Marshall Stokes, CTO at StoryMixMedia

Austin, Texas’ answer to TechStars or YCombinator shows off its graduating class of startups today (plus 15 other companies) as the third year of the Capital Factory accelerator program comes to a close. While you can view the live stream starting at 7 a.m. PDT/10 a.m. EDT, I went out last week to interview the startups at the Capital Factory office in downtown Austin to give readers the scoop before the event.

I was struck by how product-oriented these startups were, and how all of them had paying customers. I also thought these companies didn’t really spend a lot of time on their “big vision” as some Bay Area startups tend to do. Maybe it’s Austin’s general orientation toward the enterprise market, where products talk, and big vision may get you financing but few customers, or perhaps it’s just the way these startups think. Josh Baer, managing director at Capital Factory and CEO of OtherInbox, told me that each year the startups invited to participate seem to have a theme and this year’s startups were all about traction. “They all had products and paying customers,” he said. As for traction, about half of the previous two Capital Factory graduating classes have gained some with follow-on investors. Five out of 10 received funding, and one is profitable and won’t seek funding.

Now, onto the startups:

SwimTopia. Mason Hale, the former CTO over at Frog Design, went from iconic products to delivering swim team software as a service over the web. SwimTopia is the first product of TeamTopia, which basically aims to become the Google Apps for swim teams, then later, other amateur sports leagues. Hale, who describes his search for a business co-founder in the video, is looking for about $300,000 in seed money.

StoryMixMedia. If I were Shutterfly or Kodak, I’d buy this company in a heartbeat. StoryMix Media was founded in 2011 and is seeking $500,000 for its service which sends out Flip cameras to weddings and then helps brides and grooms piece together the videos their guests take into a video of the event. As Marshall Stokes, CTO of the service, says in the video, it’s also planning an iPhone app so hardware won’t limit the amount of video guests can take.

GroupCharger. GroupCharger may sound like a social networking veneer laid over your alma mater’s request for cash, but co-founder Kirtus Dixon is after something bigger. GroupCharger, which was founded in 2010, helps universities connect to their alumni and find them on social networks. After that point it’s not just a request for donations, but also a way for alumni to create a social network based on their old school ties. Dixon says that churches, high schools and other big life milestones might be right for GroupCharger’s software. GroupCharger is hoping to raise about $200,000 in seed money.

SpeakerMix. This is a startup for your inner Tim Ferris or Steven Covey. SpeakerMix was created last year by two guys who caught the startup bug after high school and happened to have worked in an agency that helped line up event speakers. They decided the old way of trying to book speakers was too cumbersome, lacked a feedback mechanism and was out of date. So they created SpeakerMix where speakers can sign up, others can rate them and event planners can search for folks that range from Lance Armstrong to some-guy-you-never-heard-of-but-is-big-in-his-profession.

HelpJuice. This is the only company without a video, but it too has paying customers. It was formally created as part of Capital Factory after founder Emil Hajric was asked by a friend to build the app (the friend even got his company to pay for the service!). HelpJuice is a service that provides a better customer help page for companies. When a customer encounters a problem they typically try the search page but find a forum-like feature that’s confusing or outdated, so for a fee, Helpjuice turns customer queries into searchable articles that future customers can search more easily. Hajric says the search uses a Google Instant-like feature where articles will appear as the consumer types in his query, which helps the consumer find the right response (80 percent of the time) and hone their question as they search. Hajric is seeking $150,000 in seed funding.

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Many assumed the Toronto native had cracked under the pressure of a rigorous Ph.D. program and was now experiencing a complete mental breakdown. They weren’t buying the ex-computer hacker’s improbable explanation — he’d dropped out the world’s most famous technical university because he was bored. As for the new waiter gig? It was “research” for a new startup that would revolutionize the restaurant industry. Suuure.

Fast forward two years and Suri’s classmates have little choice but to buy his story. Celebrating its official launch today — E la Carte (a graduate of the Y Combinator summer 2010 program) is supplying partner restaurants with handheld, touchscreen tablets that let customers view pictures and read descriptions of food, order meals and pay at their tables without having to wait for the human waiter.

The product operates on the premise that restaurants are “chaotic environments” that haven’t been improved upon much since the first tavern opened in the middle ages.  Orders are constantly mixed up, cooks can’t decipher custom orders written on greasy order slips, waiters spend too much time chasing lost orders — and heaven forbid a party of seven wants to split their bill at the end of a meal. Forget about it.

In fact, Suri says he came up with the E la Carte concept after dining out with a big group of MIT engineering buddies. The check came. Some people wanted to pay with credit card, some people with cash. Everyone wanted to pay for their meal alone. No one could figure out how to split the check.

“This felt like it went on for hours,” Suri says. “I thought if a bunch of MIT engineers were having this much trouble, others must be having the same problems.” (Cue smug wisecrack from the boys at Cal Tech in five, four, three..)

As a result, the E la Carte software comes with an especially nifty feature that allows friends to easily split the bill — either evenly or by menu item — and pay with a combination of cash and credit card.

It has other useful bells and whistles as well, including a timer feature that counts down until an item’s estimated time of delivery (which can be customized to account for restaurant conditions). And to fill those painfully agonizing minutes between ordering spinach artichoke dip appetizer and waiting for it to arrive, the tablet includes entertainment and social media features. Customers can play an array of solo and team games, partake in a little trivia, doodle in a paint brush application and upload the artistic masterpieces — along with their menu choices — to Facebook.

While the Presto tablet uses touch screen technology, it doesn’t exactly look like a sleek iPad, which would likely be broken in five minutes in a family-friendly restaurant environment. Instead E la Carte is supplying restaurants with heavier, more durable hardware that happens to be coated in rubber. Much of the product’s heft is devoted to a heavy-duty battery that can last a day without a charge, as well as a credit card reader so customers can pay at their tables.

E la Carte has 15 employees (14 are engineers and most are from MIT) and Suri requires those without restaurant experience to apprentice in the service industry before signing on to the project. He believes this strategy gives his tech-heavy crew insight into the trenches.

