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Jim Barnett is co-founder and CEO of Turn, a three-year-old online advertising firm that uses an eBay-like auction to improve the way advertisers are matched to web publishers. Previously, Jim was president of AltaVista, and later, of Overture’s search division, which Yahoo bought for $1.6 billion in 2003. Jim talks to us about why he finally became a founder, why bootstrapping is not always the answer, and why sometimes co-founders need to part ways.

F|R: When did you first get the startup bug?

Barnett: Unlike some of your contributors, I’m a serial CEO. Historically, my passion and expertise has been taking entrepreneurial companies and scaling them into professionally-run companies. I did that with several companies, but ever since I was a kid I wanted to run a company from scratch.

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Editor’s Note: This post is the second in a three-part series authored by Xobni’s VP of engineering, Gabor Cselle. Read a longer version (co-written with Marie C. Baca ) on Cselle’s blog starting Monday.

I run product development at Xobni, maker of an email application that helps you organize your Outlook inbox. My co-founders and I were fortunate to get seed funding from Y Combinator in the summer of 2006, and I now often speak with entrepreneurs that are applying to the incubator. And when I do, I give them this advice: The most important decisions are the ones you make in the beginning of the process, such as what product to build, and what market to serve. These will determine whether you’re headed for failure or a multimillion-dollar exit.

Xobni was extremely lucky in that even though we initially built the wrong product, we were always focused on our product-market fit. This helped us quickly correct our course, and eventually produce a product that is making Microsoft drool. I’ll explain how we turned it around. Continue »

There are a lot of different words that can be used to describe the venture capital community and its relationship with entrepreneurs. Many of them, however, cannot be printed. For example, I once heard a VC say to an entrepreneur: “It would be easier to build a nuclear reactor at [UC] Berkeley than to execute on this idea.” And I once heard an entrepreneur say of a VC: “If I ever see that guy in a parking lot, I will speed up to hit him.” You get the idea.

The Sand Hill Road crowd does have a reputation. In an unscientific opinion poll, the collective sentiment was probably best described by a friend of mine this way: “Let’s just say you probably don’t want to grab a beer with a venture guy, or want your sister to marry one.” Yikes, I am a VC. No one wants to have a beer with me? Where did this rap come from? I think it all starts with the clumsy poker that gets played out in pitch meetings.

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In my years covering technology, I’ve gotten more than my fair share of pitches related to the latest consumer Internet startup. Thanks to this I’ve been able to witness what amounts to be a near-familiar life cycle for these companies. Not every company hits every step, but most of these will be familiar to those of you in the Silicon Valley Social Media/Web 2.0-Something trenches. Continue »

I’m one of the co-founders of two-year-old startup Marketo, a marketing automation company serving B2B companies. I’m also VP of marketing, meaning I’m under constant pressure to take Marketo’s own messaging to new heights. After all, if we can’t market ourselves like a world-class company — and make it look easy — why would customers ask us to help them do it?

The challenge: How to do all this with a limited budget and limited resources. At Marketo, we’ve had our share of ups and downs, but I’ve learned important rules about how to be a better marketer that I think will help you, too.

The 8 Commandments of Startup Marketing

1. Use free distribution. Our early goal was to extend as many online tentacles as possible so anyone searching for a solution like ours would “come across” us. Since we didn’t have a lot of money, we focused on low-cost tactics like my blog and search engine optimization. This helped us generate search rankings and free site traffic.

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Editor’s note: For the sake of accuracy, we have replaced the edited questions and answers with their unedited version (save for some minor stylistic changes). We sincerely apologize for any confusion.This week Found|READ interviews software entrepreneur Paul Graham, co-founder of the influential startup incubator, Y Combinator.

Since 2005, Y Combinator has seed-funded 250 founders and over 45 startups including Justin.TV, RescueTime, Weebly and Zecter. Many other “YC shops” have quickly achieved liquidity events, among them Reddit (Condé Nast) and Auctomatic (Live Current Media). Fresh from Y Combinator’s fourth annual Startup School ‘08, Graham talks about the competition, various success factors, and how Y Combinator picks its winners. Continue »

Dear FoundRead readers, after nearly 12 months, the time has come to take a hard look at the progress of this blog. The results have been mixed, and as such, it’s time to make some changes.

First the good news: The concept (and the premise) on which we started the effort was spot on, reflected in the dozens of contributors that became part of the FoundRead roster. In Hollywood lingo, this blog has been a critical hit, with more than 5,000 RSS subscribers, many of them startup founders or aspiring founders. That is very cool.

Popular aggregator and news discovery sites have linked to us occasionally, but there is one site that has embraced us completely: Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com.) To them we say thanks.

And of course many of these achievements can be directly attributed to FoundRead editor Carleen Hawn, who has done an awesome job of building a community, finding interesting writers and drawing the very best stories out of a wide range of startup founders.

Sadly, FoundRead hasn’t really generated the kind of traffic we had hoped for, so it’s time for a change. Here are the details:

1. FoundRead will stop being a standalone blog and will become a category on GigaOM. Each article in this category will carry FR branding, including the logo.
2. Readers of FoundRead will be forwarded seamlessly to the new category page.
3. FoundRead RSS subscribers will continue to get articles from the FoundRead category: no more, no less. [If you want to subscribe to FR feed, click here
4. Carleen Hawn will remain the editor of the FoundRead channel, so you can still contact her with story ideas, etc.

What I hope to achieve with this change is to keep the concept of FR alive but expose the great content to the larger community of readers who visit GigaOM. I want everyone to know that this has been a painful decision, but given the current economy, a necessary one. I hope you will continue to support us in this new, somewhat more modest format.

HubPages is an online publishing ecosystem where authors submit useful, informative articles on topics they know and love, and then earn royalties for their contributions through Google AdSense, eBay Partner Network or Amazon Associates.

Our site grew quickly after we launched in August 2006, as word spread that writers could (could for once) earn good money by publishing online. Still, a year on, HubPages was far behind our biggest competitor, Squidoo — both in terms of traffic, and in terms of revenue generation for the company and its authors.

We wanted to assume leadership in our space, so we decided to radically change direction. Instead of accepting just any content, we decided to open an author’s forum and monitor the content more thoroughly for quality. This was counter-intuitive — at the time, the potential traffic and revenue that publishing sites such as ours could generate was largely seen to be dependent upon quantity of content.

But porn and spam were constantly intruding on our users’ experiences, and limiting our options for monetizing effectively through online advertising. (Google doesn’t like spam or porn!) So we went ahead and instituted the seven key changes listed below. Paradoxically, reducing the number of published articles in the short-term actually helped HubPages grow traffic and gain share against Squidoo, in the long-term.

This makes HubPags a great case study in why “less is more” for content-oriented startups. (Especially with consumers who suffer for data-overload.) Here are the 7 filters HubPages instituted to effect its turnaround. Continue »