Pajama Entrepreneur

As you can see I have not been posting too much. It’s been a terribly busy month. I bought the Muniwireless website back from my business partners, so I am running it again. On top of that, I’m also running Mapplr (www.mapplr.com). Busy, busy. But I’ll be posting more soon.

I am tired of office supplies stores and catalogs that sell the same ugly office accessories - pens, pads, calendars, pen holders . You know the ones I’m talking about: cheap and ordered by the bulk and totally depressing to look at. Fortunately, there are alternatives. Check out See Jane Work, an online shop where you can find gorgeous desk calendars, binders, pens, organizers, and whatever you need to create an office environment that inspires creativity.

It’s Labor Day in the US, the traditional end of the summer, and beginning of a new school year. Over here in Amsterdam, it’s just another working day, but this week marks the first week that everyone is really back from holiday. I have posted several articles recently about what it means to be an entrepreneur, to begin a new company, and offer a new service. It’s not about participating in media stunts like Seedcamp. It’s about passion. It’s about treasuring your life, not wasting it on a job or a profession that people expect you to do, that’s comfortable but not challenging.

I like Seth Godin’s Labor Day thoughts:

It’s hard work to make difficult emotional decisions, such as quitting a job and setting out on your own. It’s hard work to invent a new system, service, or process that’s remarkable . . . As the economy plods along, many of us are choosing to take the easy way out. We’re going to work for the Man, letting him do the hard work while we work the long hours. We’re going back to the future, to a definition of work that embraces the grindstone. Some people (a precious few, so far) are realizing that this temporary recession is the best opportunity that they’ve ever had. They’re working harder than ever — mentally — and taking all sorts of emotional and personal risks that are bound to pay off. Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that you’d rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier, drive through the other barrier. And, after you’ve done that, to do it again the next day. The big insight: The riskier your (smart) coworker’s hard work appears to be, the safer it really is. It’s the people having difficult conversations, inventing remarkable products, and pushing the envelope (and, perhaps, still going home at 5 PM) who are building a recession-proof future for themselves.

The Financial Times has an article on the growing number of startups in Europe, a region known for bureaucracy, high taxes and lack of entrepreneurial spirit, but now blessed with the arrival of . . . Seedcamp!

The FT article talks about Saul Klein, a UK-based British ven­ture capitalist and entrepreneur, who created Seedcamp (”a week-long series of masterclasses for high-technology businesses from across the European Union”). Seedcamp begins on Monday September 3 in London. The Financial Times is covering the highlights (like the Olympics). A panel of VCs has already chosen 20 companies out of 270 to participate. The list is at http://blogs.ft.com/techblog/. S0 readers of the Financial Times can follow their “progress” online. This is looking more like a Big Brother-like media stunt.

What’s the prize? Free advice! From successful entrepreneurs, professional advisers and executives from Oracle, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Then, the startups get to do their elevator pitch to VCs like Accel and Index. Seedcamp will choose 5 companies who will get 50,000 EUR each. Unfortunately they will have to stay in London for three more months (ouch!) and continue doing elevator pitches.

I’m sorry I can’t see the point of all this. And to associate the growing desire among Europeans to start new companies with a thing like Seedcamp is laughable.

(1) If you are a startup and need to participate in a contest to reach any of the above mentioned VCs and waste your time at the media circus studying how to be a successful entrepreneur instead of working on your product, you will not get anywhere, not with 50,000 EUR or 50 million EUR or all the advice in the world.

(2) Three months in London doing a dog-and-pony show, listening to a VC advisor tell you how you need to hire a VP of Marketing when you don’t have a launchable product yet is totally ridiculous. Waste of time.

(3) Real entrepreneurs do not think this way. They are self-driven, they experiment a lot (many of their initiatives generate results that they did not expect), they do not wait for cute little contests put on by VCs. If they manage to develop a compelling product (after experimenting, tinkering around), the VCs are banging down their door to invest.

I am certain that successful European startups - not in terms of how much VC money they manage to suck up, but in terms of how many people in their target market find their product truly useful - will not come from Seedcamp or anything like it. It’s a waste of time. Success does not always mean having 10 million customers. If you create a product or service and are targeting a small market but have 80% of that market, you are successful.

And success isn’t measured by the amount of VC money you get. In Silicon Valley circles, this is some kind of badge people are proud to wear. This is very WEIRD and it’s an attitude that has blown over across the Atlantic. Very unfortunate. There are many faux entrepreneurs running around, bragging about how much VC money they raised. But their applications suck, they flame out after one year, and nobody hears about them again. This is not what entrepreneurship is about.

