interview with Andraž Tori of zemanta: part 2/2

this is the second part of the interview with Andraž Tori of zemanta. the first part can be found here.

Andraž, what does seedcamp and pitching mean for your company?

pitching is a fabulous experience of explaining your idea and trying to inspire other people. pitching is one of the best things, when you have a start.up.

seedcamp was a great experience, because it gives start.ups a chance. that's very important for early stage start.ups. having the possibility to present your idea to somebody that matters can help you to move your idea forward.

seedcamp was a very fortunate event as the timing was exactly right for us. this is the part of the start.up life that you can not plan for. you need to work hard as hell, but at the end you also need to have a bit of luck.

you have already left some tracks in your personal career, informatics olympiad medal winner, co-founder, open source developer and now zemanta. what`s next?

well [laughing], i do like to do cool stuff that interests me, that helps people and has some impact on the world. that's what i am going to do for a long time. but first and foremost we have to make zemanta a big success.

bostjan spetic and your are the founders of zemanta. ales septic, the ceo of your company was not among the founders. how was it to have a non-founder becoming the ceo?
it is an interesting experience. we already worked with ales before and we rely on the good sides of everybody in the team. handing over control was not really a big topic, as we were always running the company very consensually. there is always disagreement about certain topics but it is important to find a proper consensus and then honour the decisions.

semantic technologies are hard to tackle. how do you trade between a very domain specific vs. a more generic approach for your product?
we started with a very generic approach from the beginning. it is just now that we start to add specific things that are required for special areas of application. that is not the usual thinking but that helped us.

anything else you would like to talk recommend new start.ups for the beginning?
be very clear from the beginning of what kind of value you provide and to whom.

the other thing is, just do it. it is not perfect in the first iteration ever. just put something out, see what others say and how they use it. learn on that and create a new thing. it is not a bad thing to be wrong sometimes. then go ahead and improve – you sometimes fail and you just improve again.
that is probably what we haven't still completely consumed from the silicon valley type of entrepreneurship [in Europe]. failing is just part of succeeding. failure is still a failure but it is not the end of the world. it is as good experience to learn and do it better next time.

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interview with Andraž Tori of zemanta: part 1/2

inspired by jessica livingston´s highly recommended book, founders at work, interviews with local start.ups will become part of the regular start.up blog entries. the interviews will be split up in two parts. while the first will focus on general start.up topics, the second will look deeper into the company in focus.

the first company in line is zemanta. founded by Andraž Tori and Boštjan Špetič, zemata provides an intelligent blog extension which automatically generates context sensitive proposals for pictures, links & tags. their firefox plug in can be downloaded here. a live demo can be tried here. winning seedcamp brought zemanta wide media attention as well as reputable vc funding. the interview took place at this year's web2.0expo berlin with Andraž Tori.

Andraž, tell me about the (three) most exciting things about start.ing up your company?
first it was really exciting to see that we had something not many people in the world were doing. the second great thing was winning seedcamp. this was a big achievement, since there are not many start.ups in slovenia.
finally it is great to do stuff that usually can only be done in silicon valley. to do something which is really for the whole world and to see that we here in europe are on the same level [as silicon valley]. that is exciting.

what about the most unfortunate things about start.ing up?
we did not have any big misfortunes. there were hard bits, like getting calls in the middle of the night, when the service [of zemanta] went down and not getting to sleep all the night fixing stuff.

on the business side there are long negotiations about funding. you are of course not happy with all the conditions you get.

there are times when it is hard and tiresome. it is exciting, but not just fun.

what are your lessons learned until now about technology?
prepare to re-do things. you will create solutions to problems, learn that you misjudged things and rebuild. and you have to listen to other people. the collective intelligence of people is always better then a single mind. one has to be persisted and stubborn, but just in the right amount.

when you hear the words "exit" and "shut down", what comes to your mind?
that's t the life of a start.up.

how do handle private life vs. work?
i put a lot of myself in zemanta, but i enjoy it. you have to observe and listen to yourself. when you are over-investing yourself just step back a little. sometimes you have to push to the maximum, but you can not always work in that mode.

this was the fist part of the interview with Andraž Tori. stay tuned for the 2nd part, where a closer look on zemanta will be taken.

