Get Rich or Die Trying

Editor’s note:  Contributor Ashkan Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo, he hosts a show on business and has published books on success.  Follow him on Twitter @ashkan.
“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”
President Calvin Coolidge
Determination is critical to success as overnight successes actually take years to build; indeed, “overnight successes” are a myth.
If a Cat has Nine Lives, How Many Does a Startup Have?
In fact, examples of perseverence include:
-          Pandora was nearly bankrupt; today it’s valued at $1.75 billion.
-          A year ago, OMGPOP was nearly dead.  But one hit led to a $200 million exit to Zynga.
-          Angry Bird’s Rovio staved off bankruptcy to become an IPO candidate.
-          Jeff Bezos was lauded and ridiculed early on, but he ignored the haters to make Amazon one of the most valuable brands in the world.
-          Even a large multinational like FEDEX overcame its share of obstacles, legend has it that founder Fred Smith “won enough hands of blackjack in Las Vegas to help meet a payroll.”
-          And last but not least, Apple came back to become the most valuable company.
You’ve Got Hope!
Comebacks aren’t restricted to sports, they happen in business, too.
But does that mean you should put your head in the sand, charge ahead, ignore the critics and warning signs?
It depends.  After all, when you consider that Fab and Groupon pivoted their way to greatness, it begs the question: how do you determine what advice to take when it comes to sticking to your guns or not?
Let’s Remember the Basics
Humans value success, money, power, respect and fame differently.  But ultimately, while simpler things like health and happiness measure our satisfaction, in business the most common standard for success is some kind of liquidity event.
Options vs. Talk
An advisor once told me that entrepreneurs sometimes think they have options with regards to exits when all they have is talk.  It’s thus important to differentiate interest, intent and action with regards to deal-making.
“Wanna Know What I Think?”
“Many receive advice, only the wise profit from it.”   Publilius Syrus
While the journey is rewarding to the entrepreneur, it’s the outcome that matters to other stakeholders who will tell you what they think, regardless of whether it makes any sense (or you want to hear it) or not.
Advisors, Consultants, Mentors
Advice can be:
-          Practical, Applicable and Realistic OR Impractical, Inapplicable and Unrealistic
-          Sincere OR Self-serving
-          Relevant OR Irrelevant
-          Stuff you know OR Stuff you don’t know
-          True OR False (only over time do you know if was true or false).
Ultimately, some genuinely like to help others (the “missionaries”) and vicariously live the entrepreneurial dream; others don’t generally root for you unless they have skin in the game (the “mercenaries”).  Each group may have something to offer and teach you, but you may have to incentivize them one way or another; to quote John Doerr: “no conflict, no interest”.
To the mercenary the incentive may be equity; to the missionary, it may be an advisor title.
Advice: The Good, Bad and Ugly
Advice can be good, bad and ugly:
-          Good advice is usually Practical, Applicable and Realistic, though sometimes Impractical, Inapplicable and Unrealistic advice may prove useful, too.
-          Bad advice tends to be wrong, though it comes with good intentions.
-          Ugly advice is self-serving, spiteful and envious.
You really need to weed out those who give you ugly advice.
Bad advice can still be helpful in general ways provided you can find ways to apply and adapt it to your reality and business.
Lessons of Advice Giving/Seeking (file under “obvious, but worth stating”)
Advice is a double-edged sword:
More often than not, when people give you advice, you already know it.People don’t listen, so mastering how you communicate and frame advice is important.Memory is selective: people will retain a portion of what you say.Interpretation is subjective: no matter what you mean, people will understand things in a different way.It never hurts to ask and seek advice, as you’re under no obligation to apply it, but if you don’t implement what someone recommends, they may feel slighted.It’s almost more important what people don’t say than what they do say.You have to ask the right questions, and, hmm… you actually have to let the person answer those questions.Just because people appear to not be listening doesn’t mean they’re not, so be careful what you say; they will hold it against you if it backfires (people like scapegoats).Advice is akin to the falling tree in the forest: information is a valuable asset and creativity is a valuable skill, provided they’re put to use.  Increase your social value by being generous with both.You need confidence and diplomacy to ask and receive advice.  You won’t like most of the advice you’re given and people may be offended by what you have to say.
An entrepreneur’s ability to communicate is an undervalued skill.
So What Do You Do?
But it’s what you do with advice that ultimately matters.
The common denominator in successful businesspeople (executives or entrepreneurs) is knowing when to follow your gut, mind and heart – each one is usually saying something different.
Using the data and applying it to your industry and business is paramount.
Be Realistic
How do you quantify and qualify success?  For example, tech is a zero-sum, winner takes all game.  Despite your traction, maybe you’re fighting a losing battle.  Content isn’t, and most content companies take a long time to become big businesses.  If you can stay in the game, maybe that’s not a bad strategy.
While the grass is greener on the other side, pivoting non-stop to chase the latest fad isn’t a strategy either.  Sometimes it’s the macro backdrop: location hasn’t lived up to the hype, video is underwhelming, and online media remains small.
Be Honest With Yourself
Mainly, be honest with yourself.  You’re the man in the arena, after all. If you’re having fun and are passionate about what you do – and can manage the emotions that come with the highs and lows of entrepreneurship – my advice is persevere even if the definition of insanity is doing the same things and expecting a different outcome. Sometimes you don’t need to trade the whole team, you just need to make some mid-game adjustments.  After all, to win the championship, you have to stay in the game and keep it close, for you’re always only a lucky play away from winning.

