Today the team at Songkick publicly rolls out the labour of love which they've been working on for the last year - and I'm really excited about it and very proud of the team.
Why? Well, for a few reasons.
First, the service they've built is really killer. They have taken all the distributed passion and energy that fans pour into gigographies and live music across the web and pulled it all together in one place. The service launches with over 1m gigs past, present and future and the team has built a social layer around the content letting you really get lost in the venues, the bands and the music. If you love live music, you'll love this product and it has a real shot at becoming the home for live music on the web.
Second, they are playing in the most exciting and potentially the most valuable part of the music industry. While recorded music is in trouble, live music is growing like crazy. For fans the emotional attachment we have to concerts and festivals is something unique and for artists live is the place where you get your start, make your mark and is the mainstay of your income throughout your career regardless of your label. Artists and their managers control live music and as labels have lost control over the recorded product, live has become a pivot which is revolutionizing the industry.
Third, the Songkick team led by Ian, Pete and Michelle have really shown themselves to be great start-up role models for the next generation of European entrepreneurs. When I first met them in Boston a few years ago as they were leaving YC, they said they wanted to aim high and bring a passion to succeed and build something really big into the London start-up scene. There are some teams you meet you want to back immdiately, and they haven't disappointed. They are shooting for the moon but they have always kept their feet on the ground. They have been very strategic about investors, partners and hires and are incredibly disciplined controlling their costs and managing their time. Hard things for first time entrepreneurs. Sure they've made mistakes but they learn fast and adapt. Hallmarks of people who can build something big.
So, well done Songkick. To all the team. I know its been a huge effort to go live and you've all been itching to show the world what you can do - enjoy it. To liv music fans, enjoy it too both th trip down memory lane and all the gigs to come.
Raising money if you're an entrepreneur is tough at the best of times, but if you're a first time entrepreneur its incredibly difficult because the reassurance investors look for more than anything else when they look to fund is validation.
There were lots of interesting conversational threads at dinner last night with Fred Wilson and 15 first-timers from the TAG and Seedcamp networks but this theme of building validation and how important it is for entrepreneurs really stuck with me.
Validation comes in many forms: previous successes, persuading a killer person to join your team or even be an advisor, signing a paying customer, acquiring lots of users, getting positive press or blog reviews. The list goes on. But without some form of validation, however good your idea might sound - if you have no track-record its just so hard to get off the ground.
First timers have no start-up track record - they have to build one.
Its hard to get to achieve most of the list above at the very early stages, so probably the biggest thing that Seedcamp and YCombinator do is that they force teams to ship - and ship quickly.
We both want teams that can code, not just think, and the added forcing function of limited time and limited capital makes getting something out the door imperative. There's nothing like a deadline to keep focus.
Its not important to have a finished product, even less a finished plan - what's important is to show that you can create a prototype that you can share with other people: a verbal and visual representation (to paraphrase Fred's great point) of what's going on inside the collective heads of your team.
To be both an accomplished hacker and a painter in just three months with virtually no money is an endurance test - you need to have great co-founders and you need to have great support. Paul Graham and his team have created an excellent model and its a model for our times.
There is nothing more validating at an early stage than a team that shows how they can bootstrap with limited resources to produce something which solves a real problem and that people want.
First timers who have come through YCombinator or Seedcamp have real validation. They have been filtered in the application process, they have had feedback from smart, experienced entrepreneurs and investors and they have plugged into the collective wisdom of their peers.
This is powerful stuff. So its not surprising that for many investors, teams who have been through these programs have a real mark of validation that makes it a lot easier to take an investment risk on a first timer.
In today's environment, if you are in your 20s and you put [society's] [your parent's] economic fears aside, there has never been a better time to be a first-timer.
Sttart-up costs are incredibly low (read Josh Kopelman's post on the "Price of Failure") and there is no technical excuse not to bootstrap.
Today's startup has access to:
incredibly mature open source technologies;
a globally networked talent-pool through services like LinkedIn and Xing;
incredible platforms for scaleable infrastructure and viral distribution that simply didn't exist - in most cases even 12 months ago.
