brinking - nabeel hyatt

What makes a Social Game, a social game?

It's been a little frustrating to watch as the term Social Gaming is being applied to practically everything on a social network - so much so that even single player games on Facebook are now "social games." The folks at GigaOm have been pinging me about writing an editorial for a while, and this topic seemed worth starting a wider dialog about, so here it is:

What makes games social? (GigaOm)

Innovation Economy's Cool Companies

As a writer for the Globe, Wired, Fast Company, etc, Scott Kirsner gets asked what the "cool" companies around these parts are quite often. It's a common question I get as well, and I'm glad he took the time to give his off the cuff list based on the simple criteria:

- Is the company working on something important, or at least fun?
- If you worked there, would you put people to sleep explaining what you do?

Tim Rowe notes that 16% of the companies have been located at CIC, five are game companies, at least five has strong ties to the MIT Media Lab, and probably a bunch are somehow linked to Lotus. I note a distinct lack of wireless companies.

See the list here.

Big Fish Games steps into Casual MMOs big time

Congrats! The news is out that Seattle-based casual MMO Thinglefin has been acquired by casual games publisher Big Fish Games. Thinglefin was founded early this year by Asheron's Call Lead Designer Toby Ragaini, Jeremy Friesen and Ryan O’Rourke. Big Fish is a casual games publisher, and their President Jeremy Lewis runs it as one of those quiet companies that kicks ass month after month without having to scream about it at every conference.

They are still in stealth mode, but are working on a web-based casual MMO that obviously Big Fish thought highly of. With the huge number of casual MMOs in development right now, getting distribution is key to rise above the noise. With combination of the development team at Thinglefin, and the distribution muscle of casual games publisher Big Fish, they should be someone to closely watch.

I met Toby about a year ago as he was starting up Thinglefin, and he was nice enough to give me a couple-hour headstart in announcing their VC funding to the blogosphere. I will claim my very insignificant part in all of this, as I introduced Toby and Jeremy a few months back. Clearly, they got along. :)

When is CEO 2.0 good? Ambient hires ex Palm, Sony exec as new CEO.

My old company Ambient Devices have just appointed Carl Yankowski, the former President of Sony Electronics and CEO of Palm, to come run the company. Ironically, Marc Andreessen just posted his guide on How to hire a Professional CEO. I'll copy his very brief post in its entirety if you haven't read it:

Don't.

If you don't have anyone on your founding team who is capable of being CEO, then sell your company -- now.

Perhaps Marc was just talking about the lack of a CEO at inception, but I disagree with the rule to never hire a new CEO. An outside CEO is usually brought in for one of two reasons:

a) Holy shit, this startup is totally screwed, let's fire someone so we can blame it on him. You see this frequently, with the recent exit of Dave Sifry at Technorati as a good example.

b) Holy shit, this startup isn't a startup anymore, and the current challenges require someone entirely different. There are a host of examples here as well, such as Google.

A big mistake common of VC-backed companies is replacing the CEO when the startup is in real trouble (scenario A). Of course it's hard to maintain confidence with your CEO if the company is going through rough times. But every startup has some real dark days, and the best person to make sure that it does not die is the founding team. The only thing a company has at that low point is its culture and its vision -- both of which can only come from the founders. So either the culture & vision are worth saving and you stick by the team, or they are not and it's time to shut the thing down or sell it if you can. A new CEO does neither.

But, a startup has three phases: the jungle, the dirt road, and the highway. Being the CEO of each of these is really a different job. And being a good leader is understanding how to get people better than you at a job to do it, even if it's your own. Sometimes when the start-up is doing very well, but lacks some critical expertise to get to the highway, it's time for a new leader (scenario B).

I'll be honest and say this is a very tough thing for a CEO of a startup to talk about. It's one of those dark corners we'd rather not discuss with everyone. When it comes to Conduit, I don't think there is a person on the planet that understands as well as I do what we are trying to do here, and has the ability to execute on it. But, the startup you start is almost never the startup you end up with.

That's a lot of ramen.

Here at Conduit Labs we're announcing the closing of our $5.5m Series A round with Charles River Ventures and Prism VentureWorks. We're also using this occasion to launch the Conduit Labs blog and begin the dialog with everyone, so drop by and say hi. In the future we plan to give a pretty open and honest look at building this startup, everything from what fundraising was like to the technical hurdles we've hit dealing with Flash, and most anything else you guys are interested in chatting about.

The opening post is: How we started Conduit Labs

Virtual Goods Summit Video

Video from the recent Virtual Goods Summit is up, so if you weren't able to make it you can catch up now. I'm so glad Charles did this, since I had to miss the afternoon panels, and I can clearly see I was in need of a haircut.

Above is the panel I moderated: Why Virtual Goods Matter . Another panel chock full of great facts was the first one, Virtual Goods Success Stories, where Susan Wu of CRV does a great run down of the industry, and you get good stats from Habbo, Nexon, Neopets, and Tencent.

Rest of the videos here.

If we were on the west coast, we'd have been funded by now.

I hear this refrain quite often from consumer Internet entrepreneurs on the East Coast. "If we were in the Valley we'd have raised money in no time, but people here don't get us." This is a kind lie, and it is time we rid ourselves of it. You're not getting funded because your idea stinks, the way you talk about it stinks, you stink, or VCs in general stink - but it's not because you are in Boston, New York, or DC... not anymore.

Scott Kirsner's article in the Boston Globe this Sunday (where I was quoted), or his follow-up piece with George Zachary of CRV on his blog both give this feeling of impending doom for consumer folks on the East Coast. But I think he's being overly dire.

