FC Dallas vs. L.A. Galaxy ~ Beckham staying in L.A.
July 30, 2007
It took the prospect of seeing David Beckham to convince me to pony up $68/ticket and drive 45 minutes to Frisco to watch FC Dallas (note: Frisco is not Dallas, not even close). We knew that David might not play due to his sore ankle, but as of 9:25PM this evening we learned that he won’t even board the plane to Frisco. Goal.com has the news in an article titled, "Beckham Out for Tuesday’s SuperLiga Match." Anyway, we already bought the tickets so we will be there will bells on…
Real Estate Experiment
July 28, 2007
Most everyone I know believes that it costs 3% of sale price to sell their house. When we sold our first house I didn’t think twice paying $7,500 to our realtor for showing our house once (the first buyer bought it). Six months ago, again, I didn’t really think twice about the prospect of paying $14,000 to sell our current home. But after reading Freakonomics I started to think that I might be able to pay someone less to sell our home. Turns out you can sell your house for less than $1,000 here in Dallas. Here is my story:
We have been trying to sell our house for about six months. It is a great place, with a less than ideal location for most buyers. It has worked great for our family for over 5 years, but as we are increasing the size of our family we needed a bigger place. Back in May we bought another home and have been renovating it (see renovations here). We also raised the price of our property by $50,000 as an experiment that I wrote about in a post titled, "Selling our house, the new strategy!". Everyone told us it was a mistake, including our realtor, but just a week later we got a fair offer on the property that we subsequently accepted. The buyer, for reasons we never quite understood, wasn’t able to close.
This month our contract with our first realtor expired and we decided not to renew it. He was a great guy, very knowledgeable, helpful; but I didn’t see the value in continuing to keep trying a sales strategy that wasn’t working. The only activity on the property was as a result of ‘not following’ his advice. I started thinking about what to do next. I asked my self: What does a listing agent do? Is it worth 3% of the sales price? From my experience, an agent lists your house in MLS, adds it to CSS to allow realtors to show the property, puts a sign in your yard, adds it to realtor.com and puts a lockbox at your front door. The Title Company (and your lawyer, if you are smart) handles the transaction details for both the buyer and the seller. I wonder what that service is worth? I figured it might take an hour to sell (i.e. talk to me on the phone), an hour to fill out the MLS form, an hour to add it to CSS, an hour to add to realtor.com and two hours to stop by and place the yardsign and lockbox at the house. For a total of six hours. I figured it might be worth around $150/hour and decided to propose the offer to several realtors to see if they agreed. My current realtor wasn’t interested and quickly indicated he wasn’t interested. But after posting an advertisement on Craigslist more than a dozen realtors contacted me, each more than interested in the offer. I will keep you posted on whether or not my latest experiment works.
Clueless Thompson Staffer Gets Famous
July 26, 2007
Coverage of my coverage of Fred Thompson’s campaign stop here in Dallas was picked up by Pegasus News in a piece titled, "Possible presidential candidate Fred Thompson comes to town; Staff stiff-arms bloggers." It was followed by a quick mention on MSNBC and by local talk show hosts this morning. Michael Davis from the Dallas Progress picked up the story as well in a post titled, "Fred Thompson Campaign Blows off Blogger." The only photo (blurry and seen below) of mine they are using is of the ‘guy who wouldn’t let me in’. In Mike Orren’s piece he shows the photo with the capition, "What? You one of them blawgers? From the Interwebgs? How many tubes you usin’ boy?" You can Digg the story here.
Fred Thompson comes to Dallas
July 25, 2007
This afternoon Dallas was host to Fred Thompson’s exploratory roadshow. The Senator arrived at Love Field around 3:30 and spent a few minutes talking to reporters and supporters. I wrote about my experience on the Big in Japan blog in a post titled, "Thompson 2008 Campaign Disses Blogger".
For pictures visit my Flickrstream (you can use them with attribution and link):
When the backup fails. . .
July 25, 2007
The social web (Craigslist, Technorati, LiveJournal, TypePad, AdBrite, Second Life, Yelp and so on) broke down yesterday. It all started when Pacific Gas & Electric lost an electrical grid in downtown San Francisco leaving much of the city in the dark. The outage should have caused the generators at 365 Main Street, a popular colocation facility, to start before the facility’s flywheel UPS system ran out of juice. Tragically, one or more of the facility’s generators failed to start crashing hundreds of servers. It took 45 minutes to get the generators online and even more time for various customers to reboot their servers bringing the ’social web’ back online. Nightmare!
