18
Jul

July 31st: James Hong, HOTorNOT

By Dave McClure 0 Comments
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James Hong

James Hong, co-founder HOTorNOT.com

Our speaker for July will be James Hong, co-founder of the popular photo rating / casual dating website HOTorNOT.  James will speak about his experiences as a scrappy entrepreneur, how to bootstrap a startup, and how he built a very profitable, subscription-based web business.

James is a creative, unorthodox, and scrappy Silicon Valley entrepreneur.  He came up with the idea for HOTorNOT while drinking (heavily, we suspect) with fellow co-founder Jim Young in October of 2000.  In its first week the site topped 2M daily pageviews, and became an immediate cult hit.  With *zero* angel or VC funding, HOTorNOT grew quickly to a multi-million dollar subscription business.  After operating profitably out of a living room for much of its first eight years, the company was sold in early 2008 to an investment group for a rumored $20M.  If there’s a shrewder entrepreneur in the valley than James, we’d like to meet ‘em.

Since the acquisition, James has been on temporary sabbatical from entrepreneurship — in other words he’s at home watching television, where his latest indulgence is MTV’s America’s Best Dance Crew.  James also enjoys spending time with a few of his angel investments, including Slide and Mochi Media.  He is currently waiting for the economy to completely tank before embarking on another venture… or until Boogie Bots is voted off the show.  James is a graduate of UC Berkeley, where he earned a BS Electrical Engineering and an MBA from the Haas School of Business.

10
Jul

Chad Hurley On YouTube, Recap

By Nick Gonzalez 0 Comments
Categories: meetings

YouTube Co-Founder Chad Hurley spoke to a packed house at the latest Startup2Startup event. Chad gave a very candid recount of his time starting YouTube.

Although originally aimed at online auctions or meeting new people, they eventually moved toward a general online video solution. Chad described the idea as branching out from their experiences at PayPal and their own complications with online video. The idea was to create a video experience that users could take with them similar to the way users could take the PayPal experience with them.

They started out of their garages, eventually taking up residence inside of Sequoia before taking a round from the same firm.

Chad confronted one of the chief criticisms raised against the site, that the site achieved much of its growth from illegal content hosted on the site. He pointed out that although other sites face similar problems, they haven’t achieved the same growth, because they weren’t able to achieve the same community as YouTube.

Although the choice to sell was hard, Chad said they eventually decided to sell to Google as the best path to growing and supporting the service.

Liz Gaines at NewTeeVee has more details and a video from the event.

05
Jun

June 26th: Chad Hurley, YouTube

By Dave McClure 4 Comments
Categories: meetings
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Chad Hurley The speaker for our June 26th Startup2Startup dinner will be Chad Hurley, CEO and co-founder of YouTube, acquired by Google for $1.65B in October 2006.

Chad leads business development, marketing and operations for YouTube. He was also responsible for the clean, simple user interface that makes it easy for people to upload and share videos around the world.

Prior to YouTube Chad was the first UI designer at PayPal, where he created the familiar PayPal logo still in use today. Following PayPal’s acquisition by eBay, Chad consulted for several tech companies and for the hit movie Thank you for Smoking.

Chad received a BA in Fine Art at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Update: here are links to summaries of Chad’s talk, as well as a few video clips.

05
Jun

Summary of Mike Cassidy Talk

By Nick Gonzalez 1 Comment
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Mike Cassidy gave the keynote at our last Startup2Startup event. Mike preached speed as an integral part in creating over three quarters of a billion dollars in value from the three startups he’s founded (Xfire, Direct Hit, and Stylus Innovation).

Here’s a brief video interview with Mike before his presentation.

He highlighted four main benefits of speed: beating the competition to a product, increasing morale, generating buzz, and generating advantageous investing terms. Most of his companies started off bootstraped and prototyped within weeks, and expected to launch within 4 months. He spoke of locking down office space while picking up funding. His biggest hit, DirectHit, sold within 500 days of launching.

Eric Eldon, of Venturebeat highlights his perspective from the first Startup2Startup.

When Cassidy spoke about business deals and financing he also touched on flexibility. He suggested getting all the decision makers and following a strategy of if/then contracts that make deals a no brainer if both sides meet metrics. He also spoke about aiming your first deals at secondary players more willing to get in on something new. Don’t waste your time on clients that don’t have a history of dealing with startups. And put a time table on closing deals. The prospect of closing a deal declines drastically with each passing day.

A corollary to Mike’s push for speed, was experience. Mike highlighted how most of his startups consisted of employees he’d had experience with. For people he didn’t know, his companies would hold one day hirings, where they’d interview the candidate, huddle to talk over the prospect, and have an offer out by the end of the day. Also, when you have a new employee, make sure they’re prepared for their first day.

Mike tempered his push for speed with a pop quiz question to the crowd over whether launching soon and iterating was a better strategy than taking your time. Mike moved quickly in each case (3.5 months), but acknowledged not all startups have the ability to iterate on their products in the wild.

After the speech, the mix of entrepreneurs and venture capiltalists at the tables swapped stories and advice.

25
Apr

May 15th: Mike Cassidy On Speedy Startups

By Dave McClure 3 Comments
Categories: meetings
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Speed is an essential quality of any startup looking to take on and usurp its incumbents. Speed to market, speed to funding, speed to hiring and firing all contribute to the success of a young company.

Mike Cassidy The speaker for our May Startup2Startup dinner will be Mike Cassidy, a veteran of 3 successful startups. Mike’s talk is titled “Speed: The Ultimate Startup Weapon”, and he’ll speak on how to compress your business creation and product launch to just over 3 months.

Mike is no stranger to speed. He’s raised 7 rounds of venture capital for his 3 businesses totaling over $40M, which were later sold for more than $600M altogether. Five of the rounds involved getting a signed term sheet on the same day the presentation to the VC firm was made.

Mike Cassidy has been co-founder and CEO of three start-ups: Xfire, Direct Hit, and Stylus Innovation. Xfire is an IM and P2P service for online gamers that lets them play with their friends more easily, and has over 9M registered gamers in more than 100 countries. Viacom/MTV acquired Xfire for $110 million. Direct Hit was a revolutionary Internet search engine whose customers included MSN, Lycos, AOL, and dozens of others. Ask Jeeves acquired Direct Hit for $500 million. Stylus Innovation’s flagship product was the award winning computer telephony software Visual Voice.

Mike’s presentation on SPEED is below:

Mike is on the Board of Advisors of Jazz at Lincoln Center and is on the Visiting Committee Board of the MIT Media Lab. Mike studied jazz piano at the Berklee College of Music. Mike has a BS and MS in Aerospace Engineering from MIT, and he graduated from Harvard Business School.