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Inside The NewMe Accelerator 2012 Startup House [TCTV]

Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco where she is a reporter for TechCrunch TV. Previously she worked for GigaOM, where she reported on startups and Silicon Valley. Earlier, Colleen reported for Mergermarket, an online newswire and subsidiary of the Financial Times focused on M&A. Before that, she was a contributing editor for Electronic News, the semiconductor industry trade newsletter. Colleen... ? Learn More


The NewMe Accelerator, a startup incubator program focused on underrepresented minorities in the tech industry, assembles a select group of tech entrepreneurs from all over the United States every year to participate in its 12-week Silicon Valley accelerator. NewMe is a residential program, meaning that the entrepreneurs all live together in a house for three months to brainstorm and hack on their respective projects — “eating, sleeping and drinking our startups,” as NewMe puts it. Along the way, mentors such as Mitch Kapor, Vivek Wadwha, Ben Horowitz and others stop by the NewMe house to provide advice, insight and inspiration.
Sounds pretty intense, right? So of course, we at TechCrunch TV were keen to check it out. At the moment, NewMe is smack in the middle of its 2012 program, so we made a visit to its house in San Francisco to see how things are shaping up so far.
In a word, being at the NewMe house is invigorating: The environment of eight strong entrepreneurs living together is certainly heady, but in a really good way. Everyone at NewMe is psyched about what they’re working on while also being super encouraging and proud of what their fellow founders have built.
In the video embedded above, you can watch NewMe partner Wayne Sutton talk about how the program has grown in recent years, the challenges that face minority entrepreneurs in tech, and much more. You also get an introduction to NewMe’s Class of 2012, and a brief introduction to some of the 7 companies that are being built inside the accelerator.
For a more in-depth look at the NewMe startups, you can watch each founder’s pitch in the video embedded below.
NewMe’s Class of 2012 startups, in the order in which they appear:
AgLocal
Founded by Naithan Jones, it’s a web and mobile marketplace that connects regular consumers with local farms that supply meat.
Butlr
Founded by Andre Gabriel, it’s a social shopping game that lets you buy real-world items with virtual currency.
PictureMenu
Founded by Christopher Lyons, it brings photo-rich restaurant menus to diners’ smartphones, aiming to eliminate paper menus entirely.
Helpr
Founded by Tendekai Muchenje, it allows users to make customer care inquiries through a social media-enabled web app, rather than through the typical telephone help line.
Kairos
Co-founded by Amanda McClure and Brian Brackeen, it has developed a new way for retail companies to report sales data and point-of-sale analytics using facial recognition and augmented reality technology.
Modul.us
Founded by Rachel Brooks, it is a software platform that enables any e-commerce company to allow their customers to customize and live-render products on the web.
Ubi Video
Founded by James Norman, it is a multi-platform video delivery solution that allows users to watch cross-platform video through one portal, and easily discover new things to watch.