We went round the table at dinner last night and 12 out of 15 companies were actively using AWS or trying out Google's new AppEngine. Everyone was using LAMP, Python; Django or Ruby. Everyone was using (or had a plan) for f8 and OpenSocial -- and of course with the new iPhone SDK people were salivating at the prospect of a mobile web that wasn't just a new channel but a new context for their applications.
There is no better or cheaper time to start a company in this space -- for little to no cost you can access on-demand infrastructure, social distribution and even monetization through AdWords or OpenX. In fact I'd argue with all the new platform innovation from Facebook, Apple and the cloud computing folks in the last year, now is even a better time than 2007.
So if you have a great idea and you've never started a business before go for it.
If you're a hacker, there's never been a better time and if you're a painter, find a hacker to work with and apply to Seedcamp (or YCombinator or Brad Feld and Dave Cohen's excellent TechStars -- they're all great and offer slightly different things).
At Seedcamp you know that if you apply and get through to the main week in London from Sept 15-19th just some of the folks you'll get to hang out with and get feedback from include:
the founders behind some of Europe's biggest recent exits like Niklas Zennstrom and Michael Birch plus the key folks behind MySQL, Lastminute, Last.fm, Buy.at, Plazes, Kelkoo and Zyb
the founders of some of Europe's most promising next generation businesses like Seatwave, WAYN, Moo, Spreadshirt, Lovefilm, Huddle and GlassesDirect
some of Europe and Israel's best seed and venture investors; including Atlas, Balderton, Amadeus, Index, Atomico, Northzone, Eden, DJF Esprit
experts in product, marketing and technology from Google, MySpace, Facebook, Skype, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Sun and Oracle
folks from Techcrunch, LeWeb, FOWA, O'Reilly and the FT
plus we'll even throw in some specialists in startup legals and recruiting ;)
It's worth applying anyway though - lots of last year's teams who didn't make it told us how useful the application was in helping them to focus and articulate what they were trying to build.
So, if your a first-timer - especially those based in Europe, Middle East or Africa - what better way to get validated?
You have three weeks left to apply, yes apply -- we really look forward to seeing you and if not you than your friends, so spread the word.
We've been thrilled at the interest Seedcamp has generated in such a short time since we announced it a few weeks ago. In the spirit of the new web, we've had some great guest blogs , our forums are slowly getting more active and even our Facebook group is growing like crazy - we're just crossed 600 members :)
We want Seedcamp to really help stimulate a community and conversation around European startups - so please join in, online or physically at your local Opencoffee Club. So if you're an entrepreneur with an idea, a developer with a killer app - there's no excuse to feel alone anymore.
You have until midnight August 12th to submit your completed application, we've already had nearly 100 from all over Europe including France, Germany, Sweden, Holland, Portugal, Spain, Italy and the UK. We've also had applications from India, Israel, Russia, South Africa and Latin America - keep them coming.
Seedcamp is completely focussed on supporting the entrepreneur. So we're thrilled that we seemed to have tapped into something that seems relevant and valuable to you. In fact, one of the things which has excited me the most is that people are recognizing that although capital is key, Seedcamp is more about the contacts, coverage and connections successful applicants will receive both in the week of September 3-7 in London and in the 3 months afterwards.
With this in mind, I'm really excited today to announce the first wave of Seedcamp supporters, who are really stepping up to play a major role not just in Seedcamp 2007 but for the years ahead. These are all people and organizations who have played a critical role in putting European entrepreneurship on the map and I'm thrilled to have them on board.
The team at Moo just can't help coming out with cool stuff. For what seems to be a simple printing company, they have one of the most fanatical followings on the web and a blog which is in the Top 1k on Technorati.
Today, they released their much anticipated third product - StickerBooks.
In true Moo fashion, the product is all about:
personal choice -- you can choose 90 different stickers on 15 tear-out sheets
quality -- stickers are high-quality gloss, scratchproof vinyl stickers
design -- your choice of 6 differently styled beautiful sticker books
Moo are also going to the next level in terms of excellent content with this release.