Back in the day when I was running colocation facilities I recall a very similar situation. Our facility located in 2323 Bryan ran on a huge generator. We would test the system under load each month (as 365 Main claims to do), but early after opening the facility we had an actual power disruption (i.e. unplanned). The generators failed to start. Evidently the contractor who installed the generator made a very simple, but hard to find mistake that caused the system to fail under certain circumstances. We had thrown the switch to cut off building power several times to make sure everything was working properly, but never simulated the conditions an actual failure would cause. Fortunately we only had a few customers in the facility by the time we learned about our generator’s issues.
Texas Startup Blog: Top 100?
July 24, 2007
The Bootstrapper blog says the Texas Startup Blog is No. 93 of 100 "Daily Must-Reads for Entrepreneurs". Initially I was appreciative, but more recently I became frustrated by my low rating ~ 93? I guess I shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. It is a little better than being known as a 43 Best Blog…
Less choice can be good!
July 23, 2007
According to a study conducted by Dr. Lyengar and Dr. Lepper of Coumbia and Stanford University (respectively) less choice might actually help your business. Their study, conducted in two California supermarkets, compared sales of jam. In one store the professors installed 24 brands of jam in a single display and in the other they installed only 6 brands of jam in a similar display. Passerby traffic was measured at both displays. The display with more choice (24 brands) received 60% of the total traffic and the display with less choice (6 brands) received 40%. Interestingly, only 3% of people who visited the larger display purchased jam, while 30% of visitors to the smaller display with less choice purchased jam.
In our experience with the Architel brand, when we reduced the number of choices (i.e. part numbers) and simply included the various options at the base price we significantly increased the number of closes and reduced the time it took to achieve a close. The more choices or options our salespeople gave customers the more the customer had to consider. In most cases the additional choices slowed down the sales process and in others prevented the sale.
Of course, there are exceptions that prove the rule. For example, a recent prospect complained to our salespeople that our order form was simply too simple ~ a single part number and a single page scared them. Our competitor had a 30 page service description/contract and the prospect felt more comfortable with the more complex agreement. This was a first, but our sharp salesperson helped the prospect understand that the additional complexity served to protect the vendor. The additional language actually sought to limit the duties and liabilities of the competitor. Ultimately we closed the deal (file this one under, ‘you can’t please all of the people all of the time’). Thanks to Wilson Ng for the study details and the post titled "The Challenge of Providing Choice".
Only 68 Bugs for v1.0 iPhone
July 17, 2007
Wow, I was surprised the guys at AppleHound were only able to fund 68 bugs on the iPhone. This phone is EXTREMELY solid! WTG Apple. Read the full list of bugs here.
Hyper-Local Pegasus Goes National
July 17, 2007
Mike Orren, the founder of Dallas based Pegasus News, has announced the sale of his business to Fisher Communications Inc. Pegasus will continue to operate from Dallas (Fisher is based in Seattle). Mike’s comments from the press release:
“With the Fisher deal, Pegasus News enters the next stage of growth,” said Mike Orren, president of Pegasus News. “We have been doggedly committed to delivering local news and advertising of unparalleled relevance to our community, and we’re excited to have found a partner who understands the importance and value of local and niche information. We look forward to accelerating our growth and to reaching more cities, towns and neighborhoods over the coming year.”
Fisher is a fairly substantial business, owning 19 TV stations and 8 radio stations in the Pacific Northwest. We wish our friend the best!
Reagan’s 80% Rule
July 16, 2007
Ronald Reagan had a simple rule, ‘as long as he agreed with someone 80% of the time, he was solidly with them.’ Matt Blumberg reminds us of this rule and suggests,
…this 80% rule is very true in running a business as well. You can’t expect your employees to agree with 100% of your decisions. But your employees also realize that they will never agree with 100% of their company’s decisions. At about the 80% rule, with enough transparency around decision-making to make the missing 20% at least seem rational, you have a winning formula.
Once you find yourself disagreeing with someone 80% of the time, it might be time to make a change.
Ghost in the Facebook Machine?
