ryankuder’s posterous

A couple things you need to remember when looking at startups that are only 3 months old.
1. If you saw Google or Facebook at 3 months old you wouldn’t have been impressed either. A year from now, and 3 years from now these companies will look very different.
2. Of course the idea isn’t obvious. If it was obvious many companies would have already done it. You should scratch your head and say Huh? at this point.
3. It is not possible to show everything in a 6 minute demo, and I can’t accurately reflect the vision of the founders as I write in real time for just a few lines.
4. They may not be the first to do something. Google wasn’t the first search engine either…more like the 14th entry. But, these startups put a twist on teh existing solutions.
5. Many companies start as just a feature and evolve into a full product set and successful company. At just 3 months old it is hard to predict which ones will successfully evolve and which ones won’t.
6.Remember there are 3 kinds of people; Those that MAKE it happen, those that WATCH it happen, and those that wonder WHAT happened. These startups are people that MAKE it happen. They should be respected and supported by those of us in the later two categories.

Don Dodge wrote a guest post on TechCrunch about the TechStars pitches that happened last night in Boston. These are brand new companies who have been working on their products for only a few months giving a 6 minute demo of their products and having them reported in about 4 sentences.

Naturally, the commenters brought out the expected, "Meh." "Not impressed." "Here's what's wrong with that." Smart money says that the comments aren't coming from entrepreneurs. Maybe junior level IT guys at Big Software Co.

The best part of the post however wasn't the TechStars wrap up, which was good, rather Don's reply to the negative comments. He does a great job shining some light on what you're seeing when you look at a company that's only three months old.

The commenters are belaboring the obvious. OF COURSE you can't see where they're going. OF COURSE the product isn't a full featured product. OF COURSE you don't get it. That's what makes entrepreneurs different and startups so much fun and that's why you aren't doing it.

We'll often see news of a financing round closing and scratch our heads and wonder what the VC saw there. Sometimes they see a young kid with a great idea, sometimes they see a huge untapped market and an innovative solution to address it, sometimes they see a better way to do an old thing, sometimes they see a proven team with an opportunity.

The point is that entrepreneurs see things differently than people who just comment on blogs. And if you're not doing it, get out of the way of the people who are.

Congrats to all the TechStars teams.

Some excellent underwater photography. Totally surreal, just like Alice in Wonderland should be. Click through for more.

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) -

A South African information technology company on Wednesday proved it was faster for them to transmit data with a carrier pigeon than to send it using Telkom , the country's leading internet service provider.

Internet speed and connectivity in Africa's largest economy are poor because of a bandwidth shortage. It is also expensive.

Local news agency SAPA reported the 11-month-old pigeon, Winston, took one hour and eight minutes to fly the 80 km (50 miles) from Unlimited IT's offices near Pietermaritzburg to the coastal city of Durban with a data card was strapped to his leg.

Including downloading, the transfer took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds -- the time it took for only four percent of the data to be transferred using a Telkom line.

SAPA said Unlimited IT performed the stunt after becoming frustrated with slow internet transmission times.

The company has 11 call-centers around the country and regularly sends data to its other branches.

Telkom could not immediately be reached for comment.

Internet speed is expected to improve once a new 17,000 km underwater fiber optic cable linking southern and East Africa to other networks becomes operational before South Africa hosts the soccer World Cup next year.

Local service providers are currently negotiating deals for more bandwidth.

(Reporting by Peroshni Govender; Editing by Jon Hemming)

I’m on a Yahoo Group with a couple other junior investment guys at VC firms around the city.  A message was sent to the list, which triggered an email to the entire group.  But, one of the group members has an vacation auto-responder setup to respond to every message that comes into his inbox.  So, everytime his auto-responder emails the group, it then triggers another group email, which in turn triggers an email from his auto-responder again.  It’s an infinite loop.

Hat tip to @nrek for the find.

This pattern — “success” based on forecasted future success instead of current success — shows up all over in the tech-business press. Instead of dead simple metrics like “they make more money than they spend” we see stuff like “user count growth” and “followers” and “impressions” and “friends” and “visits” qualify success. Whenever you see someone piling big numbers into made up metrics, it’s a diversion. They want you to think that this time it’s different. But like Judge Judy says, “If it doesn’t make sense it isn’t true.”

Jason does a great job dissecting a recent NYT piece called "Using Free to Turn a Profit." Figuring out how to take an product and make money from it should be simple. Find something that people want to pay money for, build it, collect the money. He's blown away that his partner David's classic Startup School talk got the reception it did. The basic message of the talk is as old as business itself, "Come up with a product, charge money for it, make more money than it costs to run it, and you turn a profit!" Sounds simple, doesn't it? But I'm amazed at how revolutionary it sounds when you try to apply it to what you're doing every day.

I'm pretty sure I have the best commute in Silicon Valley. While the rest of the Valley sits in gridlock on the 101, I make two rights, a left, and a right.

The music is Sweat, by Oingo Boingo and it happens to be exactly as long as my commute. This was the first film I took with the Flip Mino HD I got back in March.