The team is definitely taking a risk. Hardware-driven startups have had a shaky history of finding success in Silicon Valley. For a grim reminder, look no further than the recent news that e-learning startup Kno scrapped plans for its much hyped tablet and will focus exclusively on software serves as a grim reminder.

But prominent members of the tech world appear to be banking on its success. So far, E la Carte says it has secured more than $1 million in funding from Y Combinator, SV Angel, and prominent tech investors that include founders of Reddit, Gmail and Dropbox, along with restaurant executives from Applebee’s and other major national chains.

After beta testing in Boston, the service is launching in about 20 locations in the Bay Area and beyond. The company has also made a deal with a major American restaurant chain, which it plans to announce later. (A hint might be in the press kit, which lists Applebee’s executives among the initial founders).

Suri says he has received calls from about 100 restaurants that want to get the tablets on their tables. And it’s not difficult to see why some restaurateurs would be interested.  According to company figures based on six months of data from pilot roll-outs in a half dozen locations, restaurants using the system are seeing an increase of 10-12 percent higher sales through “impulse” orders, and 84 percent of guests are making more regular visits.

There are other promising applications for restaurants in data collection. The machines save consumer information and the E La Carte team gets detailed reports on what food customers are ordering, and what menu items they think about ordering based on the amount of time spent lingering over it. As for how customers will feel about their dining preferences being stored for posterity and mined for every nugget, that’s another story.

Suri pitches the tablet by saying it clearly makes a waiter’s job much easier, freeing him or her up to take care of customer-service tasks like quick refills and interacting with guests. And with higher total bills and an automated feature that allows the customer to choose a tip between 15 and 25 percent (or write in a custom amount), he says he isn’t worried about waitstaff getting stiffed on tips.

But with technology that allows customers to realize they can order their Quesada explosion salad with substitutions before a waiter even says, “How are we doing today,” how long is it before customers start to ask whether they even need a waiter at all?

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NewsTilt, a Y Combinator-funded media startup that launched in April to much fanfare, shut down just two months later. How did things go off the rails so quickly? Co-founder Paul Biggar has written a long and thoughtful blog post about how and why the venture collapsed, and there are some useful lessons in it — not just for anyone thinking about a journalism-related web startup, but for startups of all kinds. It quickly becomes clear that virtually everything about NewsTilt was either wrong from the beginning or quickly went wrong, including Biggar’s relationship with his co-founder, and the company’s relationship with its customers or users:

Following the launch, everything started going to s***, and a huge number of challenges to the success of the company had arisen. The biggest of these were the lack of traction from launch, that we had lost the faith of our journalists, and because there were communication issues between Nathan (my co-founder) and I. This combination also killed our motivation. As a result, I made a carefully thought out decision to shut down the company, and return as much money as we had left (about 40%) to the investors.

One of the more glaringly obvious flaws in the company’s makeup is what appears to be a lack of interest in the problem NewsTilt was trying to solve. While the company had an idea of what it wanted to do for journalists — namely, to provide a platform for them to find an audience and theoretically build some kind of business around their content, similar to what True/Slant tried to do before being acquired by Forbes — neither of the founders had any background in journalism. Worse than that, Biggar admits that neither had much passion for the idea either; the startup evolved out of a plan to develop a better commenting system for newspapers.

The NewsTilt co-founder describes plenty of other problems: he and his co-founder didn’t communicate well, they didn’t have enough funding to develop many of the features they had promised to the journalists they signed up, they pitched the company the wrong way to users, they made some bad hires, and so on. But for me, the lack of passion for the problem is the biggest red flag in Biggar’s post-mortem. If the founders of a startup aren’t passionate about what they are doing — so much so that it keeps them up all hours of the day thinking about it — then success seems unlikely, if not impossible. According to his co-founder, Biggar was on his honeymoon for most of the month of May.

NewsTilt’s founders seem to have taken on the challenge of helping journalists find an online audience because they thought it was technically interesting, or because there was a potential market for it. But as David Cohn — who has built his own journalism-related startup called Spot.us — noted when NewsTilt’s closure was first reported earlier this year, technology won’t necessarily solve what is essentially a social problem in the media industry. As he puts it: “I think… the folks at NewsTilt put too much emphasis on their tech-wizardry and the idea that they would build tools for journalist and all of a sudden POOF – journalism would be solved.”

Unfortunately, as Cohn points out, there is no magic bullet that will suddenly save the media industry, or transform ordinary journalists into independent-thinking online media businesses. And as NewsTilt discovered, there is also no amount of funding or technical wizardry that can replace a passion for the problem you are trying to solve. The most positive thing to come from Biggar’s analysis is that at least he failed quickly.

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Alex Proimos

Lars Hinrichs, who founded the European social network Xing and sold his stake in the company to German media giant Hubert Burda Media last year for $57 million, has launched a new startup fund/incubator called HackFwd in partnership with several members of the European startup community. The fund describes itself as a “pre-seed investment company,” which Hinrichs says has the ability to give startups the connections and resources they need to get to the next level. But doing so comes with a hefty price: In return for its initial investment, HackFwd asks for 27 percent of a startup’s equity.

This sparked some critical reaction on startup-focused discussion forums such as Hacker News, which is associated with Paul Graham’s Y Combinator — a startup incubator similar to HackFwd. Y Combinator takes anywhere from 2 to 10 percent of a startup’s equity, although companies are only in the program for three months. TechStars, another pre-seed startup fund, takes between 6 and 10 percent. Hinrichs said in email that the 27 percent stake was justified for a number of reasons, including:

• We give much more money than ycombinator. It’s a commitment for one year instead of 3 month. If you do [the] math it’s the same as ycombinator.
• We have highly specialized human resources available for the startups… together with the board, we offer knowledge you can’t buy to get you faster to success.
• Since we are also marketing the companies through our plattform we assume for those companies who actually need more funding, that we can [offer] better and more lucrative terms for round 2.
• We are looking for companies who just make good revenues and will be shortly cashflow positive and who actually don’t want another round.

