Startup2Startup

For our January Startup2Startup, we have invited Matt Blumberg, Cofounder, CEO, and Chairman of Return Path to speak. Matt will share the Return Path story, startup lessons learned, and best practices in email deliverability.

Email is a critical component of how companies communicate with their customers and prospective customers, whether for marketing purposes or as part of the product’s user experience. While writing good copy helps achieve email success, the best copy in the world is worthless if the email doesn’t reach its recipient. Despite its importance, email deliverability remains a black box for most entrepreneurs. Come hear Matt Blumberg demystify email deliverability and share best practices he’s learned building Return Path’s leading email solution.

Matt Blumberg

Matt Blumberg founded Return Path in 1999 because he believed the world needed email to work better. Matt is passionate about enhancing the online relationship between email subscribers and marketers so that both sides of the equation benefit. It is with great pride that he has watched this initial creation grow to a company of 150 employees with the market leading brand, innovative products, and the email industry’s most renowned experts.

Before Return Path, Matt ran marketing, product management, and the internet group for MovieFone, Inc. (later acquired by AOL). Prior to that he served as an associate with private equity firm General Atlantic Partners and was a consultant with Mercer Management Consulting. He holds a B.A. from Princeton University.

You can learn more about Matt by reading his email marketing and entrepreneurship blog Only Once – one of the first CEO blogs on the Internet.

If you want to brush up before Matt’s talk, review the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s definitions of email campaign performance metrics.

Startup2Startup is a group of Silicon Valley geeks, entrepreneurs, and investors dedicated to educating and helping the next generation of internet startups. We meet monthly over dinner to discuss relevant topics in technology and entrepreneurship, connect with new people and companies, and share our knowledge and experience.

Except for a minor financial crisis, 2009 was a great year. Now it’s time to celebrate.

In 2009, Startup2Startup hosted the following amazing speakers: Amy Jo Kim, Jeff Veen, Tony Hsieh, Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Randi Zuckerberg, Steve Grove, Chris Sacca, Mark Pincus, Geoff Ralston, Jason Calacanis, Guy Kawasaki, Jack Herrick, Gil Penchina, David Weekly, Jeff Hammerbacher & Roger Magoulas.

And now we bring you: The Real-Time Holiday Roast of Robert Scoble… Robert is the undisputed Crown Prince of Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Online Video, and most every other bleeding edge technology you haven’t quite heard of yet. Join us for some good-natured fun at Robert’s expense, along with several surprise roasters who will put him on the hot seat. We’ll also announce a few choice predictions and crystal-ball gazing for 2010. We hope you’ll enjoy our holiday celebration

Our topic for November is Big Data. Big and small companies have always tried to figure out how to store, organize and manage the data that they create and capture. Now that there are massive, ever growing new data sources from internal clickstreams to external twitter feeds, companies are overwhelmed with data. But some startups, unsaddled by old architectures and preconceived notions, are taking advantage of the combination of enormous new data sources, cheap storage and new analysis tools and techniques in order to change their product, their customers and their businesses. For this month’s dinner and the final regular meeting of the year, we’ve invited Jeff Hammerbacher, Chief Scientist at Cloudera and the founder of Facebook’s Data team, and Roger Magoulas, director of market research at O’Reilly, to talk about Big Data.

Jeff Hammerbacher
Jeff Hammerbacher is Chief Scientist and VP of Products at Cloudera. He was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel Partners immediately prior to joining Cloudera. Before Accel, he conceived, built, and led the Data team at Facebook. The Data team was responsible for driving many of the applications of statistics and machine learning at Facebook, as well as building out the infrastructure to support these tasks for massive data sets. The team produced two open source projects: Hive, a system for offline analysis built above Hadoop, and Cassandra, a structured storage system on a P2P network. Before joining Facebook, Jeff was a quantitative analyst on Wall Street. Jeff earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics from Harvard University.

Roger Magoulas
Roger Magoulas is Research Director at O’Reilly Media. Magoulas runs a team that is building an open source analysis infrastucture and provides analysis services, including technology trend analysis, to business decision-makers at O’Reilly and beyond. In previous incarnations, Magoulas designed and implemented data warehouse projects for organizations ranging from the San Francisco Opera to the Alberta Motor Club.

Our topic for October is Wikis and the future of the Web. The first Wiki started getting page hits in November 1994. Wikis have been around for 15 years and we’re still unraveling their implications. Wikis influence at least some part of probably every important web startup this decade and the lessons learned from of the challenges of wikis–creating and tending to community, content, trust models and monetization–should be understood by all web entrepreneurs. For our October dinner, we have invited three CEOs to share their secrets and lessons learned from building businesses based on the Ward Cunningham’s elegant idea.

Jack Herrick
Jack Herrick is a serial entrepreneur and wiki enthusiast. Jack currently runs wikiHow, a wiki based how-to manual. wikiHow is a bootstrap funded start-up. With over 17 million unique visitors, wikiHow is the 105th most popular site in the US according to Quantcast.com. As wikiHow’s steward, Jack works with a community of thousands of volunteers who create, edit and maintain wikiHow’s 60,000 how-to articles.

Gil Penchina
Gil Penchina is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Wikia.com, the largest commercial wiki, whose users have written over 3 million articles in 100 languages in the last three years. The site now reaches over 14mm unique visitors per month according to Comscore. Prior to Wikia.com Gil was an executive at eBay for 8 years, most recently as a regional VP for eBay in Europe. Before eBay, Gil worked at General Electric, Bain & Co. and started two small technology companies. He has a Bachelors in Engineering from the University of Massachusetts and an MBA from Kellogg. In addition, Gil is an active angel investor in companies such as Linkedin, Paypal, Flock, Koders, ZipRealty, FindWhat and other consumer Internet services.
David Weekly
A Boston native and son of a MIT engineer, David Weekly has been programming since he was five and has coded for MIT, Harvard, Stanford, There.com, atWeb, and Legato. David wrote the first layman’s description of MP3 in early 1997 and graduated in 2000 with a BS in Computer Science from Stanford, where he was a President Scholar and a finalist in the ACM International Programming Competition.

