The best advice I can give a first time entrepreneur

You will not get venture funding. Stop wasting your time. If you can't come up with an idea that leads directly to paying customers, go get a job. Do not max out your credit cards, do not borrow from friends and family.

The truth is, if this is your first venture, and you have never raised capital before, you will not get funding. While it is especially true today, it was mostly true since the bubble burst. Now, VCs will not tell you this as they like to stay relevant and informed and will indeed take meetings to learn about you. And of course, they are happy to offer all kinds of advice. But do not let them give you hope – they will not ever consider investing in you, at least not until you have more than proven yourself (and no, not one or two customers, but many, and much revenue).

Now ask yourself, do you have the resources to build your product, get someone to buy it the first time (and by buy, I mean pay enough to sustain you, not a token fee for a “pilot”), and stay afloat long enough until that next sale comes along? No? Then forget enterprise software. You'd probably fail anyway, big businesses tend to be risk adverse and rely on trusted relationships. So unless you have a partnership with IBM, Microsoft, Accenture, etc., you'll never close a deal (tho they will waste much of your time as they too are curious about new technology – they just won't buy it from you).

So what's left? How about software as a service? If you're a geek with a good idea (like solving a problem small businesses may have but they cannot afford to hire an FTE to manage), then building a cloud/subscription based service could give you a way to bootstrap. Tho if you are a geek you may not be particularly savvy at sales and marketing. But hell, you can figure out that stuff by reading a book. Watch out for small business marketing consultants and specialists. If they were any good at what they did they would be charging top dollar working for big businesses. Actually, that advice applies anyone who wants to “help” you, particularly if it involves retainers. They can be expensive and distracting, and rarely produce.

So, to summarize – if you really feel you have to start your own venture, save up, aim small, and expect to fail, tho you will learn much along the way. Good luck!

Would you pay for great search results?

In our experiments at Emantix with automating search queries, we discovered something really curious -- the longer and richer the query, more often than not the top result was very, very good. But the following results were not -- at all.  In fact, in our experimental search engine, howdoya.com, we had to tune down the richness of the query so that, at a glance, the entire results page looked good, giving the user an overall perception of quality.  And of course, when we tested with organically occurring ads, the same was true. Really great queries -- fewer, if any, ads, mediocre queries -- more ads.

So the question is, do more relevant search results diminish the quantity and quality of ads displayed? And if so, what are the implications of and opportunities in removing the obligations inherent in a paid advertising revenue model?

Why not an ad-free, fee-based search engine?  A low annual fee that is painless to an individual, but collectively, on a web-scale, could be a highly profitable enterprise?

Would you pay a nominal fee for better results and less visual clutter?

I would like to propose a word, a verb, to describe this opportunity  -- to "craigslist" -- or to disrupt an entire industry by eliminating a critical source of revenue.

The fundamental human benefit of the Web

As a follow up to the previous posting:

The Web empowers individuals to rapidly achieve innovations while reducing dependencies and removing barriers.

And while this may not encourage "team spirit," what it does do is free innovators, creators and thinkers to move at speeds previously unimagined. No longer constrained by middle managers who covet information as means of consolidating power; weighed down and slowed down by forced collaboration with mediocre performers (when was the last time you were in a brainstorming session where no one played devil's advocate and everyone offered real ideas and suggestions without fear of being ridiculed?); managed by superiors who either claim credit for efforts not their own or who claim vast improvements of quality by making trivial changes, the Web removes market boundaries, provides access to highly skilled but reasonably-priced resources, and allows for entire companies and brands to be built overnight merely by creating a well designed, thoughtful and information-rich online presence.

Now this may lead to more frequent job changes for these folks, expected or unexpected, but in the long run, a small price to pay for great leaps in innovation.

There is another risk — just because something is innovative is no guarantee that anyone will want it enough to pay for it. But I'll save that topic for another day.