Hinrichs said the fund markets itself as paying the salary of a founder because that’s what keeps many European entrepreneurs from starting new companies. “We bring people into entrepreneurship [those] who wouldn’t do it if this offer doesn’t exist,” he said, adding that he and his partners “tested this with over 40 geeks from around the world and got positive feedback.” He added that the European startup community is different than that of the U.S., where there is a lot more competition for funding. “We are benefiting from market inefficiencies and the growing funding gap” in Europe, he said.

The partners behind the fund include the former head of European recruiting for Google, a former global business analyst with UBS Wealth Management in Zurich, the former CEO of Burda Digital and the creator of OpenOffice. HackFwd’s site has a PDF that outlines what founders get in return for an investment from the fund, a prototype of a contract called “the Geek Agreement” with explanatory notes, as well as a “dilution calculator” founders can use. There is also an amusing diagram of the average startup’s decision tree and a humorous video introduction with a voiceover by British actor and comedian — and celebrity Twitter user — Stephen Fry (embedded below).

The document describing what HackFwd offers says that the fund promises to move quickly when a startup gets referred to the group (startups can’t apply, but must be contacted by someone associated with the fund). HackFwd says that after filling out a “business model framework” documents, a startup may be asked for a formal interview; if so, the fund commits to “give you a clear answer within 72 hours of that meeting.” It also promises to handle all the legal and administrative duties required, and to help market the startup through its network.

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These redesign is part of a network-wide overhaul — NewTeeVee will soon get a facelift as well — meant to surface content from our various blogs for your reading pleasure. Speaking of reading recommendations, here are some of the best pieces worth your attention.

Cody Willard: Cars, PCs and transistors– how to trade off a repetitive history of industry cycles. Willard, one of my favorite stock gurus, makes an interesting link between the ever-shrinking number of car makers and PC companies.

Di-Ann Eisnor: Why the Future of Location-Based Advertising Looks Like Twitter. If you want to understand the challenges of the mobile advertising marketplace, look no further than this in-depth essay by the CEO of recently shuttered Platial.

Startup Company Lawyer: A comparison of various different series of seed financing documents, including those from popular startup schools such as Y Combinator and TechStars.

Social Media Kills the Database: A new web startup guy laments the relational database and how companies of his generation are looking to open source software such as Hbase and Hadoop to break the tyranny of the relational database. It is a remarkably coherent and easy-to-understand essay and worth reading.

Paul Kedrosky: Hitchhiker’s Guide to Financial Regulation.

The panel, which featured Paul Graham from Y Combinator, David Cohen from TechStars, Naval Ravikant co-founder of Venture Hacks and Josh Baer from Austin’s Capital Factory, offered much of the expected commentary on how the ability to build cheap startups has changed the funding and entrepreneurial landscape. We at GigaOM have covered that, even the debate on whether you need to found your startup in the Valley (answer: if you want venture capital you have to go to the Valley), so what was most interesting was how narrow the definition of entrepreneur was for these programs.

Someone on the panel tried to make a point about how not all startup entrepreneurs are young, but then backed off of that when Cohen said the median age of a TechStars participant was 27 — ditto for those in Y Combinator. When an audience member asked why the programs didn’t accept older entrepreneurs, the consensus onstage was that it’s much more difficult to find two founders who are older, ready to pull up stakes and move to a new place to risk it all on building a company. And no one wanted to back an entrepreneur without a co-founder.

This makes sense in some ways. Investing in startups is risky, and all investors look for ways to mitigate those risks. Forcing folks to have a founder is simply part of that risk-mitigation formula, although it tends to force out older entrepreneurs. It’s also a reason why Valley companies tend to do better — they can find capital because they’re closer to their investors, eliminating travel and risk for their backers. So this brings me to the other elephant in the room, or rather the one that wasn’t in the room.

There were very few women — one in 10 would be a stretch. One actually asked about the lack of women in the programs, prompting Baer to note that of the 15 startups that Capital Factory has worked with, five of them had women as co-founders. And TechStars tweeted that a mere 11 percent of its founders are women (I have yet to hear from anyone from Y Combinator). But instead of wondering where the women are, or say you wish they were more (as a few panelists did), why not ask what is it about these programs that either make it difficult for them to accept women or make women not even bother to apply (or show up for panels on the topic?)?

I’ve put forth some ideas as to why there are so few women tech entrepreneurs, as have others. Do female entrepreneurs not get into these programs because they don’t fit the formula? Then we need to be talking about the risks to a startup’s success that women pose — we need to bring that into the open. If that’s not it, then we need to figure out why women aren’t in these programs. Are they not applying in equal numbers? My hunch is they don’t.

Doesn’t that mean we need to figure out why? Are there not enough of them? What opportunities are being denied to women, and more importantly, what are the ideas and businesses that venture firms lose out on? I welcome your thoughts and comments.

For the GigaOM network’s complete SXSW coverage, check out this round-up.

Late December, Imran Ghory offered a similar analysis for Y Combinator, a start-up school and investment program co-founded by Paul Graham. According to Ghory’s data, over the years, Y Combinator had seen 14 acquisitions, 33 had failed and 82 were still active, of which 24 had raised more outside capital. Reddit (acquired by Conde Nast) was one of the early stars of the Y Combinator program. My two favorite Y Combinator alumni are Dropbox and Xobni.

Update: On his Hacker News site, Paul Graham says that Ghory’s data is incorrect.

According to our (YCombintor) data, 98/145 or 67.6% of companies we funded in s2009 or before are funded and/or profitable and/or acquired. We don’t focus on that number, though (I had to write code to calculate it) because the big returns in startup investing often come from outliers that look very risky at first.

Related: Notes from a conversation with Paul Graham & Found/Read Interview with Paul Graham.

Whatever the motivation, I’m not alone. The gift card business has nearly quintupled since 1999, to stand at some $100 billion. According to credit card-processing firm First Data, sales of merchant-branded gift cards were up 2.1 percent during the most recent (and economically challenging) holiday season. But along with the growth in the number of gift cards being purchased has come a unique problem: More and more people are forgetting to use them. According to some estimates, nearly $5 billion worth of cards go unclaimed every year.

