interview with christopher clay, founder of "soup"

Image via CrunchBase

time was running fast, when talking with christoper clay of "soup". soup is a "tumblelog, a super-easy blog that can do more than just text: post links, quotes, videos, audio, files, reviews and events.". try it out here or just have a look what is going on at soup. winning seedcamp in 2008, working in vienna, london and san francisco, there was a lot to talk about the daily life of the young austrian start.up

this is the second interview in a series with creative new start.ups, after an interesting discussion with andraz tori, founder and cto of zemanta.

christoper, tell me about the (three) most exciting things about start.ing up your company?
first it is all about the places we have been. from berlin to cologne, living for three months in london and just coming back from working for three weeks in san francisco. talking to people, pitching to them all around the world, that‘s been great.

second exiting thing is all the feedback we got. we have 20.000 active users now from all over the world. just scrolling through our feedback tumbelog is simply amazing.

third exciting thing is being your own boss. that is hard. the most important decision is to focus on what to do next. it is fun to learn from your mistakes - and we learned a lot over the last year.

what about the (three) most unfortunate things about start.ing up?
first hard thing is personal. i started the company with two co-founders - none of them is working any more with me. i would not start a start.up again, without having worked intensively with potential co-founders before. so that was very stressful to go through. however, we are three in the team again.

second is the roller-coaster live. there are really bad phases. one day everything works right and you are convinced that soon you are going really big. the next day you are depressed and think that is never going to work and facebook is going to kill us. it is stressful but exciting. therefore you need a good team which motivates each other. i would not be able to do this alone.

starting up in vienna in the hindsight is the third unfortunate thing. the decision to start here was right at the time. but the chances to get investments in the united states would be much higher. unfortunately it is hard to move to the u.s. . for example getting working visa without having founded a viable company in the us is tricky.

what are your lessons learned until now about starting.up?
number one, carefully preselect your co-founders. e.g. by working on a three month non-profit project with them before founding a company together.
number two, not found in vienna again, but in berlin, london or san francisco. because funding is much more easier there.
product wise, number three, i would focus stronger on the build in viral aspects of soup.io. they should have them in place from the beginning, rather then relying on the initial users we got mainly from friends at metalab. then we would be already ten times as big as we are now.

and number four: never give up. for example seedcamp. we got rejected in the first round (when zemanta won), because the did not understand what we did. we still went to the next mini seedcamp in berlin, explained personally what we did to saul klein und reshma sohoni and they proposed us to try again. and well, we succeeded the second time.

when you hear the words "exit" and "shut down", what comes to your mind?
the good and the bad, the two outcomes. either we are in san francisco, have hundreds of thousands of users and funding or we are back in vienna, broke and start something new.
the possibility of failure is very real, statistically most start.ups fail. but we are giving our best and try to make an exit one day.
although losing soup.io would feel horrible. we can not let our users down, so even if it would not work out, we will keep it running.

final question of part 1: how do handle private life vs. work?
probably i have not learned this yet. for me, the start.up comes first. like moving to san francisco and leaving people behind is hard but i would do it. so i am rather unbalanced on this yet. i want to be sure i tried everything for it.
what i learned was to manage my own expectation. when i am too tired some times and therefore have a none productive day, i know now that´s ok. that takes pressure away from oneself.

this was the first part of the interview with christoper clay of soup. where he sees the need for new start.ups and more, read in the upcoming part two.

how to turn-off investors and what business plans & sausages have in common: best of web2.0 expo belin 2008

the second incarnation of o‘ reillys web2.0 conference took place at the bcc - well placed at the center of berlin, next to alexanderplatz.

the new location was a welcomed change to last years 60ies-bunker style berliner messe facilites like a „community lounge“ promoted interaction between attendees and with last year‘s food problems solved people were happy to focus on the topics at hand.

besides the „big pictures“ keynotes for tim o‘ reilly, john lily (mozilla), martin varsavsky (fon) et al., the show brought a wide range of in depth topics , ranging from business to marketing and design to development.

the collective presentations of the show can be found on slideshare, respectively on the conference website . going through the (until now) uploaded 42 presentations on slideshare is too much noise, so let‘s setup up best of the show. start with the five best events of the show:

1) pitch camp
pitch camp was a driving event. 12 companies were selected to pitch for two minutes each, in front of a 200+ crowd and a grand jury (ranging from techcrunch and venturebeart to accel and index ventures, see here).

the short intro giving on the art of pitching can be reduced to 3 points:
1) clear view of business
this is necessary to be able to communicate the start.up (business objectives, market segments, problems solved)
2) understand your audience and what they care about
who are they, what do they want, why would they care about you.
3) build 3 month, 9-12 mont and long term business objective

there were book recommendations as well, crossing the chasm (again!) & blue ocean strategy, chan kim, renee mauborgne, understand the problems of your market.

also interesting to note were comments by the jury what turns them OFF, when the listen to pitches.

investors

• lack of ambition displayed
• lack of character and leadership
• homework not done (not knowing the background of people start.ups pitch to, not done the business metrics, not having market figures, competitor ignorance, lack of execution plan, ...)
• lack of understanding potential customers, investors, partners

media

• old stories
• no potential to bring journalist on techmeme/digg for x weeks
• clones of anything
• no magic sauce begin

potential partners

• telling the potential partner how cool the start.up is
• not telling or not being able to tell what the partner will exactly (=cash) gain from partnership, when and how.
• unfulfillable expectations from partners (like: just put my link on the google landing page...“)

how to get in contact?

• through references
• email (keep it short, send a compelling 2 sentence pitching email)

not just also judging on the start.ups at pitch camp but also discussing on stage was:

2) keynote speaker yossi vardi

being a serial entrepreneur himself and a rather successful venture capitalists, yossi vardi gave some interesting statements at the discussion with tim o‘ reilly.
that at the end of the days successful vc just have luck, is quite a open statement.
also that it is very important to check the vc a start.up is interested in. is he friendly? do entrepreneurs work repeatedly with him?
and that business plans and sausages have one thing in common: only people who do not know how they are made eat them.

this made the 2nd of the best web2.0expo berlin events. read more about moo, user interfaces and user action through design in the 2nd part of the upcoming web2.0expo roundup.