Re: [semweb-25] Semantic Web Business Intelligence

Hi Marco & Daniel,

Thanks; that was a good read about Monitor110.  A related blog that will be of interest to everyone I think is Marc Adreesen's seven-part "Guide to startups" (starting at http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_pmarca_guid_1.html).

I went with through two startups in the mid-90s and early 2000s as VP of engineering/ speech tech, one successful in the educational software area and acquired in 1998, and the second not successful with an early incursion into mobile applications (WindowsCE) and services for the corporate training space. 

Some lessons of the second startup are clear (in retrospect of course).  We started in April 2000, right before the market started to crash. I'd summarize our mistakes and misfortunes as four: (i) founders and principals group too large; (ii) two competing technology and product development strategies; (iii) too much money, which enabled mistakes #1 and #2; and (iv) timing (this is a misfortune, not a mistake). In spite of conditions in 2000, we had a great product idea, a target market of decent size, a good business plan, and a great team and managed to get VC funding enough to last for about 18 months.  We developed a cool application and content for mobile language training and had a pilot launch and test with customers that was quite successful and won an award.  But at 8 founders (mistake #1, too many chiefs) our burn rate was too high even while not taking full pay (too high for our geography, New York state, not silicon valley).  Our product development included very effective and efficient extreme programming (a guy who understood the application and also would code 1000s of lines in a week; a lot of it likely throw away, granted), and more traditional iterative waterfall development that would be more suitable for enterprise applications with enterprise-type backing (not a startup that has 18 months to spec., design, code, produce media, test, pilot, release and launch).  To the mix above, I would add also some disconnect between our product team, which included marketing, and the sales strategy.

But in the end a big component of what undid us was timing.  Markets in 2001 and 2002 were not the greatest, right?  And Osama bin Laden was part of it too.  We launched end of August 2001, literally two weeks before 9/11.  I still remember the frustrations of my officemate (our marketing VP) and the sales VP not being able to get any traction for their product announcements and having their sales meetings canceled.  After all, who read PRNewswire in October 2001, or wanted to hear about new product launches then?

-- Nelson

Daniel Tunkelang wrote:

As someone who's had the privilege to be part of a successful startup (Endeca), I see a lot of wisdom in Roger's postmortem. Even if Endeca's vision adapted over time, we were always about business goals that drove our technology innovation, rather than vice versa. Mind you, we always knew and enjoyed the fact that our goals required technology innovation, but I think it's key that we never pursued technology for its own sake and ended up with solutions in search of problems.

Based on what I've seen over the past decade, there are a lot of folks in the NLP and Semantic Web space who put the technology first. That sometimes leads to very cool technology, but I think it usually doesn't work out so well for the folks who create it.

I'd dismiss this observation as common sense if it were more commonly followed.

Daniel

On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 1:15 PM, Marco Neumann <[address removed]> wrote:

Track: Semantic Web Business Intelligence


Hi Meetup,

I just read Roger Ehrenbergs "Monitor110: A Post Mortem" [1] account
of a start up failure here in the city. It is of particular interest
to those in the NLP and Semantic Web business space I believe.

I wonder if we as a Semantic Web community can learn something here
for our own ventures?

BTW, I do start to make plans for a media, ad and business Semantic
Web Meetup in November and welcome any ideas, and of course
suggestions for locations and speakers.

Best,
Marco


[1] http://www.informationarbitrage.com/2008/07/monitor110-a-po.html

Marco Neumann
Your New York Semantic Web Meetup organizer



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