In my case, I simply ignore some of these cards that I receive, mostly because they represent brands that don’t measure up to my sensibilities. Pottery Barn, The Gap and Macy’s are among the brands found in my unused gift card collection. I’ve often thought how great it would be if I could swap them for cards from retailers that I do patronize, like Amazon or iTunes.

Anson Tsai and Tim Wong had the same thought, and to that end have created Cardpool, a San Francisco-based startup that offers a platform to buy or sell (and eventually trade) unused gift cards. This tiny little company has raised about $130,000 in angel funding from the likes of Mitch Kapor and Y Combinator. Tsai’s MIT classmate and close friend, Xobni co-founder Adam Smith, is another angel investor in the company that launched last week.

“If you look at it, many of the systems in the financial industry are totally broken and consumers are the ones who are taken advantage of,” Tsai said. “Gift cards are a broken industry.” It is said nearly $30 billion in gift cards have gone unclaimed over the years.

Tsai plan for generating revenue for Cardpool involves building a black box that marries gift card trade data (buying and selling information) with machine learning and analytics and using the system to make money off the arbitrage. The problem is that in order to do that, the company needs to have very high trading volume on its platform.

And there is also a very crowded marketplace to consider. Several small startups, such as Gift Card Rescue, Rackup, Swap A Gift, Plastic Jungle and Gift Card Buy Back are also looking to profit off the unused gift card market.  Frankly, it’s hard for me to tell one service from another as they’re all remarkably similar.

Tsai believes that the sheer simplicity of his service is what’s going to help Cardpool stand out amongst the sea of competitors. He’s also confident that the automated back end is going to help the company get a leg up. That said, Tsai and Wong clearly have their work cut out for them.

They are going to have to figure out a way to get more users to their platform. For now, the early signs are encouraging — Cardpool saw about 100 transactions in its first week. If they can grow that number to a few thousand transactions a day, they might have a big enough business.

Last week, when I met with Tim Brown, chief executive officer of IDEO, the Palo Alto-based design powerhouse, we marveled at Mint, the finance startup that was recently acquired by Intuit for a whopping $170 million. We talked about why it was a breath of fresh air because it removed the complexity surrounding financial services, cheating the system, in a way, in order to make consumers’ lives a little bit easier. In other words, Tsai and Wong are right that this act of simplifying and demystifying financial services is a wide-open opportunity –- one that is ripe for the taking.

Given that I was on stage, it was hard to take notes. Nevertheless, I have re-constructed the conversation from memory, some of my own notes and with the help of tweets being sent out by the audience members. Only the comments that appear in parenthesis can be attributed to Paul, while rest is paraphrased. Some folks on Twitter are misconstruing these notes as an interview, which it is not. I hope I have made myself abundantly clear.

What should entrepreneurs think about to start company?

Think about finding the right co-founder. He compared co-founder of your company to location to your real estate property because once you buy your property, you’re stuck with the location. And similarly you can’t morph your co-founder. “The (startup) idea does not matter as much as having the right co-founder.”

What makes a startup successful?

Success of a start up is dependent upon whether co-founders want it enough.
People tend to over emphasize the brilliance of idea. For any successful start up idea, you can find 20 bitter losers who say “I had that idea 20 years ago.” This shows you that it’s the people, not really the idea that matter. “The most important thing is to be DETERMINED. Measure of determination is not quitting and not giving up.”

What is the biggest challenge for early stage startup?

The enemy is the “back button.” Once people leave they don’t come back. In order to get people to return and install your product or a service, “You got to understand what people need.” And you do that by finding out what people need, what you need need.You’ve got to create something that a real person needs.

Is starting a company easy these days?

The startups are cheap in the beginning, considering that founders don’t have to pay them selves. And everything you need to do a start up you already have. Computer, internet, and you can buy server per usage. So it doesn’t really cost anything more to do a start up than ordinary life.

What is the right time to start looking for money?

You should only start looking for money when you can convince investors to give it to you. In fact, raise money when you don’t particularly need it and not because you are broke.

Do you feel some start ups don’t think big enough?

Some startups don’t think big enough, while some do. Paul in an email later clarified:

“The point there was that I ask founders what huge thing is what you have now version 1 of?”  and a good way to come up with answers to that is to imagine themselves being interviewed 10 years from now when they are big successes, and telling the story of how they did it.  E.g. “The first thing we made was x, and then we expanded into y, and then we tried z, and that really took off.”  That implies the next thing to try after x is y.”

explained that he asks founders about “what huge thing is that you now have version one of?” One way of finding an answer to that question is to imagine themselves being interviewed 10 years from now when they are big successes, and telling the story of how they got there. In other words, “the first thing we made was x, and then we expanded into y and then we tried z, and that really took off.”

The following question was from the audience: What do you think about other incubators such as Techstars?

I checked with Paul and this is how he remembers it. “Partly annoyed, like JK Rowling would feel if someone wrote a
book about a boy wizard called Henry Porter.  But one good thing about them is that they tell us when we make mistakes.  If it weren’t for them, we’d be less likely to know if we turned down someone good.”

Slightly annoyed. It is like how JK Rowling would feel if someone wrote book called Henry Potter. One use is that it tells us when we have made mistakes and passed on good applicants. So if it was not for other incubators,  Y Combinator would never know that they turned down successful start up.

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The numbers are primarily estimates based on publicly available reports, DFC’s David Cole told me, and are decidedly on the “very conservative” side. The wide revenue spreads reflect the fact that 2008 earnings are still being counted, though more exact numbers are promised in the firm’s Feb. 16 report. “We indicate ranges because these numbers are estimates for 2008 based on where we think these products will end up,” said Cole. However, when the final numbers are reported, the rankings below should remain the same, though “maybe a slot here or there” will change.

