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YAWP - Yet Another Widget Post
While the SXSW crowd is a-twitter, I’m still thinking about the range of private emails I’ve gotten about my widget post. While some of the comments were assertions that I’m an idiot, there were a few that caused me to think harder about the opportunities (or non-opportunities) to build real businesses around the construct of widgets. In addition, Mike Hirshland wrote a post challenging several people (including me) to debate whether or not someone could build a company around “widget management systems” that could generate venture returns and one of Mike's partner at Polaris – Sim Simeonov – wrote an extensive post titled Widgets, Widgets, Everywhere on his view of this.
In the emails I got, several people misinterpreted my point of view so I figured I’d start with a quick summary. I think widgets are an incredible distribution mechanism for Web-based functionality. I love widgets – and love the widgetization of the Web. However, I’m struggling to see where the real business opportunities are in “wrangling widgets” (or – more simply – “widget management systems and infrastructure.”)
Whenever I think of something like this, I start with the assumption that there are no fundamentally new business models. In my experience, almost every business I’ve ever seen on the Internet either has a non-Internet real world analogy (an analog analogue), a non-Internet software analogy, or a previous incarnation on the Internet in some previous phase (Web 2.0 anyone?) While the technology, implementation, distribution, user-interface, and infrastructure dynamics change, the business models rarely do.
To me, widgets are application packagers that enable you to embed specific functionality from a Web site (or Web service) into another Web site. Sim provided a similar view from a slightly different angle in Widgets, Widgets, Everywhere by saying “widgets are the next step in the trend towards disaggregation of content at the production end and aggregation of content by the consumer.” My view of widgets today is that they are tightly coupled with the long tail – adoption seems exciting (and pageview (widgetview?) ramps seem huge) because of the long tail effect (vs. moving up the curve to mainstream media.)
When I stare at this and think about the different ways to build businesses to support this, I come up with four business models:
I don’t buy that #1 (ad networks) is a big moneymaker. Several people hit me over the head with a brick and have said “widgets will generate 10 zillion ad unit page views per day.” I’m struggling with this — you’ve got issues around form factor, content rights, revenue share, long tail critical mass, and many incumbent ad networks that are dealing with different approaches to widgets. Maybe there's room for one new one to emerge – the way FeedBurner emerged around feed-based advertising, but that begs another question which I’ll leave for you to ponder.
#2 (WMS) is great and helpful to me as a publisher, but I don’t know how to monetize it. I’d love a single WMS / widget container for all my widgets. If I’m a Typepad user, I’ve already got this and I assume WordPress.com will nail this also. I expect the CMS platforms can and should quickly integrate this – it's not technically difficult and continues to improve the value of their CMS. As a blogger, I’d be hard pressed to pay an incremental fee to a widget CMS company (I’d do a rev share on #1, but I don’t know where the ads would go!) Most of the stuff I’ve seen fits in this category and I’m impressed with what a few of them are doing functionally, but I’m still struggling with “turn the money on.”
#3 (CDN) seems like there should be something interesting there. I’m already having periodic performance issues with some of my widgets and if you’ve been following along with Fred “the king of blog bling” Wilson's performance issues, you will appreciate that a real CDN could be helpful. However, the long tail bites (or “tangles”) again – the only people that will pay for this are at the head of it so the real network effect doesn’t pay off big here.
#4 (Stats) just won’t work. Google commoditized the long tail stats market when they bought Urchin and made it free. We already saw this with feed stats – the vast majority of them are now free. I believe long tail stats – like Wikipedia (and – according to the FSF – software) – really want to be free.
If you think I’m missing something – obvious or otherwise – I’m all ears. And – if you think I’m really wrong, please keep hitting me over the head with a brick.
How Many Founders Does A Startup Need?
I love my NewsGator and Technorati key word search feeds — they help me find the most interesting things. A NewsGator key word search on “Ryan McIntyre” picked up this post by Chan Chaiyochlarb titled If you are going to launch a startup, how many friends would you need?
