All posts by Mark

I’m the founder of The Hawaii Project, a new book discovery engine. Previously I was responsible for Product Strategy and Product Management at Telenav, after they acquired goby. Prior to that I was the ceo of Goby, since acquired by Telenav. Before that I did time at Endeca, PTC, Netezza, Evans & Sutherland in a variety of R&D, professional services and business development roles. When I’m not obsessing over work, I’m a proud husband and father of two great kids, love to play tennis, am a compulsive reader and book collector, and am really into way too many different kinds of music. (What’s with the Viking you might ask? While the vikings were known to split a skull or two, I mean more the verb than the noun, as in “to go adventuring” in the sense of the Old Norse fara í víking. I’ve always been interested in the vikings and started using viking2917 as a handle to avoid spammers way back when, and have just kept using it….)
Favorites, Startups, Travel

A week in a life of a startup

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Mark Suster wrote a great post on whether the startup life is for you or not. His post really nailed it, particularly around the roller coaster ride that is a startup, and how you really have to embrace the rollercoaster to enjoy it. I had one of those weeks that really reflected that, so I thought I’d share.

Gonna be a great week. Meeting with an old friend in San Francisco, followed by a meeting with a very smart and well regarded entrepreneur-turned-venture-capitalist, that I’ve met with before and like very much. Hoping to meet with a couple of high profile reporters as well. Then down to LA, where I’m on a great panel at a conference, and going to meet with two potential customers to try to close some projects.

Monday. start off the week with a 6am flight out of Boston for the west coast. Up at 3:30am. Ugh. It’s President’s day, a holiday, for normal people, who are off. Oh well, this is what I do. Pick up a USA Today in the airport, our product, goby, is featured with a very positive review and picture in USA Today. WOOHOO! Hard to beat that as a way to start off the week. Reading my email in the airport, my friend’s company needs him to fly to Chicago so that meeting is off. DAMN! Manage to wedge in a replacement meeting the next day with one of my advisory board members; get some great advice and contacts. Reporter meetings appear not to be happening. I think of another strategic partner I should meet in LA and drop a note; meeting looks good.

Tuesday. Get a random mail from someone I know who wants to explore strategic partnerships; since I’m randomly in the area, we get together and have a very interesting conversation. Walk out of that meeting, the venture person I was meeting with has come up sick and can’t make the meeting. All that prep the night before wasted. DAMN! On the positive side, I’m close to the golden gate bridge, no other meeting to arrange on short notice, so I take a walk across the golden gate bridge on a beautiful day, before driving down to the airport and hopping a flight to LA.

Wednesday. Get off the plane, one of the big meetings I have, the person has come down with Bronchitis and can’t meet. DAMN! But another meeting with a potential strategic partner miraculously appears (WOOHOO!) and I squeeze in a very interesting meeting that didn’t exist before I left. My second meeting drops me a note and lets me know he’s had a basketball injury and can’t meet either. DAMN! Then on to my other meeting, which goes well enough but doesn’t result in getting the business (at least yet!). Slog to the hotel through LA rush hour traffic, grab a drink and a pizza, then off to the hotel room to prep for the panel tomorrow. In bed at midnight. Just before I go to bed, get a mail that we’ve been accepted to speak at one of the biggest and best advertising conferences (WOOHOO!).

Thursday. Up at 6. Conference is going well. Meet a lot of interesting people. Panel goes very well, so far as I can tell (WOOHOO!). Somewhat by chance I make some great connections and have some great conversations with my co-panelists that may help the business very shortly.

Friday. Get a call from one of my colleagues, a deal we’ve been chasing and was looking dicey, we now have what looks like an agreement. WOOHOO! First deal this quarter and couldn’t come at a better time. Get a mail from one of my other colleagues 30 minutes later. Google’s changed their algorithm and punched a huge hole in our search traffic. DAMN! Hop on the plane, and miraculously, the seat next to me is empty so I have some breathing room for the first time in like 10 flights (WOOHOO!).

That’s the roller coaster for the week. A lot of weeks are like that. Big highs followed 30 minutes later by big lows. If that sounds like fun to you, you belong in a startup!

Startups

Judging the MIT Venture Capital competion, and, Term Sheet Basics

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I’m very excited to be a judge in the MIT Venture Capital Competition tomorrow. This competition is the inverse of the MIT $100k Entrepreneurship Competition. In that event, MIT’ers present their business plan / startup ideas, and the best potential company wins. In the Venture Capital competition, MIT’ers play the role of Venture Capitalists. The judges aren’t selecting the best company, they are selecting the best nascent VCs. As an entrepreneur, being a judge of that is a delicious irony 8).

As part of the warmup for the event, I gave a talk last week on the basics of term sheets. The subject is very well covered on the web, especially Brad Feld’s series of blog posts and on Venture Hacks, and most of material is loosely based on theirs – I include it here in case a summarized overview is useful.