While no one will be shocked by World of Warcraft’s heavy earnings, Cole believes the Asian MMOs, which are developed at far lower budgets, have a higher profit margin. “Profit margin on Asian games is incredibly high,” he told me. That’s true even though most of the Asian MMOs charge the equivalent of 5-6 cents an hour with usage cards, Cole noted, a model that has yet to be widely adopted by Western developers.

Speaking of which, it’s notable that the bottom of the top 10 is where the big budget MMORPGs in the World of Warcraft vein — LOTRO, Conan, and Warhammer — reside. (All below the no-frills Runescape, which we wrote about last July.)

1. World of Warcraft, launched 2004
Genre/Platform: Western MMORPG; client install with 3D graphics
Revenue sources: Monthly subscription, retails sales, prepaid cards (in Asia)
DFC estimated 2008 revenue: $500 million-plus

2. Fantasy Westward Journey, launched 2004
Genre/Platform: Asian MMORPG, client install with 2.5D graphics
Revenue sources: Prepaid cards
DFC estimated 2008 revenue: $150-$500 million

3. Maple Story, launched 2003
Genre/Platform: Asian MMORPG for kids, client install with 2D graphics
Revenue sources: Microtransactions, prepaid cards, international licensing
DFC estimated 2008 revenue: $150-$500 million

4. Shanda (company, includes Legend of Mir and World of Legend series), launched 2003
Genre/Platform: Asian MMORPG, client install with 2.5 graphics
Revenue sources: Prepaid cards, virtual item sales, freemium subscriptions
DFC estimated 2008 revenue: $150-$500 million

5. Lineage I and Lineage II , launched 1998 and 2003
Genre/Platform: Asian MMORPG, client install with 2.5 graphics (Lineage) and 3D graphics (Lineage II)
Revenue sources: Subscription, prepaid cards
DFC estimated 2008 revenue: $150-$500 million

6. Runescape
Genre/Platform: Western MMORPG for kids, web-based with 2.5D graphics
Revenue sources: Premium subscription, prepaid cards, real-world advertising
DFC estimated 2008 revenue: $50-$150 million

7. Club Penguin, launched 2006
Genre/Platform: Virtual world for kids, web-based 2.5D graphics
Revenue sources: Premium subscriptions, prepaid game cards
DFC estimated 2008 revenue: $50-$150 million

8. Lord of the Ring Online
Genre/Platform: Western MMORPG, client install with 3D graphics
Revenue sources: Subscription, retail sales
DFC estimated 2008 revenue: $50-$150 million

9. Warhammer Online
Genre/Platform: Western MMORPG, client install with 3D graphics
Revenue sources: Subscription, retail sales
DFC estimated 2008 revenue: $50-$150 million

10. Age of Conan
Genre/Platform: Western MMORPG, client install with 3D graphics
Revenue sources: Subscription, retail sales
DFC estimated 2008 revenue: $50-$150 million

The most popular MMO among this 10, in terms of active players? That requires more speculation, but it’s almost certainly not World of Warcraft. Cole points out that Fantasy Westward Journey registered an astounding 2-3 million concurrent players last August. Though Warcraft now boasts some 11 million+ subscribers, “You’re lucky to get 5-10 percent [of them] playing at the same time,” he said. Maple Story developer Minho Kim told me last December that his MMO has 87+ million registrations, but wouldn’t specify how many of them were monthly active users. DFC’s Joost van Dreunen estimates it to be 15-20 percent of that figure — i.e., 13-17.4 million regular Maple Story players.

Conan and Warhammer were released in 2008, but otherwise, Cole says the rest of the list is fairly similar to that of 2007. That will probably remain true this year, though watch for hotly anticipated MMOs like Free Realms and Lego Universe to make a concerted effort to crack the top 10.

Image credit: www.maplestory.com

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• Report: Monetizing Digital Content
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast

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.

4. Mr. Glad-Hand Palm-Presser. This might be taken as good or bad news, but no one fit this description here.

5. The All-Academic. Took copious notes of everything said, multi-tasked by updating the blog and googled relevantly real time. He pees on his own ideas and just needs to dumb down a lil like speaker #5 and speaker #6.

6. Mr. Moonlighter. Works corporate job but fantasizes about jumping ship. Committing to 6 hours on a sunny Saturday is as close to fully immersed in start-up culture as he’ll ever be.

7. Mr. Ohio in The Hood! From middle America and spooged when David Hansson

from 37Signals gave his 2000/$40/12 months 1,000,000 formula. Avoided the entrepreneur rock piles that collected outside by the pizza tables and somehow met the three other Ohio State Buckeyes in the room

8. The Aberration(s). One really hot girl. One guy over 60. One Chinese restaurant owner. One person who brought their schnauzer. I miss Baxter.

9. Mr. Multiple Question Asker. From one of the two audience microphones, they’ll make statements, ask four part questions and generally bully as much as possible.

10. The Jeff Bezos Coat Tail Rider. Somehow got Bezos to pitch his

Animoto.com offering of pics + video app that mixes audio. After Jeff’s four slide power point, am sure Mr Coat Tailer, a.k.a. Brad Jefferson, is

knee deep in term sheets.

Larry Chiang is the founder of duck9 and a frequent contributor to Found|READ. His earlier posts include: 9 Techniques For Closing a Deal via Voicemail, How to Work The Room; 8 Tips On How to Get Mentored ; and 9 VCs You’re Gonna Want To Avoid, 9 Things Stanford B-School Won’t Teach You and most recently, How to Build Good Credit for Your Business.

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• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• A 2011 Connected Consumer Forecast
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast

More than a decade ago, for my first startup, I was fortunate to have found a successful but semi-retired former VC as a Board member and a mentor. As I learned more about his background, I discovered that my low-key friend was actually quite famous and had made seed investments in Sun Microsystems and a few other pioneer semiconductor and networking companies in the late-70’s to late-80’s.

One day I asked him how he managed to find these choice companies, almost all of which had become the pillars of Silicon Valley. He smiled and said, “We were lucky”.

