GigaOM

I went to Y Combinator’s Startup School on Saturday (that’s YC-founder Paul Graham, in case you don’t know) even though most people in Silicon Valley see the material there as “too basic.” My goal is to perpetually learn and apply and to learn as much from the audience as from the killer line-up of speakers Y Combinator recruited.

What I learned I posted to Twitter. My notes are in my facebook album.

Anyway, these are The 9 YC-Types that I met that day — and a fewof the things you can learn from them:

1. Mr. Never Woken Up Before Noon. Codes and compiles well into the early morning. Only wakes up at 9AM for killer content. Fresh in from Europe. Is full of wonderment that 12 zip codes in Northern California contain 90% of venture money. Doesn’t know about the 9 VCs you’ll want to avoid meeting, but gosh darn they have great accents.

2. Mr. Silver Bullet Detector. A.K.A, a VC. Wants to find the next Google, Myspace, Yahoo!,

and get his carry (you-know-what) popped with the this 3rd fund.

3. Mr. DDSS Founder Presenting. DDSS stands for Dumb-Down-Sandbag-for-Success. During AM presentation said stuff like, “money matters with how many people you hire. The more money you have the more you can hire.” No where near as dumb as the things he says — even though he pretends he didn’t present during lunch. Continue »

We get all giddy over here at GigaOM when it comes to storage and backup products, so it’s worth noting that today a service called Syncplicity launches in public beta. What’s nice about the service is it offers both storage and backup as well as automatic syncing across PCs. What makes it better than most is its ability to sync offline documents.

Right now, the bridging feature that syncs your offline work when you get online is only available for Google Docs/Word files and Facebook photos. However, Leonard Chung, co-founder of the service, says more offline syncing options will come soon. So will a Mac product. Because my PC is wonky at the moment (hey, it’s four years old,) I didn’t get a chance to try out the software, but if you guys do, please leave us a note in the comments section with your thoughts. Continue »

In a memo to employees aimed at addressing fears of an AOL/Yahoo tie-up, AOL chief Randy Falco today penned a truth for social networks:

But despite drawing large, engaged audiences, other social networks have not been able to make the experiences relevant to users and marketers alike.

Falco believes that AOL’s future combination of Bebo and Platform A will solve this problem. He’s wrong. Buying more companies with cooler widgets or more users isn’t the direction the Internet is heading. We no longer need portals because we now can navigate the web for ourselves. The real opportunity for a startup in social media is making social networks relevant for advertisers — and making advertisers see social networks as an essential forum for their messages.

It might start with a technological solution, such as the one from startup ScanScount, which is trying to isolate relevant content so advertisers feel comfortable placing their brand on social and user-generated media sites, but it won’t end there. These sites, no matter how useful, need to make money. The company that figures out how to do that will be the Google of Web 2.0.

They’re just throwing darts at a wall. Or worse…

“Oh, Look! Mr. Peepers just picked the very same [startups] your investment software did!”

OK, venture capital may be slightly more sophisticated than this — but I have trouble with VCs who nobly claim that their business has more risk than any other, and in the very next breath hammer you with their big-brained analytics for consistently discovering winners. At least the honest VCs admit they often have “no idea” what will succeed and what won’t.

Consider what Fred Wilson had to say yesterday in response to Silicon Alley Insider’s attempt to handicap the 25 most valuable Internet startups. Fred wrote:

… the idea of trying to determine the most valuable startups is an exercise in futility. Yes, it’s clear that Skype, YouTube, Facebook created a lot of value for their founders and investors… Here’s what is certain, many of the companies they put on their SA25 list will be busts. Many of the companies that don’t make the list will create hundreds of millions if not billions for their founders and investors. [Henry Blodget, editor of SIA] asked me to nominate some of my companies. So I nominated all of them. I have no idea which ones will make us a lot of money and which ones won’t.

Fred admits that if he’d been asked to handicap his firm’s “most-likely-to-make-the-fund” portfolio companies before the last bust — he’d have gotten it dead wrong.

“I certainly would not have picked Mercado Libre. Our whole foray into latin america was turning into a disaster … But here we are, MELI is worth $1.6bn.” Meanwhile, other investments that looked like “sure things” went bust.

I love it that Fred, and other VCs like Josh Kopelman are willing to say they have no idea which of their portfolio companies are most likely to succeed. “Uncertainty is the hallmark of the venture capital business,” Fred concludes. Keep his words in mind the next time you get rejected, or discouraged.

No one knows how these things will turn out, and in that truism lies a font for optimism — if not opportunity.

Here’s this week’s list of stories we may have missed, but which you shouldn’t.

