Yossi Vardi’s top tips for start-up owners – #leweb

Israeli entrepreneur and business leader Yossi Vardi came on stage at Le Web 12 in Paris today to deliver some of his tips. Unfortunately he was a bit rushed out and didn’t have time to finish his presentation. Here are the tips I was to able to pick up as I was listening to him.

[this piece written during a blogging stint for Live.Orange.com]

Yossi Vardi What should start-ups do to succeed?

1- What it takes to succeed?

The most important factor for success is luck. People who are hard-working though are often in the best position for being able to reap the harvest of serendipity. Trying and reaching out to people increases your ability to be lucky, Vardi said.

2 – raising too much money can be toxic

Start-ups which raise too much money want to show their investors that they are using the money and they are often led to burn too much money too early and fail to make a profit

3- right size for team?

Vardi suggests that the optimal size for initiating a start-up is 3. Having only 1 is too hard and above 3 it’s too difficult to get oneself organised.

4 – a mentor is needed

A mentor is needed to help support the team and help them meet the right people Vardi went on.

5 – pivoting

Start-ups have to pivot, i.e. be able to modify the concept so that it adapts to the Market. Pivoting is important but it can also prove that the founders can’t learn from experience if they are pivoting too often. This is a double-edged sword.

6- attracting investors’ attention

Finding an introduction to the right investors is important, this is why networking is key. The is also confirming what we had witnessed in  Silicon Valley last September.

7- exits

There is a debate – in Israel and elsewhere – between experts about whether it’s better to do an early or late exit. When doing exits, one has to remember that one is not selling one’s company to another one, one is selling to an individual Vardi said.

As mentioned above, Yossi Vardi’s presentation was unfortunately interrupted. There a many other recommendations Vardi can deliver to entrepreneurs, we’ll probably have to wait until the 2013 edition of Le Web for us to hear the rest of the presentation and Vardi’s advice.

of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley –#blogbus

On day 4 of our Blogger Bus Tour, we met with Carlos Diaz, the CEO and founder of Kwarter and Guillaume de Cugis, CEO and co-founder of Scoop’it, two French entrepreneurs who left their country in order to take their venture to the next level and … change the world! (this post was originally written for the Live Orange Blog)

Kwarter, how it all started

Kwarter started off with sports. The idea is to use your mobile in order to connect and comment, hangout. There is also a gamification (see my Vlab piece on that subject) angle of using such kinds of applications while watching TV and changing the user experience: the more you engage, the more you get points and also credits and eventually, you are able to redeem your credits to get t-shirts and other freebies.

The start-up decided to tackle sports as their first topic (Fan cake, the first social game to be edited and released by Kwarter is just about that) because “just watching TV isn’t enough anymore. The trend seen in Silicon Valley is to turn each passive experience into an interactive one”. The focus is on American sports only at the moment: American Football, Hockey and Baseball … but it should be a piece of cake (sorry, I couldn’t resist it) to extend it to European preferred games such as football and handball.

[Carlos Diaz, CEO and founder of Kwarter]

Diaz, the founder of Bluekiwi Software, whom I have known for years and I was very happy to see again in San Francisco, started the company in Summer 2011 and did a quick prototype which helped him raise  seed money very quickly. All this is very classic, although many start-uppers tend to forget about it; the name of the game is: prove the concept quickly, put together the technology, build the user engagement model, and find the business model … fast. Things have to go fast in the land of the Gold Rush.

a pivot around the initial business model

“The first idea was to have our own application and build traffic based on our brand. The ten next years will be about Gamification” Carlos Diaz added. In 2011 they Kwarter’s pilot was turned into a platform for other brands because they realised that they had to do this for others, not under their own brand. A few weeks later, they signed a deal with Turner and Bud Light; just that! Turner will kick-start its operation about the Baseball playoff. And we are not talking about small business but “half million dollar deals!”.