I believed him. Many successful entrepreneurs and investors were successful because they were at the right place at the right time. It helps too that when the right opportunity presented itself, they also had the right skills, right experience, right circle of acquaintances and the right financial resources.

So I constantly ask myself, “What made him so lucky in the past?”

And more importantly, “Would I ever be so lucky in the future?”

I was 15 years old when I immigrated to San Francisco. Back in those days (early 70’s), the dominant retail outlet was Sears Roebuck, which sat high on the hill on Masonic and Geary. I remembered every Wednesday, Sears would take out a full-center-page ad on the Chronicle, advertising all the items that would go on sales the coming Sunday.

And that was how people consumed. If my dad needed a new circular saw, he would wait for the Sunday sales. And if he had bought the tool a week earlier at regular price or if he had missed the sales by one day, that was just too bad. And if he had brought it home and didn’t like it, that was also too bad (unless it was defective which never happened since everything were over-designed and were made in America).

Today, the same store is occupied by an Office Depot and a Best Buy, both struggle to compete with Costco (which is only two miles away and has more parking). Today, if I need anything, I would search online, read all the reviews, and check to see if they are available from Costco. If they are not, then I check Best Buy, and so on.

The point is that I can buy anything anywhere at any time. If the item goes on sale the next week, I can bring the receipt back to the store and be refunded the difference. If I don’t like the item after using it, I can get my money back with no question asked. If I throw away the original packing material, it is not a problem. If I have lost the receipt, it is also not a problem. They would gladly look up my membership number and would know immediately when and where I had bought the item.

The point is that this dramatic change of consumer pattern over the last thirty-five years was completely enabled by technology. As an investor, my VC friend was lucky because he was presented with ample opportunities to invest in an unlimited number of innovative companies, each of which was to invent one particular building block for the emerging infrastructure. All he had to do was to trust his instinct in picking the right team and mitigate his risk by spreading the investment around.

So that was his luck. Where is mine?

I believe the trend hasn’t stop. The trend continues and is in fact accelerating. But instead of making the distribution channel more efficient for hard goods and making it easier for the consumers to spend discretionary money, we are now making the distribution channel more efficient for information and entertainment.

When I first came to United States, we didn’t have cable, we didn’t have satellite, we didn’t even have VCR or DVD (although we had a one-button remote). Instead we had a choice between VHF and UHF. For all practical purpose, we had only three TV channels. Ironically, this was called broadcasting even though the channels through which information was distributed were indeed very narrow.

But the idea was that since the distribution channels for information were so few and so limited, they had to “cast” the information to a broad base of audience in order to make money. So there were no customization and no targeting. Information and entertainment were created for the consumption of a mass audience and no one had any choice but to cater to the least common denominator.

Today we have the opposite; we have narrowcasting. With always-on Internet, search engines, peer reviewed aggregation portals and social medium sites of all variety, we have lots of channels (ironically “a series of tubes”). And it is possible for each of us to “cast” specific information to a very narrow niche of consumers and still make money.

So now the burden is not in gaining physical access into the channels, but rather in delivering information and entertainment that is both relevant and authentic to our target audience. Otherwise consumers would do the equivalent of channel “flipping” (with another one-button remote called the mouse), except now the choice is not between three channels, but perhaps between three million channels.

Last Friday, I wrote an article giving advice to the summer class of aspiring YC’ers. This week, the YC selections have been made and obviously lots of good candidates were selected and lots more were not.

So the question is what do you do next? If you were selected, what you do next is obvious and has already been prescribed by PG (or is it O.G.?). But if you didn’t get selected, then my guess is that most of you would continue anyway and chances are that you would be successful in spite of this minor setback.

Having had my shares of rejections as a struggling entrepreneur, I believe most of you would be wondering right now what you might have missed since you weren’t given a chance to be a member of the YC community.

So let’s have a discussion on what YC is. Because if you don’t know what YC is, then you wouldn’t know what you are missing. And if you don’t know what you are missing, then you wouldn’t know where else to look for the same support and benefits.

Interestingly, there has been lots of discussion among the YC’er on what YC is and whether or not it can be emulated, replicated, or extended into a different context.

YC is micro-loan program. Now don’t get me wrong. Everyone agrees that YC is not a VC and the value that it provides goes way beyond money (which by the way is very small amount of money if not a micro amount of money).

The point of this article is not to get into yet another argument about YC versus micro-loan. Although for your entertainment, I would submit the following, which is the mission statement of the Microloan Foundation:

“We provide … basic business training and continuing guidance … enables them to develop self-sustainable livelihoods …”

So in some respects, YC is a combination of a peer-support group, a boot camp, a finishing school, a spiritual guru, a den mother, a personal trainer, a career counselor, a dating service (for future investors), a therapist and a one-use ATM card. It is a glorious concept and I wish all of us struggling entrepreneurs were provided with such an opportunity.

But not having it does not mean that you cannot succeed because having it could not have prevented failure.

And that’s not even the true genius of YC.

To understand the true genius, we need to go back to the trend.

In summary, narrowcasting is the new trend. We can now deliver specialized products and services (i.e., information and entertainment) very efficiently and very cost-effectively to a small, well-targeted population and can make lots of money doing it.

The genius of YC is to understand that superimposing on this trend is another trend, which is that we are in the midst of a great intergeneration transfer of wealth (among the middle class), a wide spread phenomenon that has never been seen in the Western world.

I am not going to make the same mistake that Hillary had made when she spoke at her daughter’s graduation which is to say something to the effect that, “you young folks have it easy”. No, not at all. I don’t believe that for a minute.

But I do believe that the younger generation have more resources and have more financial support from their parents and their grandparents than we did. And I do believe that the younger generation has more discretional spending power and at an earlier age than their predecessors. But at the same time, they are inundated with demands on their time and attention span so their need more tools and more filters, not less.

So in a nutshell, by natural selection and by design, the YC’ers are younger and are representatives of their own generation and their need is a harbinger of what’s to come in terms of evolving consumer behaviors.