Term Sheet Basics

View more presentations from viking2917.
Goby, Music

music this weekend in boston

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(crossposted from the goby blog)

Here’s the lineup for Boston concerts this weekend.

Self-described as “Victoriandustrial”, Emilie Autumn was Courtney Love’s violinist. Corsets, Glam Rock with strings and edges. Whether you like the music or not, it’s going to be a unique show. At the Armory in Somerville. You have been warned. (update: I think this show is sold out. bummer.)

Patty Larkin. A dependable folkie at the Homegrown Coffeehouse in Needham. If you’re in the ‘burbs, a great night out!

Cowboy Mouth is at the Middle East on Saturday night. This act is way too big for this venue; don’t miss a chance to see them in such an intimate venue!

Touring around his highly regarded new release, “So Runs the World Away”, Josh Ritter is at the House of Blues. Intriguing, unique, but accessible.

Mary Gauthier is the classic singer from the wrong side of the tracks. She didn’t start performing until later in life, and the earlier part of the life was apparently pretty rough. If you’re free Friday night, take a drive up to Marblehead, have a nice dinner and take in some gravel-voiced, honest stories.

You can see this list in more detail here.

As always, drink responsibly (or better yet get a driver!), drive safely, and information on all this and more can be found at boston music this weekend.

Goby, Music

Cool Icelandic Music documentary, and Boston music this weekend

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OK. It’s snowing. It’s been snowing. It will continue to snow. Snowmageddon, Snowpocalpyse, #snow, whatever you want to call it, it’s here. In honor of all the snow, here at goby we’re checking out music from a place that’s warmer than Boston. Iceland. Seriously. It’s warmer in Reykjavík than Boston today. Anyway. Check out this documentary about Icelandic music – there’s some cool new music here. http://www.seriousfeather.com/iceland/index.html. Ok, now back to our regular programming, Boston concerts this weekend.

Combining Latin, Hip Hop and World beats, Ozomatli comes to the Royale Friday night. Your feet will move whether they want to or not.

Robyn. Friday. House of Blues.

Wavves, Best Coast and more at the Paradise on Friday night.

If your tastes run this way, 15-time Grammy winner and international treasure Tony Bennett will perform at the Wang Theatre on Saturday.

Joshua Bell might be one of the best violinists in the world. Check this out. His violin is a Stradivarius that cost almost $4M. Seriously. He’s also been involved in some cool stuff, including this (via Wikipedia:).

In a curious experiment initiated by Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten, Bell donned a baseball cap and played as an incognito street busker at the Metro subway station L’Enfant Plaza in Washington, D.C. on January 12, 2007. The experiment was videotaped on hidden camera; among 1,097 people who passed by, only seven stopped to listen to him, and only one recognized him. For his nearly 45-minute performance, Bell collected $32.17 from 27 passersby (excluding $20 from the passerby who recognized him). Weingarten won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for his article on the experiment.

Bell plays Friday night at Symphony hall.

Viktor Ullmann and poet Petr Kien were prisoners in the concentration camp Terezin, where they created this almost inconceivably wry and touching opera, entitled The Emperor of Atlantis. They died at Auschwitz. Their opera survives – an allusive, haunting, texturally rich testament to their spirit. At the Calderwood Pavilion of the BCA in the South End.

Breaking with our usual rules, there are a few Thursday shows important enough to bring to your attention:

When you were younger (a long time ago!), do you remember the guilty pleasure of “Play that funky music” by Wild Cherry? If so, go see Chromeo at the House of Blues on Thursday.

John Mellencamp. Nuff said, you like him or you don’t. In Lowell.

Neko Case – folk? country? bluegrass? alt-country? indie? rock? who knows? who cares? she’s amazing. go see her. At the Wilbur Theater.

You can see this list in more detail here.

As always, drink responsibly (or better yet get a driver!), drive safely, and information on all this and more can be found at boston music this weekend.

Search, Startups

The real problem with Quora

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There’s been a blizzard of social media chatter about Quora recently. Robert Scoble loved it, then hated it. Vivek Whadwa doesn’t get it. Arrington thinks Scoble’s nuts. All of this is focused on whether or not Quora is a great blogging platform, how the voting system works, and so on.

Here’s the real problem with Quora, and why it’s going to struggle, until it solves it.

There’s no information architecture. It’s just a huge pile of unorganized content. The value in a Q&A service is the ability for people to process the answers and find useful information, or at least predict where they’re going to find this information. Hunch suffers from a similar problem – it’s hard to know which ‘Hunch’ is going to answer your question. Until Quora finds a way to put some normalization onto the questions, the pile is just going to get bigger and harder to sift through. And this normalization is a hard problem, particularly for subjective questions, which is what currently predominates in Quora. It won’t be an easy thing for them to fix. Wikipedia (to which many comparisons are made relative to Quora) has a pretty clear information architecture, and a dis-ambiguation mechanism, and it’s data model elements are primarily (simple) nouns (Places, People, Topics) – whereas Quora’s primary content are usually (complex) subjectively phrased questions.
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