It's a neat table of the number of founders for Microsoft, Google Youtube, Yahoo!, Overture, eBay, PayPal, Skype, Kazaa, Hotmail, Ask.com, Excite (where Ryan's name showed up), Napster, Lycos, Amazon, Apple, MySpace, Facebook, Netscape, AOL, Mirabilis, and Digg. The average number of founders – 2.09.
My first company – Feld Technologies (1987) – had two founders (me and Dave Jilk). The first company I funded as an angel investor (NetGenesis: 1994) had six founders that quickly dropped to four. The second company I funded as an angel investor (Thinkfish: 1994) had four founders. Another early angel deal I did (Harmonix: 1995) had two founders as did Email Publishing (1996). The range from 1994 – 2000 seemed to be solidly between two and four.
I just looked through the companies I’m currently on the board of. The number of founders range from 1 to 4 with a concentration of 2 and 3. The few companies that have single company founders paired up with an experienced entrepreneur as CEO early in their life.
When I look at the list of my successful companies, the distribution is very similar. Lots of two founder companies, a few threes, and a few fours. I can’t think of a success case that I’ve been involved in with greater than four founders (although my partner Ryan can since Excite weighs in as the exception with six.)
The Morning Routine
I’ve written about Discovering Work Life Balance in the past, but when I came across Jim Citrin's article titled Tapping the Power of Your Morning Routine I realized that I left out an important part of the dynamics of work life balance for me.
Some people are early birds; some people are night owls. I’ve always been an early bird. In Citrin's article, he talks some of the common characterists of key CEOs that he admires. As a morning person, it was fascinating to see what people do when they get up.
I wake up, get out of bed, drag a comb across my head. Skip that last part about the comb. I try to get up at 5am on Monday to Thursday, regardless of where I am (every now and them I get hosed on travel and sleep in – if I get less than six hours of sleep I have a rough day.) The next sequence is very predictable.
I give myself until 7am for this. I then run from 7am until “whenever my run is over” (I’m in maintenance mode right now so my workouts last an hour – in the summer when I gear up for my next marathon it will be longer.) Shower. Eat breakfast. “Start the rest of the day” (usually before 9am.)
Occasionally I have to do a phone call before 9am – I optimize around this. I’ve stopped doing breakfast meetings – I want the first four hours of my day to myself.
It has taken me a while to figure out this rhythm. While my morning routine might not work for you, I’ve found the notion of a morning routine to be a critical part of my work life balance. Think about your morning – tomorrow.
We are the Web
Great video on the essence of the Web today from Michael Wesch – an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University.
I love the title – The Machine is Us/ing Us. The neat question, of course, is where is the Web going to be tomorrow? At the end, Michael suggests that we need to rethink a few things, including copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetorics, governance, privacy, commerce, love, family, ourselves. (Thanks Bruce for the pointer.)
I am a managing director at Mobius Venture Capital and live in Boulder, Colorado and Homer, Alaska. Following is my standard bio:
Brad Feld is currently a Managing Director at Mobius Venture Capital and has been with the firm since 1996. Prior to Mobius, Brad founded Feld Technologies, which was sold to AmeriData Technologies in 1993, where he became Chief Technology Officer. Brad currently serves on the boards of a number of private companies, including ClickCaster, ePartners, FeedBurner, Gold Systems, Judy's Book, Lijit, Me.dium, NewsGator, Rally Software, and StillSecure. In addition, he is on the board of The National Center for Women & Information Technology, The Community Foundation Serving Boulder County, and The Colorado Conservation Trust. Brad has previously been a member of the board of directors of the Young Entrepreneurs Organization and founded the Boston and Colorado chapters. He holds Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Management Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
I love to read, am an avid marathoner, believe computers are my friend, am happily married to an amazing person, have one gigantic golden retriever named Kenai, and try to enjoy myself every day as I subscribe to the “you only get one chance” view of life. The best way to contact me is email.
- View Brad's featured alumni profile
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