So what is being an entrepreneur about?

(1) Not knowing what’s going to happen next week or next year. It’s easier to have a job with a big company or the government. Sure, there’s no job security even in Europe but it’s still hard to fire people. The good thing is if you get laid off next week from Big Co, you get unemployment insurance compensation for months, sometimes years. This is why a lot of Europeans sit on their butts working for large companies, complaining endlessly about how boring and crappy their jobs are.

(2) Lack of financing is not to blame for the absence of HUGE Internet players like Google or Amazon. What’s to blame? The absence of a HUGE integrated market where everyone speaks the same language, has the same legal and financial system. I love these articles in financial newspapers (appealing of course to financiers) where the authors complain that Europe does not have as many startups as the US because of lack of VC funding or because large financial institutions that do not appreciate cute little startups, and so on. That makes a difference in a few cases but when we are talking about numbers - large numbers of people going out to start their own tech-related business and out of those large numbers, out come a handful that are hugely successful - I am afraid we are talking more of attitude and environment, not money.

You need the large numbers of people starting new things, otherwise you don’t even get Skype, Amazon, YouTube, Facebook (developed by students by the way), Google. And as I mentioned earlier, you need a HUGE market. Skype succeeded because it developed an application that appeals to everyone from Algeria to Ghana. That’s not so easy. Most online services still rely on local markets to grow, especially the trend-of-the-moment, social networking sites.

How do you get large numbers of people throwing the dice and saying, “To heck with it, I’m going for it?”

Change in Attitude - see (1) above.

Environment - people in the US are hugely supportive of those who go out and try something new. If you sit down with friends or even strangers at a cafe, and explain to them that you are about to start a new business, that you are worried about being able to support yourself and your family, and you wonder if the new business will make money but you think you have a good shot, they will say, “Go for it, dude!”

Try this in Europe. You will get 101 reasons why you shouldn’t.

But it’s changing.

Ten years ago, I’d say you would get the 101 reasons all the time. Today, you’d get it 50% of the time. Why? Because a new generation of Europeans has grown up who are used to: (a) working on temp contracts, (b) seeing their parents laid off time and time again, (c) independence (traveling around, having their own money at a young age, valuing other things than security).

They realize that having a job in a big company is a joke. You are not supposed to take it seriously, except as a way to get training and new skills. For them, Dilbert is very real: the stupid, nasty managers who get promoted year after year, the idiotic company mission statements, the pretense around loyalty, the face time nonsense (showing up in the office just to show you are there, not to do real work because your manager is a control-freak who wants to see his staff present all the time, like an Army commander who oversees his troops).

In the technology business, it’s never been easier or cheaper to start something new. You don’t have to launch a new product or online application. You can also be a very good web designer, programmer, etc. with your own business — that’s also entrepreneurship, but it’s yours, you are not working for an evil boss. You don’t need VC funding. Office space, if you need it, is cheap. You can also work from home because broadband in Europe is super cheap. You can source help from countries like India or the Philippines or Roumania, if necessary. Countries like France and the Netherlands have made it more fiscally attractive and much easier (from a paperwork point of view) to start a company. There’s a growing network of tech startups in every country (and across Europe) so you won’t feel lonely.

Entrepreneurship is about having a more profound vision of what your life should be. You have one life on this earth and it is very precious. Do you want to waste it sitting around with Dilbert and his office mates complaining about the pointy-haired boss? Or do you want an interesting life?

You don’t need Seedcamp for this!

One of the fun things about blogging is being famous for … what people think you’re famous for (uncritical fan of any muni Wi-Fi project, Tropos fan girl, whatever). In my case, I built a blog called Muniwireless.com and turned it into a niche tech publishing company (with research products and conferences) with the help of Microcast Communications.

I am, and continue to be, a big fan of cheaper, faster broadband not just for geeks like me, but for everybody. I believe that to achieve fast, cheap ubiquitous broadband (not the 512 Kbps upstream junk that some people love to call broadband) but real broadband that allows high definition happiness via Joost or some other video on demand service, you will need: (a) a regime that has a real broadband policy that encourages competition on the service level and (b) structural separation (or in the interim, local loop unbundling with mix of infrastructure owned not by the same people trying to sell you Internet access). That means some government regulation is needed to ensure competition.

How do you know your home market has crappy broadband (and little competition)? Check out this article: US Broadband Speeds Can’t Support Joost. Replace “US” with the name your country — how fun is that? How does it feel to be a tech backwater falling further behind?

