, work more or just sleep.  I quickly became uncle Mike to the girls.  It was a really enjoyable time even though I was single and lacked any good dating prospects. 

Evie and Lucy in May 2006

We started right away.  We built some wireframes, did a deck (that’s what AOL taught us to do) and hired a few Romanian developers (Luci, Sergiu and Mitza).  One thing I noticed right away once we were focused on our new company is that I never, ever, thought that I should have stayed at Ruckus longer.  If you ask anyone who has quit their job and started a company they never will say that they left too early.  

I also am grateful that I was single and in my twenties. I had no expenses.  I had no expectations of money. I could take major risks in my life. I could focus all my energy on the company.  I think about my life now – with wife, kids, house, etc. – and while I’m much better at the startup game, I’m less likely to take risks like that.  My advice to anyone who is thinking of starting a company is to do it as soon as you can.  You won’t learn what it’s like without doing it.  You just won’t.  So start as soon as you can. 

We often worked outside

 

The Story of Qloud

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The 2 years from 2006 to 2008 Toby and I built a company called Qloud from nothing to over 20 million monthly users.  Those years were some of the craziest years I’ve ever had both professionally and personally.  I’ve broken the time into these stories.

I’ll be posting one every now and again. Enjoy….

  1. From VP to the Futon: Living in the basement
  2. Fundraising: Striking out in Silicon Valley
  3. On the Case: Getting Investment from Steve Case 
  4. Launching the worlds first real music search engine
  5. Developing with Romanians
  6. Inspiration Strikes: Pivoting
  7. In the Abyss: Running out of money
  8. Music Technology in 2007 and Our Use of YouTube
  9. Sean Parker and Facebook’s Platform
  10. Launching
  11. Blowing Up
  12. Happy Walters
  13. Selling to Buzznet
  14. What Success Feels Like

 

 

Kapost Culture & The Alliance

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Kapost is still expanding rapidly.  A year ago we were ~20 people and now we’re ~60.  That’s a lot of new faces and we’ve done a lot of hiring. (Blog post about Kapost expansion)  Thinking about our our expansion brought me to how we view culture.  Some thoughts on that…

Culture is Important

We have a culture doc that is on the web (below). It gets a lot of views (over 2k).  It’s also important as it’s how we describe working at Kapost. We actually thought a lot about it. 

I’ve been asking a lot of people who have scaled companies what they would do differently and what’s worked for them.  They repeatedly talk about culture. This is what keeps it all together for them. As David Cummings (Founder of Pardot) says,

Yes, the people are the most important part, but culture is reflected in the core values, processes, and the way the company chooses to act.

Basically, it’s super important.  I’ve also been thinking about what culture actually means.  More and more to me it means just how stuff gets done.  How do conversations go, how fast are decisions made, how honest should people be?  That is all defined by the culture.  It takes a while for people to realize.  I’d say that at Kapost, people have described our culture as super transparent, high accountability, and very fast.  I think that’s true. I think it’ll change over time but that’s how it’s been for the past few years. 

Vibe vs. Values

Brad Feld had a post that described the difference between Vibe and Values.  It says how the music in your office, the dress code, the food in the office is all “vibe” and the vibe can change in a company and are defined by employees.  The values are “the guiding principles or a code-of-conduct upon which a company was founded and which it operates on a daily basis” and are defined by the company.  Things like “don’t be evil” at Google.   They are two different things and we should differentiate between the two. 

The Alliance

This is a business book I read this summer when it came out. It’s by Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn.  It’s very interesting and something we talk about a lot at Kapost.  The idea is that employees are no longer hired for their entire career and because of that you should treat them as though they will someday leave your company.   Each employee is coming aboard for a “tour of duty” and you should actively define that tour, being explicit about what the employee will do for the company and what the company will do for the employee.  It more accurate reflects how people treat a job.  It also allows for honest conversations about what employees and employers want.  It’s a great framework and I recommend you check it out. 

 

What Would It Take to Get You Fired?

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What if you walked around the company you worked at and went to someone and asked, “What would it take tomorrow to get you fired?”

I just saw that question asked in this awesome video by Jerry Colonna:

Chances are people don’t really know what it takes to get fired. What he argues is that if people don’t really know what it takes to get fired, then they don’t really know if they are actually doing a good job.  Putting some transparency around what defines success and failure can take a lot of stress out of people’s time at work. 

Hupspot IPO Thoughts

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This past Monday Hupspot released their official S-1 which is the information released for a company when they are about to IPO.  

I’ve read a lot about this information and wanted to jot down some of the more interesting pieces: 

  • Founded in June 2006 in Cambridge MA, they coined the term “inbound marketing.” They did more than coin it, they lived. They wrote the books, built an influential blog and practiced what they preach.  Nowadays you hear “inbound marketing” all the time.  Here’s to them for coining a term that an entire industry adopts.  (ChiefMartec talks about this more here) 
  • In their S-1, they list as one major risk factor as is the inability of customers to create content to make blogging, social media, and inbound marketing in general worthwhile.  This is true for our customers as well.  If nobody is creating content, then many of your marketing efforts fail (email marketing, social, inbound, etc.)  
  • Continue reading “Hupspot IPO Thoughts” →

SaaS is going into battle together every day

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I read a good post by Jason Lemkin (former CEO of EchoSign, now partner at Storm Ventures) about hiring VP’s in your company and he had the following passage which totally resonated with me: 

SaaS is going into battle together every day.  Wining that next customer.  Saving that big deal.  Building that crazy feature.  Every day, there’s a new drama.

It’s truly a team effort.  The VP of Sales opens and closes.  The VP Marketing feeds the machine. The VP of Customer Success keeps it running and adds fuel to the fire.  The VP Product makes sure the 1,000+ customers get what they need, as impossible as that is.  And the VP Engineering’s job is to make a business process 10x better than it ever was before, just using computers.  This is teamwork.  And it’s really not that silo’d at all.  You’re all working on different parts of the same puzzle — Customers.

Where I don’t see true teamwork, I almost always see eventual failure.  Or at least, underperformance.

I’m running the product ship and I feel really thankful that we have a great team lined up right now of Toby, Patrick, Riley and Nader.  

It’s a battle out there but with these folks, I like our chances….