David started the company that became PBwiki (now PBworks) in 2003, along the way creating SingleStat.us and IMSmarter.

Our wrestlers speakers for September will be Jason Calacanis and Guy Kawasaki. Jason and Guy will debate the topic of whether Apple is becoming “Big Brother”, whether they will approve your app for the App Store, whether Apple is now officially more Evil than Microsoft or Google, and whether Steve Jobs will let you know the next time he plans to have a checkup. We expect nothing less than a good old-fashioned SmackDown and MudSlinging. The fight debate is scheduled to go 3 rounds, or To The Pain (popcorn and lawnchairs cost extra). We know you won’t want to miss it.

Jason Calacanis
Jason Calacanis is founder and CEO of Mahalo.com, a human-powered search engine which launched in May 2007. Prior to Mahalo, Jason was an “Entrepreneur in Action” at Sequoia Capital. Jason is also a co-host and partner for TechCrunch50, a technology conference showcasing top new startups.

Before Mahalo, Jason was co-founder and CEO of Weblogs Inc, sold to AOL in November 2005. Upon joining AOL, he was appointed SVP and became GM of AOL Netscape. Prior to Weblogs, Jason was the founder of Rising Tide Studios, which produced Silicon Alley Reporter. The company was later sold to Dow Jones.

Jason is a frequent speaker at technology conferences, and his newsletter is published by Newsweek, The Huffington Post, and Nikkei Japan. He appears regularly in major news outlets including Charlie Rose, CNN, 60 minutes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and others.

Guy Kawasaki
Guy Kawasaki is a founding partner and entrepreneur-in-residence at Garage Technology Ventures. He is also the co-founder of Alltop.com, an online magazine of popular topics on the web.

Previously, Guy was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer. He is the author of nine books including Reality Check, The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way.

Guy has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.

Our speaker for July will be Geoff Ralston, CEO of Lala Media, and formerly Chief Product Officer at Yahoo. Geoff will be speaking about “Selling in the Age of Free”.

Geoff Ralston is the CEO of Lala, a music startup in Palo Alto. He is also an investor, board member, and advisor to several companies. Geoff worked at Yahoo from 1997-2006 after the 1997 acquisition of Four11 Corp where he was VP Engineering and led the creation of RocketMail (which became Yahoo Mail after the acquisition). At Yahoo Geoff was SVP and General Manager of the Communications Business Unit, and then served as Chief Product Officer from 2003-2005. Prior to Four11, Geoff was the creator of the popular LookUP! Internet white pages and do-it-yourself home page service.

Geoff holds a BA in Computer Science from Dartmouth College, an MS in Computer Science from Stanford University, and an MBA from INSEAD. He lives in Atherton, California with his wife and three children.

Our speaker this month is Mark Pincus, co-founder and CEO of Zynga. Social gaming site Zynga is one of the largest application developers on Facebook, with more than 40 million monthly active users and top games such as Texas Hold’em and Mafia Wars.

Previously, Mark was also the founder and CEO of Tribe Networks, and a serial entrepreneur with a track record of growing venture-funded technology companies. Prior to founding Tribe Networks, Pincus founded and served as CEO of SupportSoft, a provider of service and support automation software. Prior to SupportSoft, Pincus co-founded Freeloader, the first consumer push information service, which was acquired in 1996 by Individual, Inc. for $38 million.

Before becoming an entrepreneur, Pincus worked in venture capital where he led investments in new media and software startups at Columbia Capital Corp. and at Tele-Communications, Inc. Before getting involved in new media, Pincus was a business consultant for Bain & Co. and an investment banker at Lazard Freres & Co. Pincus graduated Summa Cum Laude from University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School and he is a graduate of the Harvard Business School.

Retired serial entrepreneur Steve Blank was joined by IMVU co-founder Eric Ries last night at Startup2Startup in Palo Alto to discuss how startups should couple customer development with product development from day one.

Blank began by describing how the product development process used by most entrepreneurs is ill-conceived. Instead of continually reassessing their product designs in light of customer feedback, companies tend to follow a linear development path that takes them through four main stages: 1) conceptualization, 2) product development, 3) beta testing, and 4) launching.

Ries argued that this strategy only makes sense when both the problem and the solution to that problem are fully understood. Most startups, however, cannot readily conceive a good solution to the problem they’ve identified. And many others don’t even have a clear idea of the problem they are trying to solve. Particularly in the latter case, startups must continually reevaluate both the problem and the solution by consulting their potential customers and developing a thorough understanding of those customers’ needs and behaviors. And this reevaluation leads to lots of product iteration that turns the development process into more of an ongoing cycle.

While we tend to think that the technology behind a startup determines whether it succeeds or fails, most startups actually fail from a lack of customers. This is especially true on the web where the risks to technology are relatively low, while the risks to customer acquisition and retention are relatively high. Therefore, it’s crucial for a web startup to incorporate processes that help it to develop a promising customer base while it builds out its technology.

Blank emphasized that there are no magic solutions for customer development; it simply takes a lot of focus on customers and the market at hand from the very beginning. When startups continually focus on their customers, they tend to fail fast and often because they discover a need to realign their efforts. But this is a good thing since lean startups with the ability to adapt (and “get outside of the building” to talk with customers) end up creating products that customers are actually willing to pay for. After all, earning revenue from the start is the best signal that you’ve stumbled upon a real solution to a real problem.