NewMe Accelerator is an accelerator for minority led technology start-ups that houses a handful of visiting start-ups in Silicon Valley. NewMe does not invest in its startups, but rather offers support in the form of community. In 2011, the program supported 8 in-house visiting start-ups (five of which were selected, three of which were chosen by the community). It included weekly dinners and mentorship from industry experts, and concluded with Demo Day.
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Forget Today’s Drama, Dustin Curtis’ Svbtle Is About Pushing Blogging Forward

Eric Eldon is the Editor of TechCrunch. He was previously the cofounder and editor of Inside Network, where he managed publications including Inside Facebook, Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps. Before that, he spent a couple years covering technology and finance at VentureBeat, a leading Silicon Valley publication where he was the first employee. While Inside Network sold... ? Learn More

Widely read designer Dustin Curtis has come up with a new blogging platform called Svbtle, that’s meant to help you take blog posts from ideas to well-presented articles. At first, it looks like a better Tumblr, based on the work he showed off on Thursday. And in fact it looks so good that a couple developers had copied the design within hours, and offered new versions for the world to install.
Which, in turn, sparked a big debate about the rights that creatives have over their work… I’m going to skip over all that because it’s not a new topic, and it misses the point.
Curtis has a plan for this project that ties in the minimalistic admin and public interfaces of the platform with his larger goals as a writer, and possibly as an entrepreneur.
He’s creating an exclusive blog network.
He’s using his clout in design and startup circles to attract other thought leaders who blog, including Dom Leca of the beloved email client Sparrow, and John Collison of payment startup Stripe.
The idea is that the design of the blogging platform should be a vital part of the creative process, that helps some of the best minds in the business refine and present their thoughts. The interface includes a section for brainstorming ideas, and an easy flow for turning them into posts. It removes the array of options, like advanced markup features that you’ll see on WordPress and other established platforms, to focus writers on core ideas.
I got a bit more from Curtis about his plans on Thursday night, before his work got engulfed in a wide-ranging debate in the hacker community.
Svbtle is an experiment. I wrote it for myself; it was only very recently that I decided to build it into more of a platform. My goal is to eventually open it to the public, but I want it to be really good before any kind of official release. Finding only the absolutely essential features that are required for something as complex as blogging takes a lot of work. For something like this, to paraphrase Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the design is finished not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
In the meantime, he’s following a proven strategy for seeding quality.
Until I feel the design and workflows are good enough for a wide release, I’m working on building a private network of extremely well-vetted bloggers. I’m running it with more of a newspaper model than a blogging platform model; I plan to offer copy-editing and other benefits to help improve the writing of members on the Network, for example.
This is key. Lots of professional blogs have little or no copyediting. The network is intended to help writers polish the writing and reading experience, just like the design is.
Because Svbtle is designed from a philosophy that focuses first and foremost on writing and the curation of ideas, and not on social features or personalization, I don’t see much of a chance of competing with Tumblr. I wouldn’t want to, anyway. They’re really good at what they do.
So forget Tumblr. Curtis is trying to scale the type of brand experience that long-time bloggers like Jason Kottke and John Gruber have captured. People who read Daring Fireball aren’t just on the site because they also love Apple stuff. They also identify with the the clean feel, the form-plus-function design principles that Apple embodies, that Gruber writes about.
And, indeed, Kottke.org and Daring Fireball show how Curtis could turn his platform into a business. Both use The Deck, the self-described “ad network of creative, web and design culture.” Its business is running quality, non-intrusive ads alongside the words of thought leaders. Here’s how Curtis responded when I made the comparison:
If the Svbtle Network works as well as I hope, there is nothing stopping me from building an exclusive ad network similar to The Deck. I haven’t really thought about it, but that would almost definitely be the best way to monetize this platform.
Innovation, as many of Curtis’ critics have been proclaiming, is about everybody taking a creator’s work and building on top of it. That’s exactly what Curtis is doing. He didn’t invent the first blog platform, and he isn’t building the first blog network that the world has seen. But he is taking the best elements of all the work that has come before, and building a new brand — the sort of thing that could prove quite defensible regardless of who scrapes the words or copies the design.