1) Why we make misjudgments: On Tues. Mar 25, our friends at VentureHacks did a better job than I did of editing-down Marc Andreessen’s latest opus on cognitive bias, which is based on investor-lawyer Charlie Munger’s theories of “25 key forms of human behavior that lead to misjudgment and error, derived from Mr. Munger’s 60 years of business experience.” Mr. Munger is the longtime investing partner of Warren Buffett. Marc’s essay, The Psychology of Entrepreneurial Misjudgment, part 1: Biases 1-6., is worth reading, but try the VentureHacks version first. You might also want to check out Mr. Munger’s book: Poor Charlie’s Almanack.

2) Ideas/Business Models: OK, it’s becoming a Twitter world. Could it be that now, instead of a Facebook app, you’ll need to write a Twitter app? Do your employees use Twitter? And ask yourself: does your company or business have a Twitter-play? With the access to consumers Twitter offers, it won’t take long for this platform will be monetized, big time. You need to be ready to take advantage. To wit: from blogger-founder Loic le Mur we get this list of 58 Twitter apps. Check it out.

3) Founder profile: And speaking of Twitter, for a glimpse inside a the mind of another role model, read 10 Questions for Ev Williams, from Inc. magazine’s March issue. See also Max Chafkin’s profile of Ev, Anything Could Happen. Or if you’re pressed for time, our crib sheet of it, published Mar. 26: Do as Ev Says, and as Ev Does.

4) And related: reread Ev Williams’ magnum opus, dating from 2005!: Ten Rules for Web Startups .

5) How to be sticky: “If you want to succeed, you need people to remember and act on your ideas. For instance, if you are a leader, you want people to catch your vision.” F|R wrote on this very topic in November, but this week Life Optimizer published a great summary of Stanford Professor Chip Heath’s book: Made to Stick: why some ideas survive and others die. It’s written with his brother Dan. Read this post, and you don’t have to buy the book!

Facebook users can already access the site on their mobile phones through the Facebook mobile page, but apparently the combination of the social network and 3G networks is what prompted Hong Kong tycoon, Li Ka-shing, to up his stake in the company to more than $100 million from $60 million.

Li talked about his Facebook investment on an earnings call for Hong Kong conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa this morning, where he is chairman. MarketWatch reported that Li is willing to invest even more because “we could have some synergy between the 3G services of Hutchison and Facebook, so the customers could use Facebook on mobile phones.”

Hutchison, which provides 3G service in Asia, Europe and the Middle East under the 3 brand, has lost more than $16 billion since 2002 building out 3G networks. In fact Hutchison today reported that its 3G services turned cash-flow positive for the first time in 2007, with 17.6 million subscribers worldwide and total sales of HK$ 59.91 billion ($7.7 billion). However, it still reported a net loss of $2.31 billion on 3G services.

An alliance with Facebook might be a way to pump up the brand a bit more. Actually, this looks remarkably similar to Microsoft’s reason for investing in Facebook. And who wouldn’t put a $15 billion valuation on sex appeal?

Microsoft has teamed up with Facebook, Tagged, Hi5, Bebo and LinkedIn to allow people to transfer their contacts between the five networks and Microsoft’s Windows Live Service. It’s a start in being able to access some of the data locked into a social profile, but it’s by no means as wide-ranging as Google’s efforts to push the Social Graph.

The Google effort uses FOAF and XFM tags to track contacts on the public web and port them into participating players, such as Twitter and Flickr, that already use those tags. The Microsoft effort involves an API shared between the six members of the group. Microsoft’s goals are to prevent screen scraping of data used for phishing, whereas Google wants to make information on the internet (even personal connections) as searchable as possible.

The latest cover story in WIRED, called Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business (authored by Editor Chris Anderson of The Long Tail fame) has sparked a long list of blog posts on every aspect of ‘free’. I’d like to list some of my favorite ways of offering something to the market for free. Of course, lots of start-ups are focused on selling advertising directly or through Adsense, but there are other options to consider. The list isn’t complete of course, so please feel free to comment with other ideas!

Offer products for free and extract data from its use to sell

The best example I think is Newsgator. Newsgator offers several RSS readers and services (Newsgator, NetNewsWire, FeedDemon) and used to charge for them – they had actual revenue by charging for their products! Recently however, Newsgator decided to offer all readers for free. That way they gather a lot more data, which they will aggregate and offer as ‘attiontion data’ to publishers, journalists and other people interested in buzz. A risky way of transforming a business, but also one that could inspire a lot of other start-ups to rethink their sources of income.

If you want to learn more about this concept you should head over to the podcast section of Educators Corner by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, where Mitch Kapor talks about his new start-up Foxmarks. Continue »