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• Seedcamp '08 finalists announced
• Reuters: Refresh and fresh funds for Zemanta
• Zemanta

moo, fat free sites and user action: best of web2.0 epxo berlin 2008 part 2

after pitchcamp and yossi vardi at this year‘s edition of web2.0expo berlin, moo, user interfaces and user action through design conclude the best of show sessions.

let's start with number three:

3)moo
stefan magdalinksi, cto of moo allowed open insights into the challenges of building moo. two years after starting, with a team of 30, they are shipping to around 187 countries worldwide.

How we made MOO

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web2 scaling)

starting their business just before amazon web services surfaced, they build their own infrastructure. to transfer their infrastructure now to s3 would be to complex and thanks to the fact, that storage costs decrease faster then their data growth, costs are kept under control. they use virtually hosted squid caching proxies for $100 per month to speed up u.s. site access.

„ajax is great, but breaks ability to test“ according to mr. magdalinksi. in order to maintain to keep their website up and running when introducing new funcionalites, the developed around 400 rollout test, using watir.

business wise, they share 15 percent of their revenue with they affiliates. marketing analysis is mostly done by looking at actual user behavior. user feedback is currently managed by a mix of self made solutions of salesforce. and while the implementation of salesforece took just two hours and only costs a few hundred dollars a year. the „web 0,5“ style interface slows down customer service.

delivering physical products to the customers is the core challenge of moo. an overall of two percent of shipments get lost on the post. surprisingly canada hast the most unreliable postal system overall. developing the plastic cardholders proved to be one of the big challenges: designed in europe, produced in china, the first shipping of card holders did not meet the quality requirements. coordinating all the production process proved to be more time consuming then expected.

best of show number 4 goes to:

4) mobile user interfaces
creating specialized mobile user interfaces, presented by brian suda, maxed out the capacity of the room.

phrasing the term „fat free sites“ for mobile web sites, he showed why list views can be 2-3 times more efficient in terms of number clicks necessary then drop down menues.

that power user „fat free“ interfaces prefer to have everything on one screen, in order to reduce search times.

Creating a Specialized Mobile UI

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web2expoeu08 ui)

this leads to the last best of show session of this year's web2.0 expo berlin.

5) user action

„User: Action! Leading Users to Action Through Design“ of solana crawford brought not only a driving speaker but a welcomed step away from the tech driven sessions.
her key messages were a) to know your goals - your audience - the action you want users to take on your site and b) realize the power of coulors - shapes - screen layouts.

User: Action! Leading Users to Action Through Design: a presentation by Solana Crawford at O\'Reilly Media Web 2.0 Conference ,Berlin 2008

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: interface user)

so much from this year's web2.0 expo berlin. a experience hopefully to be repeated next year.

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.

ignite session at web2.0expo berlin

there is not only a slot about "how to pitch" as recently reported at this years web2.0expo berlin. also a "start.up ignite web2.0 epxo europe" (this name is a bit long, but well...) session is announced. the time line is rather tight though: 10th of oct. to apply.

pitching "how to" session at web2.0expo berlin

events coming in at a steady pace now: web2.0epxo berlin pitch camp x.0 - how to pitch your company for fame and fortune. 21. oct. 2008, berlin. techcrunch moderated.

leweb´08 startUp registration opened

too late for the ongoing seedcamp competition this time? the next possiblity to pitch on an european level is coming up.

leweb´08 startUp competition is now open for application. the competition is organzided by seedcamp. leweb was added as a link in the blogroll.

for all those who need some more presentation preparation and which went through all the demo videos already, there just starting ignite/web2.0expo new york will film the presentations, so keep watching for them.