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FCC Documents Show Sony Chromebook, Potentially Running On ARM

Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He has written for the TechCrunch network since 2007. Some posts he’d like you to read: The Dangers of Externalizing Knowledge | Generation i | Surveillant Society | Choose Two | Frame Wars | The User’s Manifesto | Our Great Sin His personal website is coldewey.cc. ? Learn More

Google’s Chromebooks haven’t exactly made a splash, but apparently not everyone has been scared off. Sony seems to think there’s gold in them thar laptops, and they’re making their own. For now it’s known as the VCC111 (probably shorthand for “Vaio Chromebook Computer, series one, 11-inch display”), according to documents and pictures from FCC testing.
The understated look continues with these Vaio Chromebooks, even as far as what appears to be a matte black unbranded shell. A white version is also shown in the test setup photos. But the most interesting thing is the processor, which is listed simply as T25, and may in fact be Nvidia’s Tegra 2 chip by that name. An ARM laptop? Hey, if Microsoft can do it, why not Google and Sony?

At 1.2GHz, with 2GB of RAM and a few of the other usual fixings, it isn’t a stunner spec-wise, but that’s kind of the point. It’s a tastefully-designed netbook designed to boot fast and get on the internet. It isn’t an ultrabook or work laptop or what have you. So it should fulfill that purpose admirably, and sell well below $500 to boot.
Release date is unclear, but they filed a confidentiality request for 180 days after August 15, 2011, so this unit has been around for a while — but they probably weren’t planning a release until at least 2012, judging by their request to keep the external photos secret for half a year.
Perhaps they’re waiting for Google I/O? Seems a bit of a long wait to release something that was more or less ready late last year. Hopefully we’ll see an official announcement soon and get our hands on the device for some real-world testing.
[via Laptop Reviews]

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Women, Tech, And Tone

Jon Evans is a novelist, journalist, and software engineer. His novels have been published around the world, translated into several languages, and praised by The Times, The Economist, and the Washington Post. His journalism has appeared in Wired, Reader’s Digest, The Guardian, The Globe & Mail, and The Times of India, and he writes a weekly column for TechCrunch.... ? Learn More

Earlier this week a startup named Geeklist was called out on Twitter for a promotional video which apparently featured a woman dancing around in her underwear. (I say “apparently” because the video has since been made private.) The Geeklist founders acknowledged that this was problematic — and then, inexplicably, they went right off the rails.
Click through that link to see some jawdropping bad judgement; they responded to the woman who complained by Twitter-cc’ing her employer(!) while calling on her to “take it offline” and explaining they “weren’t cool with the angry tone.” While their own haughty tone, of course, was perfectly acceptable…
At which the geekosphere erupted. This will be an interesting test of “no such thing as bad publicity”; I’d never heard of these guys before, and based on the available evidence hopefully never will again, but suddenly they were all over my Twitter feed, in a context of furious condemnation. Best of all was the darkly amusing bug report filed by Coda Hale, which, alas, has since been deleted. Thankfully, somebody managed to screen-shot it.
In the end, Geeklist apologized, more or less. End of story, right? Weird hyperoverreaction, public rage and shaming, concession and apology. Well, if you consider their apology an apology — and a lot of people don’t –

"We apologize as well *if* our handling of the tweets offended anyone"? Whaddya mean, "if", guys?! Classic fauxpology. gklst.tumblr.com/post/197346209…—
Kagan MacTane (@kmactane) March 22, 2012

Repeat after me:
“I’m sorry you were offended” is not an apology. The words you’re looking for are: “I’m sorry I offended you.”—
Faruk Ates (@KuraFire) March 22, 2012

I’m still baffled by why Geeklist’s founders went berserk in the first place. Baffled, but not surprised; a co-founder of a startup I mentioned in a recent TC post responded with a similarly bizarre and erratic (although, to his credit, not actually insulting, so I won’t link to it) Twitter rant. Have these guys never been criticized before? Are they so deluded and entitled that they think the slightest hint of disapproval gives them license to break out the flamethrower? Does everyone out there need online skin-thickening training?
More important, though, is the demonstration that sexism in tech is an ongoing trend rather than an occasional aberration.