Diaz – like many others we saw in Silicon Valley – has managed to make his company pivot around its existing business model and hit the bull’s eye. Well done!

big corporations doing their shopping

“I was really amazed at the way on how large corporations were shopping for innovation in the Valley” Diaz went on. “What we do with Turner will be very disruptive: whatever you do will be displayed on the screen. For instance, as baseball players will be displayed on the screen, an overlay bubble will be shown with comments from Kwarter such as “20% of people believe this player will do a home run!” Baseball fans won’t have to wait for too long for the launch date will be October 5th, 2012.

Twitter (but not Facebook) is paying for TV channels to use its service

“So far we see the Twitter mentions on TV. But Twitter is paying broadcasters for this” Diaz said. “This is why Facebook isn’t seen on TV because Facebook refuses to pay for that kind of display”.

setting up one’s business in the Valley

Is it easy to set up a business here when one comes from Europe? “Sometimes I feel like Silicon Valley is like Disneyland” Diaz explained facetiously. “People are very naïve and they think that building a business is easy but it’s not. Just being turned down in Europe isn’t sufficient to launch a good company in the States” the French entrepreneur added.

“in 1999, Silicon Valley was a boring place!”

De Cugis said that “in 1999 and 2001 Silicon Valley was a very boring place. It all changed with Social Media, when some tech tsars became stars. It took me two years to adapt to the way of doing business here. After six months you realise that if you want to be part of this game, you can’t be part of it because you’re not part of the ecosystem and I started getting very frustrated. Then I realised all this was for real and I adapted to the way I needed to think of this as a real business. One year isn’t enough, it takes two years at least. And partnering is one thing but you need to have a good reason to come here.

living in the Valley is expensive, taxes much higher than France

“This is a difficult move” Diaz went on. “Personal life is very expensive here, even more if you have kids. A house with 2 kids costs $6,000 per month! Taxes are a lot higher than even in France. And this is because life is so expensive that people want to get very fast. This is why people want their projects to take off in such a hurry. People are very focussed on their jobs but they sort of work round the clock and have no vacations. Here there is nothing apart from tech, everyone is in high-tech. Even the salesman from the AT&T shop wants to start his own start-up”.

Scoop’it, from Toulouse to the Valley

Scoopit also went to NYC and hesitated between NYC and Silicon Valley. In NYC, the tech scene is competing with a lot of other things though. “If you go to the local Starbuck’s there, there are few chances that you will bump into a tech entrepreneur” De Cugis explained. “Here it’s a small city, there are only 700,000 inhabitants. You could go to a meet-up every night. And all that happens in Soma, you don’t even need to drive up to Silicon Valley.

setting up your business in Paris is a mistake

Although many would disagree, Diaz declared that “founding your start-up in Paris is a mistake, unless you are into Fashion or if you want to become a leader in your own country. All successful French start-ups (e.g. Meetic, Priceminister,…) aren’t known by anybody here. In order to do something to change the world, to be a game changer, one has to have a large market to start with” Diaz contended.

changing the world is hard

Yet, changing the world is hard… even in the Silicon Valley, and if believing in one’s dreams is important, one needs to avoid pulling the wool over one’s eyes. This, in a nutshell is what I withdrew from that passionate exposé by Carlos and Guillaume.

Start-up of the month : Synthesio describes the 4 types of brands on the web (1/2)

note: many thanks to Synthesio‘s Michelle Chmielewski for her help with the Englsh version of this post

This past July I met up with Loic Moisand, co-founder of the start-up Synthesio with Thibault Hanin, specialised in web monitoring and analysis of social and online mainstream media. They are a great example of a French start-up that has succeeded, in France as well as abroad. I mentioned them previously in two videos filmed with Trey Pennington, who is in charge of Synthesio’s marketing in the US and the UK (video 1 – video 2). This time I wanted to take a moment with Loic in order to find out more about the creation of Synthesio, on one hand,  and about their measurement of influence on the Interneton the other. What I discovered during this interview is a real gem that goes above and beyond a simple market analysis : a very interesting and useful market segmentation that Loic Moisand has created based on his experience in the field that I found to be a fundamental and useful discovery for online marketing experts and branding experts that set their eyes on the web.