There is a great cover piece in the latest BusinessWeek, which features Moo and Mindcandy, two innovative and edgy London companies in which TAG and Index were early investors.
Both are great examples are companies appealing and selling to a global audience based out a European city. The piece also talks about Joost based in Luxembourg and FON based in Madrid. Of course there are a legion of other European consumer Internet stars making waves worldwide like Netvibes, Bebo, Habbo, Stardoll, Last.fm and not forgetting Skype.
Its really exciting to see European companies making a global splash being recognized by mainstream US media - long may it continue.
Openads, has announced in the last few hours that Index have led a $5m funding round to build out the product and expand the team. The round includes investment from Mangrove, Josh Kopelman from First Round Capital, O'Reilly and TAG.
The core Openads team is based in London, is another great example of an interesting European startup, which has manage to exist under the radar screen, quietly creating a geographically diverse business with a commanding position online.
Openads develops free, open source ad-serving software which publishers use to manage the advertising on their websites. It has all the features a publisher would expect from an ad server but at a fraction of the cost of alternatives -- free.
In fact, in a world where so much focus has been placed on advertiser needs the team at Openads has really aimed squarely at understanding the needs of small and medium-sized publishers who want to make more moeny from their website.
Openads is already used by more than 25,000 publishers across 140 countries in 20 languages, in fact it has more installations than all competing ad serving solutions combined.
The geographical footprint is very reminiscent of Skype to me -- very strong in the US, but equally present in some of the web's most established (Western Europe) and fastest growing markets (China, Russia, Brazil and Poland).
We're really excited to be working with the team at Openads, who have built a very simple, feature rich and easy to use product that publishers across the world clearly love using. Publishers are having their business squeezed across the board and taking away the cost of ad serving so publishers can focus on raising their effective CPMs is a winning proposition.
Library House, the folks who cover the UK and increasingly the European venture scene are going to be holding a one day event on 27th June in London which they bill as "a one-day showcase celebrating Europe’s web innovators".
The interesting thing about this event is that Library House is looking to showcase not just established companies like WAYN and Shozu, but also new upcoming companies which have not been funded.
I'll be on a panel and going along, as I suspect will a number of other entrepreneurs and investors. If you're an early stage European entrepreneur you should check it out - you can apply here.
It's been great to see OpenCoffee spread to over 35 locations across the world in the last 3 months since we first started off in London.
Europe is starting to be covered and in the last week, we've seen the boundaries extend to include Tel Aviv and Slovenia coming online this week, along with our first entries in Italy and Germany.
In recent weeks we've also heard about Sydney, Cape Town and Toronto really taking off. While there are new OpenCoffee's opening almost every week in the US with new locations now in Austin, Memphis and North Virginia.
We're now up to 525 members for our London group on Meetup, which I'm happy to say puts us in the Top 20 groups for London. That is until I realized we're still 2 people behind the London Vampires group.
Come on London, let's get ahead of the Vampires (527) - next up the much tougher challneges of Biking & Adventure Hiking (620), and maybe one day Poker (937).
Maybe we'll have passed the Vampires by the time you read this :)
Figuring out how to best use Google AdWords is a key job for any entrepreneur, so it's great to see businesses popping up trying to make it as easy as possible.
Toby Mason, one of the co-founders of Zootrain, has been kind enough to offer folks reading this blog and members of London's now thriving OpenCoffee Club a £100 off voucher to a Zootrain seminar.
If you haven't tried AdWords and want to know how this could be a great offer. Use voucher code skpub14 to qualify and thank Toby if you go along.
Starting from this Thursday, every 10-12, we'll be having London OpenCoffee at the very cool 5th View Bar at the top of Waterstone's at 203-206 Piccadily. See the Trustedplaces review here.
The view is awesome and best of all we'll be able to have FREE wifi, so please bring along your demos and if you don't feel like chatting feel free to work.
we have over 450 members to our London Meetup group and there are now around 33 locations hosting OpenCoffee Clubs around the world - so check them out at our OpenCoffee site and join in the global conversation.
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