As a small entrepreneur, I am very sensitive to big firms with overwhelming market power squeezing out little gals like me. I am especially furious when big firms use their power to lobby corrupt and/or stupid politicians to devise rules that continue to let them have so much market power that they deprive me and my fellow entrepreneurs of choice — choice of broadband service level and price. That is why I am a big fan of the Amsterdam CityNet FTTH project and many of the fiber projects - private, public and private-public. No one model fits all but you need to think about which model to use to achieve the results you want. You cannot be doctrinaire about it and say “all government intervention is bad”. And I am still not happy with what I consider to be the very slow deployment of FTTH in the Netherlands. Like many governments, there are many in ours who think that it’s enough to have Telco versus Cable. Wrong!

So I am pissed off when a “think tank” residing at Reason.org who is nothing more than a front piece for the lobby-happy telecom industry starts saying that I will start sounding like them. I will slit my own throat before I become a telco sock puppet like them. I posted this comment on their blog:

Actually there is one reason I will never sound like you. I am not a telco sock puppet, like you. Where I live - Amsterdam - we are not waiting for the Invisible Hand to do its job with broadband. Europe is ahead and we are going to have Joost while the rest of America waits to get video on demand. I’m not saying government should do everything (I am an entrepreneur with several other businesses, Muniwireless is just one). I believe in looking at each situation and finding out what works best — sometimes you need more government help, sometimes you don’t. I am not a doctrinaire like you. And I don’t kiss TELCO ass.

Om Malik, founder of GigaOm (a blog that should be on your news reader), talks about his days at Business 2.0 which is in danger of being shut down by parent company, Time Inc.:

It still doesn’t take away from the fact that I did some of my best work for Business 2.0, working hard, not because those Time Warner options were going to make me rich, but because I believed in the magazine. What a fool as I was – in the end it was a business, managed and remotely from a glass cocooned Manhattan tower – where they don’t know a thing about passionate readers, or communities or the fact that their world is no longer theirs. I hope, I never forget this lesson, as I build my little company.

I built Muniwireless from the ground up, starting it out as a blog and turning it into a media company with the help of partners. I did not start blogging about citywide Wi-Fi to make money. At the time I started it, I wanted to solve a problem: how to aggregate all the information about muni Wi-Fi projects in one place so that cities, vendors, service providers and journalists could easily find it. That’s it. It was a passion and still is. I am opinionated because I want ubiquitous wireless broadband that’s fast, cheap and good. For everyone not just people who can afford $80 per month subscriptions.

Large media companies seem to be controlled by machines crunching numbers. It’s never about the audience, never about a passion to bring something valuable to people. It’s about those numbers. Never mind if they print garbage including stories about celebrities, as long as they can run endless numbers of ads around them. If their publications fail, good riddance.

Here’s an article in Wired about Michael Arrington’s rise from blogger to mini-media empire. When he started Techcrunch, he had no idea it would turn out to be one of the most influential technology blogs. Unlike boring tech websites run by large media companies, Techcrunch has personality (like its founder) and passion. It’s not written by a machine. There’s a strong voice behind it. Michael does not make apologies about who he is and how he writes. There are a lot of people who don’t like him and what he’s done, but he goes on anyway.

The flipside of success: saying no to advertisers

I also started my blog, Muniwireless.com, without thinking that it would turn into an operation with conferences, seminars and a quarterly magazine. But it did after 2 years of blogging.

The challenge for me (and I suspect every blogger who succeeds in creating a small media enterprise) is this: how do you keep writing passionately without offending your big advertisers? The answer is you can’t. At some point, something you write will piss them off, they’ll threaten to stop advertising and sponsoring your events. What I learned is that you just need to keep writing with passion and serving your readers.

If you start tempering your opinions and writing things to please the advertisers, you won’t have a audience much longer and your advertisers will flee, too. Besides, the tech business is volatile. One of the advertisers on Muniwireless decided to advertise less after a story I had written pissed them off. It was a convenient excuse; their business was not going well. I remember being very upset about their decision, but looking back now, I should have just told them to jump off a cliff. I had to be more diplomatic because Muniwireless was not just about me. There are other people working in the company.

That’s another challenge. When there are others working in your organization, you can’t throw as many temper tantrums as you used to, although if Muniwireless were still a one-person operation, I would have banished that particular advertiser to my 9th Circle of Hell.

At the DLD conference in Munich last January 2007, I spoke to the CEO of a media company about my experiences with advertisers and he said: “The most powerful word in this business is NO. No, I won’t shut up because you want me to. No, I won’t retract my post because I think I’m right.”