I met with Loic in the Cybervillage of Paris at Crimée, the same place where I had met him 1 1/2 years ago ; time enough for the young entrepreneur (28 years old, to be exact) to work hard on developing his start-up. His work has paid off as Synthesio has seen their revenues grow significantly, even if I can’t just yet reveal the exact numbers since the enterprise is private (you’ll just have to trust me when I say – they’re good).

The two Synthesio founders are both graduates of ESSEC (one of Europe’s top business schools), even if Thibault Hanin is the “geek” of the group, having earned his engineering degree beforehand. One worked on the software and the other on case studies, each in their “own little corners” of the school’s campus, according to Loic, before deciding to team up for a bit, just to see. “We worked on a business plan for a month and found that we complimented each other quite nicely”. They were able to raise enough funds rapidly, complete with a student loan, and were off and running. “Our first investors didn’t even look at the details of our businesses plan, they just evaluated who we were and trusted us”. A look at entrepreneurship that is very different from the usual Gaulic jeremiads. “I don’t at all agree with people that say that we can’t invest in France. There are good grants for those that are young innovative enterprise, thanks to the Research Minister,” adds Loic Moisand. Of course the two young entrepreneurs “ate nothing but pasta” for the first year while they developed their offer. But there were numerous surprises…

Business isn’t rational, it’s linked to the entrepreneur’s desires

The story behind Synthesio is interesting in and of itself. Well-positioned today for measuring social media buzz, the start-up began along a completely different route : “We started by creating a sort of Google Alerts,” explains Loic Moisand, but we quickly realized that there was something else going on in social media. Even if we didn’t begin that way”. Founded in 2006, the company took one year to prepare their offer. “I met 400 people, communications directors, research directors, agency directors, etc. during that year” adds Loic Moisand ; and that doesn’t even take into account incidental meetings. Forced to complete an internship abroad for his degree, the entrepreneur chose India for personal reasons, a choice that proved to be incredibly important for what followed in terms of their software operations, which makes the Synthesio co-founder say, “business is not rational and many things are tied to the founders’ desires”. A lesson in humilty and reailty to be taught in business schools, perhaps… “We wanted to visit, have fun, and not make something super French” continues Loic Moisand, and that’s exactly how Synthesio began “with everything in 5 languages from the very start” in order to win – little by little – international accounts that have made a very impressive list of clients: Accor, Orange, Sanofi, Eli Lilly, BNPP, etc. that use Synthesio to measure what is said about them online.

Finding a good brand name

Well-taught  marketers know it all too well : finding a good brand name is a fundamental step. The double-team took it upon themselves to create their own algorithm that spit out original names, and Synthesio came out. The domain name was free, so nothing more than to find a logo, which Loic created, partly Ying-Yang, partly a stylized “S” with “the red representing the human, and the gray, the technology” he clarifies.

25 employees in 3 countries and… 30 languages

Synthesio is comprised of 25 employees today working full-time, plus partners that bring that number up to 35, spread out in 3 countries : France, the UK and the US. “But we have people that work for Synthesio everywhere : Morocco, China, India, Russia, Portugal, Spain, etc because the company handles research in 30 languages (the dashboard is available in 6, including Chinese). The multilingual search engine is the cornerstone of their service along with the fact that the analyses are done by humans. The differentiating point is exactly that. The engine is a proprietary development that is partially protected, as only original features and innovations can be patented.

The buzz analysis market : a fusing of 3 stages (+1 or 2 for France that seems to do everything its own way)

The worldwide market is broken down into 3 segments : free, do-it-yourself and upscale, Synthesio belonging to this last group. France is a bit different as it has 2 different types of actors (ami and Digimind) that are editors as well but positioned on different price schemas. This category doesn’t fit – according to Loic Moisand – with Forrester’s and Gartner’s groupings, which would explain their difficulties in positioning themselves internationally, even if the two actors “perform well on French territory”. Digimind has opted, itself, for the third type of positioning in North America. The France, creative as always, also has another example that doesn’t fit with other models : Trendybuzz, a research company with publisher software.

coming next : Part 2 with a breakdown of Internet brands by Synthesio