Understanding these two synergistic trends, one on distribution and one on consumption, is where opportunity begins. And I believe the YC’ers are in fact “at the right place at the right time” and could reap potential financial successes far greater than those of my VC friend of the last generation.

Therefore the true genius of YC is how it empowers and how it provides a nurturing environment for the young entrepreneurs who are both top-notch technologists and the perfect “surrogate” consumer for their own invention.

In the old days, we would take a bunch of money from the VC’s, build a product, and when it is ready, launch and see “if the dogs would eat the dog food”. Today there is no need to do that.

By being both the entrepreneurs who invent the product and the customers who consume the product, this new generation of “entre-sumers” are themselves the alpha “dogs”. And if they execute properly, there would be plenty more beta dogs from their generation who would follow.

So this is in fact like the lion looking for courage or the tin man looking for a missing heart. If you have been selected by YC, they would have given you the gift that you already have. If you didn’t get selected, it is now up to you to find validation elsewhere.

But every validation along the journey is temporary, even one from YC. In the end, the only permanent validation is if the other dogs are in fact eating your dog food.

So if you didn’t get selected by YC, it is now up to you to seek the gift that you would have received which is that as an entrepreneur and a consumer, you have within your grasp the synergy of the two that would put you in the right place at the right time.

Now that the YC summer contest is over, you should take the weekend off. Enjoy it with your friends and family but by Sunday night, it is time to get back on the proverbial bike again and peddle like hell.

In summary, whatever you do, don’t get stuck in time. No one needs permission to start a startup, not even from YC. It is time to make your dream a reality. There are no more weekly sales at Sears. In fact, there is no more Sears, at least not on Masonic and Geary.

Good luck!

Denny Miu is a cofounder and former CEO of Gigamon Systems. He has extensive experience in developing technology, products and business relationships. Denny has also been a Professor, an engineer, an entrepreneur, a team leader as well as an individual contributor. His previous post for Found|READ was Calling YCombinators: Lessons from a “Serial First-Timer”

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• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
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So I am a hybrid. As such, I do have a few lessons that I can share which I have been writing up as a book, entitled “Survival Guide for Bootstrapping Entrepreneurs”. I have finished five of the planned ten chapters and I have posted them online on my blog, StartupForLess.org.

10. Why Startups Fail and Why Gigamon Should’ve Too

9. How to Turn Your VC into Your Worst Enemy

8. What I Learned From My Dad Who Taught Me How To Ride A Bicycle

7. Make Money Then Make Meaning

6. Team Building versus Bread Making

Given that Tuesday was the deadline for applying YCombinator summer funding, I imagine right now there must be at least a few hundred aspiring entrepreneurs (founders and cofounders) waiting to jump in with both feet. At the risk of being presumptuous, I’ve distilled my lessons-learned into the following three points and offer them to the contestants of the YC contest with my best wishes.

Remember: There are no losers in entrepreneurship except those who stop trying.

A. Entrepreneurship is a Responsibility

Entrepreneurs have a responsibility to focus on making money.

Entrepreneurship is about the “new” violently overthrowing the “old” and it is not an abstract exercise. In doing what we do and asking others to follow, entrepreneurs affect people’s life and the life of their families. And we affect them profoundly.

I have learned that building a successful startup requires the perfect alignment of many people’s diverse interests and desires. To succeed, we must figure out what rocks our hearts, our minds and our souls, providing our constituents with what they need and what they want.

People are driven by many things: money, fame, power and destiny.

But as the company grows and as more and more people are brought together, I have learned that the only thing that everyone has in common would be money. So my experience is that from the beginning, as an entrepreneur, we must focus entirely on making money. Doing otherwise would be irresponsible.

B. The Times They Are a-Changin’

Being an entrepreneur means you don’t give up which also means that you are bound to try to solve the same problem over and over again, albeit with more experience, and expect different results.

So the one thing that you have to keep in mind is that in time everything changes and it could change even between the time you put together the team and the time you receive initial funding (from YC or anyone else), or between the time you execute and the time you ship products.

My experience is that peripheral vision is as important as vision and you have to learn to make adjustment as reality presents itself.

In other words, to be successful as an entrepreneur, you need both a compass (which reacts to external stimulus) and an inertia guidance system (which is inside your heart but very important in guiding you through the dark clouds).

In my last startup, it turns out that being our own “surrogate” customer was the most important ingredient for our success.

My fellow co-Founders had worked in the network monitoring side of the networking business for many years. They knew about their customers’ pain first hand because as a monitoring tool vendor, they knew how hard it was to deploy their own products. So in a sense, they were frustrated that their ecosystem was disjointed and the product that they invented had been their dream tool.

Had they not been long-time veterans of their own industry (which they help built in the past 20 years), they couldn’t have gotten that important insight by just talking to our customers. Customers know what to object when you present them with an imperfect product but not when you present them with a perfect PowerPoint.

Henry Ford had said that if he were to listen to his customers, he would have built a faster horse because that was what his customers wanted.

To put it in more modern context, it is sort of like Steve Jobs and his iPod (and iPhone). It is hard to imagine how things could have become what they are had Steve not been a music fanatic (not just a fanatic). Steve didn’t rely solely on his customers neither to define his dream toy. Instead he listened to his heart because he believes he was the perfect surrogate customer.

And that was what we did. We listened to our hearts (even though we were just a bunch of engineers).

In a way, this explains why the demographics of YC’er tend to be younger (at least much younger than me). Part of that is self-selection but part of that is by design. I believe time is a-changin’ and we are in the midst of a great intergenerational transfer of wealth. My kids clearly have much more resources than I did when I was a college student, not just because of the resources that I can provide but also from their grandparents.

This combines with the dramatic improvement in channel efficiency (for information, as opposed to for hard goods which was for the last twenty years) really change the consumer pattern of the younger generation. So my generation of entrepreneurs would be a far less optimal “surrogate” customer of the new era.

It is now your turn … having miss the opportunity to invent Ethernet and desktop computing, you can start inventing the next Facebook or the next YouTube.

But being young often means being inexperience.

