Tag: Qloud

Qloud and Facebook’s Platform (9 of 14)

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This is post #9 about the Qloud experience.  The previous post was about about how we used YouTube as a music engine. Read that post here. 

The year is 2007 and we’re building as fast as we can our new music service.  It’s going to be a full-powered music streaming service on top of a collaborative music search engine and it’s going to be sweet.

Before we launched I went out to lunch with Sean Parker (known by many of you as Justin Timberlake in the movie The Social Network).  At the time he had left Facebook and was about a year into his new VC gig at Founders Fund.  We sat down to lunch and the subject immediately turned to our upcoming launch. He asked, “Hey, do you know about Facebook’s platform?”  I didn’t and he went to explain it to me.  Basically FB needed a way to expand and what better way than have companies build their product in to Facebook.  While the 3rd party companies would provide the development, Facebook would allow you to message and add their users as your users.  It sounded cool.

I went back to the team and explained this upcoming launch.  I got in touch with Dave Morin (yep, the Path founder used to be head of Facebook platform) and he gave us access to the platform.  Our plan was to build a subset of our service on Facebook and gain some early users.  Then, when we launched our new website we could make a claim that says, “We already have 10,000 users on Facebook.”

It did not go that way at all.

Launching on Facebook right when the Platform was launching was probably one of the best things we did. Because it was new, it had a bunch of early adopters.  It also had a bunch of loopholes that allowed us to market and message millions of users.  If you remember getting a ton of requests to join some stupid game, that was the platform.  We used to do things like “You can’t install our app unless you invite 30 friends.” and people did it.

Of course Facebook wasn’t happy about this, but we weren’t going to stop.  Kudos goes to our colleague Noah who really figured out how to growth hack the crap out of it.

Lessons learned: at both Kapost and Qloud, we grew because we attached ourselves to a tidal wave in the industry. In Qloud it was the Facebook platform and Kapost it was Content Marketing.  Facebook eventually would shut down the platform but not until much later.  Heck, even Zynga used it to become a billion dollar company leveraging Facebook’s platform. Sometimes the bright and shiny new thing in the industry is worth going after.

The next post is about the actual launch. Check that out here.

Music Technology in 2007 and Our Use of YouTube (8 of 14)

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This is post #8 about the Qloud experience.  The previous post was about about running out of money and pivoting.  

The year is 2007 and Toby and I have a great idea to build a comprehensive music service.  There were no web streaming services at the time.  Some of the players were:

  • eMusic – a service for indie artists where you could download mp3’s. 
  • PressPlay – a Sony sponsored music service that has only 2 labels and also required a download
  • Rhapsody – a pretty good  service that required a player download and costs $20 a month

We started building the service and went around to all the music labels and providers we could find to license the actual tracks so we could serve up the songs to our users.  Turns out that’s not easily done in 2007.  To get music you have to strike individual deals with each individual label.  Those deals require time (which we didn’t have) and money for upfront payments (which we didn’t have).  Hmmm.

Luckily we figured out a nice loophole.  Google bought YouTube in 2006.  Right before that acquisition YouTube gave equity to the music labels.  In exchange for this equity, they struck a deal that forbid the labels from suing YouTube for 2-3 years (I’m not sure of the length).  This was a little-known fact, but it was true.  

It is also true that almost every music track in existence is available on YouTube.  This was pre-Vevo.  So, we decided that our backend streaming service will actually be powered by YouTube.  Nobody had every tried this, but it allowed us to (a) serve all our music for free; (b) be legal; (c) embed our music right into a browser without asking uses to download a player. 

We did one other smart thing. Turns out there are many many videos for each song. Some are correct and some aren’t. We didn’t have time to go through millions of tracks, so we build into the service the ability for users to mark which YouTube video is correct for that track.  They could play up to 10 different videos and vote for their favorite.  By default, we play the video with the most votes.  This tuned out to work really well.  Once we launched our users would spend hours voting on videos and helping us curate our library. 

We build the service in 4-5 months.  Now we just needed to launch.  Read about how that went in the next post…

 

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)” →

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

 

Steve Case on Immigration

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I had the pleasure of working closely with Steve Case the Revolution gang back in the Qloud days.  I can tell you first-hand that he is the real deal. He made an appearance yesterday in the Senate and spoke about immigration.  Here are some of his statements.  All pretty interesting: 

1. “Today, 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies in the United States were started by immigrants or the children of immigrants, employing 10 million people across the globe and doing $4 trillion in revenue. Of the 10 most valuable brands globally, seven of them come from American companies founded by immigrants or their children. In the past 15 years, immigrants founded one quarter of U.S. venture-backed public companies.” [Source]

2. “Statistics show that immigrants are almost twice as likely as US-born workers to start a  company. Between 1995 and 2005, half of Silicon Valley startups had an immigrant founder. In 2005 alone, those businesses achieved $52 billion in sales supporting 400,000 jobs. In 2011, more than three-quarters of the patents filed at the top ten patent-producing US schools had an immigrant inventor. Of the 1,600 computer science PhD graduates from our universities in 2010, 60 percent were foreign students.” [Source]

3. “The mistake that opponents of immigration reform make is believing that our society and economic growth are zero sum. They are not. More talented immigrants joining the American family does not equate to fewer jobs, it equates to more jobs.”

4. “It is not the case that an increase in foreign talent will increase unemployment for native workers. Studies show that from 2000 to 2007, every 100 additional foreign-born workers in STEM fields created 262 additional employment positions for native US workers.” [Source]

5. “Every year, arbitrary immigration caps force approximately one-third of the 50,000 foreign-born STEM graduates from our universities to leave the country. After earning a Masters or PhD from universities such as Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT, these talented men and women move to competitor nations and launch businesses abroad that compete with our workers here at home. If our military had a similar policy we would train soldiers, sailors, and pilots at West Point, the Naval Academy, and the Air Force Academy with world-class battlefield skills, only to send them away to join the militaries of foreign nations.”

6. “What was once the secret sauce of our economic advantage – a strong entrepreneurial economy that rewards risk, disruption and innovation – is being replicated aggressively around the world. A few decades ago we lost ground in the manufacturing sector when we failed to respond aggressively to global competition. We cannot afford to do the same when it comes to the entrepreneurial sector.”

7. “History teaches us that the most open and inclusive societies tend to be the most successful: Spain in the early 1400s pioneering navigation and global trade; Italy in the 1500s advancing science and learning. But no country has benefited more from immigration than the United States. We began as a startup founded by immigrant settlers who left a difficult situation to build a better life. What distinguishes us is that we have always been a magnet for risk-taking men and women from across the world hoping to start businesses, innovate, and contribute. That is part of our DNA. It is why in the 20th century we created more wealth, opportunity, and economic growth than any other nation.

But that advantage is slipping away. As the economies of developing countries mature rapidly it is no longer the easy choice to settle in the United States. There are now increasingly attractive opportunities abroad. We must improve the environment for entrepreneurship to thrive. Now is the time to work together and pass comprehensive reform that fixes our high-skilled immigration system.”