Dear tech guys getting called out on sexism: It's not (just) that you need to tweak word choice or reduce nakedness in your ads.—
erin kissane (@kissane) March 22, 2012

It means you need to rethink the toxic culture that made those choices possible.—
erin kissane (@kissane) March 22, 2012

I like to think — in fact, I genuinely believe — that the tech world, despite the fact that socially awkward young men are currently massively overrepresented in its ranks, generally wants to be helpful and welcoming. And believe me, it could be worse; a friend of mine is an NYPD cop, and she reports that the entrenched sexism there makes Silicon Valley seem like Utopia.
But it’s hard to argue that things are getting better. “This industry is one of subtle sexism. I almost prefer outright sexism, because at least that you can point out.” It was especially disheartening to see a claim that the Hacker News community was flagging and downvoting posts about the Geeklist controversy; to quote that discussion, ‘Did you really just say “HNers aren’t ostriches, they just don’t want to talk about sexism”?’
Similarly, I expect comments on this post complaining that it isn’t appropriate for TechCrunch. Unfortunately, subtly but systematically excluding a huge pool of capable people from the tech community is a very large tech problem indeed, and all the ostriching and fauxpologizing in the world won’t help to solve it.
Image credit: Ostrich, by David Lewis, on Flickr.

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6waves Lolapps’ CTO Rue and Chief Product Officer Sethi Step Down

Kim-Mai Cutler is a technology journalist who has worked for Bloomberg, VentureBeat and The Wall Street Journal. Before she joined TechCrunch, she led mobile coverage at Inside Network, a six-person media startup that was acquired by WebMediaBrands in 2011 for $14 million in cash and stock. She specializes in covering gaming, distribution and monetization of mobile applications and venture... ? Learn More

Just a few days after social gaming company 6waves Lolapps said it was laying off most of its development staff to focus on publishing, its chief product officer Arjun Sethi and chief technology officer Brian Rue have stepped down.
6waves Lolapps was born last July out of a merger between a Facebook game developer Lolapps and a publisher 6waves. The publisher had been instrumental to the success of Lolapps’ hit Ravenwood Fair, which was considered one of the best games on the platform in late 2010 and early last year.
Clearly, the merger didn’t work exactly as intended. But with the deal, 6waves Lolapps picked up some valuable technology that helped boost revenue per day from players across the publisher’s network of titles. Sethi said his resignation after more than four years at the company was planned ahead of the layoffs.
“After more than four amazing years with Lolapps, I find it so hard to say goodbye to the team and to the impressive products that we’ve built together,” he said in a statement on his personal blog.
After joining Lolapps as its chief executive, Sethi saw the company transition from simple, very viral quiz apps in the early days of the Facebook platform when distribution was easy to more intensive games like Ravenwood Fair, which was like a mix between Frontierville and a business sim game.
Rue added in his own blog post: “It’s been a crazy ride of ups and downs and it feels very strange that it’s come to an end. I’m proud of the culture that we built, and it was especially evident this week as suddenly-former employees banded together to commiserate and find new companies to call home.
Up until recently, it looked like 6waves Lolapps was going to be a dual publisher and developer. After the two companies merged, they raised about $35 million in funding from Insight Venture Partners and South Korean gaming giant Nexon. Not long after that, the company ponied up to buy a developer in China called Smartron5 and a mobile development team through a deal to buy Escalation Studios.
Sethi hasn’t planned his next move yet. Going forward, 6waves Lolapps will focus on publishing. Its existing titles will continue to work and 6waves Lolapps is looking for a third-party team to service them.
The titles that were still in development including Ravenshire Castle will still come out. Sethi and one of Lolapps’ original co-founders Kavin Stewart will personally fund a spin-off to make that happen.
All in all, the layoffs are just another sign of how challenging the environment is for gaming companies on Facebook. It’s a very bittersweet week that underscores just how fickle the gaming industry week is with OMGPOP’s stellar turnaround and sale to Zynga and 6waves Lolapps’ sad layoffs.