It IS harder to build a consumer internet business in Boston. You get this constant nagging feeling that you're missing the kind of impromptu meetings with like-minded folks that provide inspiration -- that's why I support efforts like OpenCoffee so much. And he is right when he says:

Having just boomeranged back to Cambridge after spending two years in San Francisco, the lack of consumer tech activity here is startling to me -- it's like going from a noisy, hot, crowded bar to another across the street where the bartender has plenty of time to wash glasses and gab with the three regulars perched on stools.

But the fact that it is harder is nothing new. That's like saying, "the financial industry in Boston is still not as big as New York's." That's not news, that's reality. I think what IS news is that it is much easier to run a consumer business on the East Coast than it used to be. There are more of us for one, and location is much less of an issue for funding.

As recently as five years ago most VCs invested locally exclusively, but that is becoming increasingly rare. Today plenty of west coast firms, from Redpoint to Sequioa to Kleiner Perkins, invest in east coast companies. Three of the most famous consumer internet investors are not even in Silicon Valley. Brad Feld (Colorado), Josh Kopelman (Philly), and Fred Wilson (NY) make it a point that they will go anywhere for a good company.

But the reverse is happening too, Charles River, Matrix and Venrock are bi-coastal, and guys like Bijan and Will seem to be doing as many deals in Seattle, NY, and LA as they are New England. All that is to say that VCS are getting better at not making excuses based on location, and so should we entrepreneurs. If you are down the VC road and aren't getting the reception you want, first check yourself, then I encourage you to have no fear and get your ass on a plane to hunt down that deal.

Conduit got fairly close to moving (none of us have much family here, and I'm sure the house would do well in any market) but we decided Boston was the best place to build this company. Some of our reasons for Boston were:

1) Much easier to hire excellent engineers. Google and a few others have sucked all the oxygen out of San Fran, and that's why they are trying to recruit here now.

2) Easier to get mainstream press attention. While getting Techcrunched and Digged is somewhat harder, New York is a huge asset when it is time to access mainstream TV and print. I've seen this first hand.

Virtual Goods 2007 wrap-up

The first Virtual Goods Summit was on Friday, and congrats to Charles and Susan for getting together an amazing group on short notice. There was remarkably little filler and a ton of real concrete discussion from the leaders in this industry.

I moderated a panel on Why Virtual Goods Matter, and there is good coverage on 3PointD. Craig, Amy Jo, Byron and the inimitable Daniel James represented a great range of perspectives on why customers care, from the social worlds to mmos to academia.

For me virtual goods represent two important things: the ability to monetize online communities in a much more effective way than advertising or subscription, and the ability to actually increase engagement of that community.

Virtual goods enable a user's ability to invest in their online identity the same way they invest in their offline one.

Read:  3PointD, Raph, and Virtual Worlds News for overall coverage of the event.

Boston OpenCoffee update, Joost invites, first international

There is a good article over at Read/WriteWeb about the OpenCoffee "movement." I'm not sure it is a movement, since we aren't exactly hatching plans to form our own tax-free unity government or anything, but membership does have its benefits.

On top of the excellent coffee, good VC and entrepreneur company, and an excuse to show up to work an hour late on Thursday's - Joost is now extending 1,000 invitations to OpenCoffee members internationally. Let me know if you're interested this Thursday. I imagine that will make for a pretty big turnout this week.

Also, if you happen to be in Amsterdam, it'll be the first International OCC event. The ubiquitous Scott Rafer will be there, along with Jason Calacanis.

As always, these events are open to all comers, from senior CEOs we know well, to still hatching entrepreneurs we've never met. Just bring a demo if you can. The most fun has been when groups gathered around a laptop to give feedback on startups like stealth-mode Thingy, a preview of the relaunch of Going.com, and demos of Where.com.

Is knowledge a liability?

How many of the worlds great inventions were hatched by people over 35? Clay Shirky wrote a thoughtful post on why the rockstars and experts of an industry (ie old people) make bad entrepreneurs. This started with Fred Wilson's claim that age is a mindset, which Clay called, "a kind lie." The article uses a wonderful metaphor of a bag of 50% black/50% white marbles to illustrate the negative power of certainty:

But what would happen if the contents of the bag changed overnight?
What if the bag suddenly started yielding balls of all colors and
patterns — black and white but also green and blue, striped and
spotted? The next day, when the expert draws a striped ball, he might
well regard it as a mere anomaly....meanwhile, someone who just showed up five minutes ago would say “Hey, this bag has lots of colors and patterns in it.”

Which the NY Times reads as "don't fund anyone over 27." I imagine this is hard to swallow, especially if you are a reader with a particular amount of expertise in an industry.

Although I generally take Clay's point, he does miss one very effective way of staying fresh as an entrepreneur, skipping industries. He was far more eloquent than I about the value of forcing yourself into uncomfortable territory. Note that Einstein did not come up with any amazing feats in how to run a patent clerk office.

Although the NY Times probably took things too far in being so orthodox, I think Clay's thought process is valuable in tempering our natural inclination toward starfucking. A person's golden namedropping resume is a bad proxi for their likelihood of being a great entrepreneur/ceo/etc.

Read: The (Bayesian) Advantage of Youth

UPDATE: Que the angry emails, I got three in the hour since I posted this. Two people point out that Clay's example of Tivo is wrong since those founders were well over the age of 35. Another points out that this is an issue about adaptability, not young vs old.

I understand why people would be defensive... hey, I'm over 30 now as well. But as Nicholas Negroponte says, America's biggest benefit over the rest of the world is their profound belief in the young's ability to lead.