THE DREAM IN ACTION

Tonight I watch the interview between Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, and Peter Thiel, once PayPal CEO and current Facebook board member.

Thiel is sharp and the interview was great. One of the most interesting questions was, “what is the best startup success predictor?” Thiel’s response:

The lower the CEO salary, the more likely it is to succeed.

The CEO’s salary sets a cap for everyone else.  If it is set at a high level, you end up burning a whole lot more money. It aligns his interest with the equity holders.  But [beyond that], it goes to whether the mission of the company is to build something new or just collect paychecks.

In practice we have found that if you only ask one question, ask that.

Also, Dave McClure’s question, about how the affect of significantly cheaper startup costs are affecting VC investments, was awesome. Dave also asked about startup incubators that are investing less money but giving more guidance and how they are taking away “larger scale” VC deals.

In his response Peter Thiel commented that there are likely many “undiscovered” alternatives to big VC funding. He alluded that he thinks Y-Combo type investment funds will drive a new style or even era in startup funding. These are the kinds of pearls that should make your ears perk up and your mind sharpen around developing new ways to invest or new ways to collect/find investment depending on what side of the investment you are on. Great question Dave.

TechCrunch50 is really a phenomenal event. I watched much of it at the live stream on Ustream.  I am surprised that it is being live streamed as I figured that would devalue the tickets, but I’m glad that it is.

  Many of you like using Friendfeed to aggregate your internet activities and share those activities with friends and followers on the web. Sweetcron (that a came across from Dave McClure’s FF) is very similar to Friendfeed in the sense that it will aggregate any web activity that you decide to share with your Sweetcron, the main difference is that Sweetcron is self hosted like a normal blog. You install the Sweetcron software on your server and host your site like normal. The developers name is Yongfook and he is based in Tokyo. I wasn’t familiar with this developer before but as I watched his explanation of what Sweetcron is he seems awesome, and hilarious!

This is the screen shot of Yongfook’s Sweetcron based site where he pulls in images of twitter comments, links, shared on Digg, things from Facebook, images from Flickr, and more.  Like I said, this is cool, and this guy is awesome.

As Dave McClure said on his blog, 500Hats, about Sweetcron, it is going to be “Fooking huge!”

UPDATE TO POST:

I have now installed Sweetcron on my server and set it up early this morning. It really is awesome. Now folks can get to my Sweetcron Lifestream by clicking the  LIFESTREAM link at the top of my site. Here is a little screen shot of what it looks like!

As I begin to watch the metrics on ActionsTalk.com, knowing how to analyze and react to certain data points is becoming more and more important to me. ActionsTalk recently jumped from 13 to 71 users in a day and I expect as the quality and quantity of content increases those number will continue to skyrocket. Learning about things like the difference or the affect of 1000 registered users vs. 5000 unregistered on a sites monetization strategy is critical for the new start-up founder.

This slide show by Dave McClure was given at Foo Camp put on by Tim O’Reilly last week and offers some incredible insights into what is important for start-ups to measure. Thanks Dave!

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