C. Inexperience is not a Sin

Experience really matters in a startup.

However, as it turns out, experience is important but judgment is too, and everyone can be a victim of his/her experience (which ironically could often cloud their judgment). Much of a startup’s success and much of the difference that an entrepreneur can bring to a startup have to do with his/her ability to make the right decision (at the right time).

In a startup, it is actually not about making the right decision but about making the decision right. So being a successful entrepreneur requires experience but it also requires good judgment.

And good judgment has to do with when and how to build up creditability with the team and the shareholders, and when and how to cash in your political “earned” capital to mobilize the company behind an unpopular decision that you have made based on imperfect data.

In summary, experience is necessary for a startup but not sufficient. On the other hand, paradoxically, as I have learned the hard way, as an entrepreneur, having a strong will to succeed and the tenacity to follow through on difficult decision is sufficient but not enough.

You need a little of both (and a whole lot of luck, with the definition of luck being the complete absence of bad luck).

Good luck to all you First-Timers and Serial First-Timers!

Denny Miu is a cofounder and former CEO of Gigamon Systems. Denny has extensive experience in developing technology, products and business relationships. He has been a Professor, an engineer, an entrepreneur, a team leader as well as an individual contributor.

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era

RescueTime is coming up on the end of our formal YCombinator experience, and I thought it would be interesting to reflect on the things we did right and the things we did wrong. It might help future YC aspirants!

For those who aren’t familiar with YC, it’s basically a new kind of funding animal that takes 6% equity in startups that (usually) have barely more than an idea, and generally don’t have a deep background of successful entrepreneurship. In exchange for this, YC offers $15K-$20k in funding (“raman/rent money” as I call it), weekly dinners with Valley luminaries, and a big ol’ Demo Day at the end where you present to hundreds of very motivated investors. Lots more detail is here, and applications for the Summer 08 Session are due by 10pm EST April 2nd (it’s a short app — fill it out!).

I think that applying to YC has been the best decision of my life. A quick word on value: 6% might seem like a lot to give up, as early stage founders, I believe you need to optimize towards your company’s success – not your personal wealth. If YC can improve a startup’s meager chances for greatness by a few percentage points, it’s well worth it. YC’s founder Paul Graham goes into more detail, but in short: I’d rather own 94% of a watermelon than 100% of a grape.

So let me tell you about my unique watermelon…

Things we Did Right:

1. We applied to YCombinator and dove in with both feet. This is the easiest thing (in terms of effort), but boldness is a rare commodity. I’ve been damn impressed with the other YC founders, but they aren’t that much better than many of the great coders I’ve worked with. They’re just bolder.

2. We were different. In a sea of startups that look the same, we stood out. This can prove to be a bit of a liability (see the “Things we Did Wrong” list), but it’s great for social media engagement. No one wants to talk about “me too” startups that clone someone big.

3. We focused entirely on product/market fit. In the frenzy for viral loops and SEO, we quietly chugged away on building something that people LOVED and WANTED TO TALK ABOUT. With that, we’ve seen 7% week over week growth, without a formal viral loop and with no real SEO. Just plain ol’ word of mouth (which is how Google won, by the way). The good news is that we’ve got some great data to indicate that people really want some of the viral/SEO features we have in the pipeline.

4. We didn’t get distracted. It’s easy to focus on salability, hiring, office space, marketing, SEO, funding, etc. All of that stuff gets incredibly easy when you have great product/market fit.

5. We launched. I think we were the first YC company in our session to launch. Our product now is pretty polished and has a nice long (and accelerating) growth curve… Which nips the, “Does anyone want this?” question in the bud. Launching is an admission that your users are smarter about what they want/need than you are. Or at very least, it’s an admission that you have a lot to learn about your users. Dive in!

Things we Did Wrong:

1. We were different (I know, I know– this was in the “Things We Did Right” list!). We were lucky that we had the traction that we did when we talked to investors– it’s resulted in a lot of interest. Without traction/growth I think we would’ve been dead in the water in terms of investment. Most investors chase investment trends (despite the fact that companies like Google and YouTube were lousy looking markets when the early investors got to ‘em). Nowadays, widget companies are hot. Ad networks are hot. Facebook apps are hot. If you’re playing in those markets, you can build on the frenzy. If you aren’t, you have a bit more explaining to do to investors.

2. When talking about RescueTime, we didn’t focus on the BIG play. This doesn’t mean we weren’t thinking about it! Investors care more about how/why you are going to get monstrously big than how you’re going build a solid sustainable business. Because we are a bit of a unique animal, we invested a lot of time making sure that people understood what we were doing and why people liked it. We should’ve invested more time describing how we knew it was a huge and underserved market (it is!). Read Fred Wilson’s “Rule of Thirds” — if you can’t tell a story how you’re going to be in that top third, you need to rewrite your story.

3. We didn’t spend enough time on marketing — or talking about why this product was going to market itself. The most common question neophyte entrepreneurs ask is, “Now that I’ve built it, how do I market it?” If you’re asking that question, I think you need to go back to the drawing board. In low-cost / high-distribution markets that we’re all playing in, you need some combination of SEO-fu, viral loops, and tremendous word of mouth. Alternatively, if you actually have a product that you’re SELLING, you need to have some proof that you can bring in buyers without a sales force… Unless you’re building big/ugly Enterprise software for Fortune 500 companies. If you are…. I don’t envy you.

4. We didn’t talk to investors much before demo day. In a way, this is actually GOOD– investors kill productivity, and not talking to them much allowed us to focus on our product more. That being said, we have noticed some common misunderstandings about our pitch in our piles of investor meetings… We would’ve had a better pitch if we’d tested it a few times before Demo Day (to investors or a similarly critical audience).

Tony Wright is currently the CEO of RescueTime, which he launched in November 2007 via the incubator YCombinator. Earlier, Tony founded a web startup in the recruiting space that was acquired by Jobster in 2006. He also previously build and sold a “15ish-person” web development consultancy. Tony holds a B.S. in Psychology from Washington College. Read more from him at his company blog.

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