July 16, 2007
Duncan Riley over at TechCrunch reminds us that prior to launching Facebook the young coder was hired by two other Harvard students to write the code for their own social-networking site called HarvardConnect.com. The pair have claimed, for the past three years, that Mark stole the code they hired him to write and used it to launch his own competing site ~ FaceBook. Turns out Cameron and Tyler, the two Harvard students, took the issue to the Havard honor code committee back in 2004 and an article was written about the dispute in The Stanford Daily. The US Federal Court has agreed to hear arguements later this month on the issue.
This isn’t a come lately pre-IPO lawsuit, it sounds like a real threat to the social networking powerhouse. Of course this threat can easily be resolved given the billions of dollars at stake.
Facebook Conflict of Interests
July 12, 2007
The VCs behind Facebook, Accel, Greylock and Meritech are actively looking to fund companies developing applications within the fast growing social network. The initial reaction from the blogosphere is positive suggesting,
Cultivating the Facebook application economy is in nobody’s better interest than Accel, Greylock, and Meritech. Owning successful applications is twice is sweet when you own the platform too.
But startups looking for capital should consider the risks involved. Building a business within another startup’s platform (in this case Facebook) is risky in itself. Raising money from the owners of that startup is even riskier. How would Jim Breyer deal with the fiduciary obligations associated with sitting on both boards? Would he share with your team confidential information from Facebook? Facebook might allow certain confidential information to be shared with portfolio companies, but I would bet that other information would never be released.
I have specific experience with one VC that sat on the boards of two companies that relied on one another to service their customers (one sold the device another built the key component for the device). The VC was uncomfortable when the component company worked with competitors of the device company. Sometimes he would share information about the competitor with the device company at a subsequent board meeting. The device company would look at an alternative component competitor that provided better features or better pricing, the board member would share that information with the component company. Soon the CEO’s of both companies didn’t trust their VC, despite the face that he was trying to do what was best for both companies.
Consider the challenges before raising money from a firm with a significant conflict of interest. Of course, the benefit of having Jim on your board (and his firm’s money) might outweigh the risks. At the very least you should discuss how such issues might be dealt with prior to any deal…
Sprint Fires Customers
July 10, 2007
For the past couple of weeks I have been reading about Sprint’s decision to fire more than 1,000 high maintenance customers. Interestingly, most reports are critical of the move.
Evidently the average subscriber calls customer service less than once a month, but some customers call 40-50 times per month on average. From Sprint’s perspective these 1000 users took the same resources 40,000 to 50,000 normal users require. Who are these people? I can’t imagine anyone calling me 40-50 times a month for any reason, much less to complain. Sprint explained,
"Rather than continue to operate in a situation that was unsatisfactory for Sprint and our subscribers, we chose to terminate our relationship with those customers to allow them to pursue other options."
I praise Sprint for the move. If the relationship isn’t working it is best for everyone to end it.
Money for Facebook Apps!
July 10, 2007
Bay Partners have launched a fund exclusively for applications built for Facebook. The program is called AppFactory is slated for launch on Tuesday. Michael Arrington is reporting that "Bay is promising to make a decision to invest within a couple of days of meeting the company, bypassing the normally weeks-long process of raising capital." The program is run by Salil Deshpande and Angela Strange. They are calling Facebook the ‘Social Operating System’. Turns out Facebook has released more than 40,000 developer keys and more than 1,600 have been officially launched. Bay will invest $25,000 to $250,000 per applications.
iPhone, it blends
July 10, 2007
Turns out it blends: iBlender
Search
-
Startup Jobs
-
Recent Network Posts
-
Update: TECH Fort Worth: Business & Technology Incubator
From Fort Worth Startup Blog -
Execution
From Kentucky Startup Blog -
Interview with Mark Solon on VCIR Fall
From Colorado Startups -
5 most important lessons for entrepreneurs
From Kentucky Startup Blog -
TECH Fort Worth: Business & Technology Incubator
From Fort Worth Startup Blog -
Inc 500
From Kentucky Startup Blog -
Why Building a Startup Community in DFW is Important
From Fort Worth Startup Blog -
Fort Worth Startups?!
From Fort Worth Startup Blog -
AOL buys Socialthing
From Colorado Startups -
Profile: Tallulah Cosmetics
From Kentucky Startup Blog
-
Update: TECH Fort Worth: Business & Technology Incubator
Advertisement