6waves Lolapps is the result of the merger of social gaming companies 6waves and Lolapps. The two companies continue to function independently.
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Pinterest Updates Terms Of Service As It Preps An API And Private Pinboards: More Copyright Friendly

Ingrid is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining February 2012, based out of London. She comes from paidContent.org, where she was a staff writer, and has in the past also written freelance regularly for other publications such as the Financial Times. Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect. When it comes to work, she feels most... ? Learn More

Pinterest is growing up fast: just last week the image-based social network rolled out redesigned profile pages, and now it’s following that up with an updated Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy and Privacy Policy that sharpen how the company interfaces on a number of commercial points, as it rides its wave and rapidly reaches and passes 12 million users.
“We think that the updated Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy, and Privacy Policy are easier to understand and better reflect the direction our company is headed in the future,” CEO Ben Silbermann wrote in an email late on March 23 to Pinterest users informing them of the changes, due to take effect on April 6. From the looks of it, that future direction involves not just more private experiences on Pinterest but also stronger push to get Pinterest working in a whole lot more places, and with a whole lot more partners.
The new terms put a much stronger emphasis on how Pinterest can commercially use the information you post on the site. Specifically, Cold Brew Labs (owner of Pinterest) says it is changing its terms to spell out that Pinterest does not have the right to sell your content — something it says it never intended to do in the first place.
“Our original Terms stated that by posting content to Pinterest you grant Pinterest the right for us to sell your content,” Silbermann writes. “Selling content was never our intention and we removed this from our updated Terms.”
Conversely, users are not allowed to use the site for commercial purposes, either. “We grant you a license to use the Service, including accessing and viewing Pinterest Content, for your personal, noncommercial use to allow you to express yourself, discuss public issues, report on issues of public concern, engage in parody and as expressly permitted by the features of the Service.”
And speaking to all the controversy around the use of copyrighted material that has surrounded how Pinterest users pin copyrighted content — raised by Flickr but also touching rights owners like Getty — the site says it now has “simpler” tools to make it easier to report infringements on copyrighted or trademarked content.
But while it looks like it might be getting easier to report infringements, it appears that it will still be up to Pinterest to approve whatever changes need to take place as a result. Given that at the moment over 80 percent of content is re-pinned rather than original content, it’s not likely that this will be the last we hear of the intersection of Pinterest and content infringements.
The company also gave more indication of what products might be on the horizon. Silbermann writes that across all of its revised terms the company has “added language that will pave the way for new features that include a Pinterest API as well as Private Pinboards.”
The Pinterest API will likely bring more of the functionality of Pinterest out of the site, but also make it easier for users to pin content to Pinterest from other places. But Pinterest content, of course, is already being used on third-party sites, and in some cases for commercial gain by those doing the integration. (We wrote only yesterday about the social marketing company Vitrue, which offers a product to its clients to port Pinterest content to its Facebook brand pages. It’s doing the same with Instagram.)
Another key area of change, and one that Pinterest really had to address as it continues hone its credibility as it continues to grow, is that it is now formally no longer allowing pins that “explicitly encourage self-harm or self-abuse.” Silbermann writes that these revisions were devised partly in response to user feedback — or in his words, “help from our community”. One wonders how much its 80-percent-female user base played a part in this change.

Pinterest is a social networking site with a visually-pleasing “virtual pinboard” interface. Users collect photos and link to products they love, creating their own pinboards and following the pinboards of other people whom they find interesting. The site is currently invite-only, and it has experienced rapid growth in recent months.
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