What Other Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Dogster

Pets.com may have been one of the most wasteful and frivolous of dot com companies, but Dogster is one of the most disciplined of the Web 2.0 generation. It's interesting since Pets.com had a clearer business model, and satisfied a more obvious need. Just goes to show execution wins, in a downturn or no. While a lot of Dogster's smart moves were made in the company's early days, there are plenty of tips in my TechTicker interview with Dogster CEO Ted Rheingold for cash-strapped entrepreneurs worried about 2009.

Clip one:

Clip two (featuring moxie!):

Is Your Startup Going out of Business?

My guest today on TechTicker was Keith Rabois of Slide. Before Slide, Keith was an early member of the PayPal mafia and an early exec at LinkedIn. He also has an advisory role with Sequoia Capital -- where among other exploits he pretty much hand-delivered YouTube to the firm. In other words, in a sea of engineer-minded entrepreneurs, Keith actually knows a thing or two about the business side of startups. He also has opinions and isn't afraid to voice them.

I had to de-Southern myself before taping as I usually sound like I'm saying "Rab-a-way" instead of Rabois. No joke, Mr. Lacy thought it was spelled this way for about the first six months I knew Keith. Ah, the downside of being on camera-- proper pronunciation!

The funniest backstage moment this morning was when the control room told me my guest was ready and I sat down, shuffled my notes and looked up to see a very, very old man in the monitor. "Um, that's not Keith," I said. Oddly enough, the guy sort of looked like a 50-year-older Keith, so I half-wondered if the downturn was just aging him. Turns out, the studio was just confused.

So here are the clips in case you didn't make it over to TechTicker today. The first one is on all the layoffs in the startup world last week (some 250 jobs all together and counting) and what separates companies that are seeing opportunity in the downturn from those seeing doom and gloom. The second clip is about how all those layoffs and hard-to-get-series-b-rounds will ripple into Silicon Valley's macro economy. And the third is about Slide itself: a company planning to spend its way out of the downturn.

Do I Know the Digg Guys or What?

Some of us (Read: those who don't plan/have a book to promote in November) choose to go to London at a different time than everyone else in Silicon Valley. So since I'm the only person in the Valley not at FOWA in London right now, I didn't hear Kevin Rose's keynote. But apparently I didn't have to. It nicely echoes what I wrote here: That Digg has picked a fork in the road and is ready to grow up and prove it can be more than a fan boy site filled with Microsoft ads. (Convenient timing for me too, since I'm updating "Once You're Lucky" for paperback.) As someone who has spent a lot of time giving Digg tough love, but also defending what Kevin and Jay have done well, I'm rooting for them.

(Sorry for the crowing, but I'm getting a lot of kudos on my latest Valley Girl column and am enjoying feeling like an actual reporter again today, less obnoxious self-promotional media persona. Well, except this somewhat self-promotional post and my upcoming interview on KQED's Forum in an hour...)

UGBT Memphis: Don't Just Spread the Wealth, Focus It

Now that I've heaped praise on one corner of Memphis and its entrepreneur scene, time to criticize a bit. Whether corporate or private, it's clear there's a lot of money to be thrown at building a Memphis-Tech scene. But it's not always being focused in the right spots.

Two examples make the point, I think.

YouNoodle Makes Me Feel Much Better about My Finances

Here at SarahLacy.com you could say we're investing in the growth of the business. Think the User Generated Book Tour makes money? HA! My credit cards are wheezing from overuse. And the very talented Olivia certainly isn't volunteering, nor should she be. Combined with a new mortgage and an upcoming $10,000 electrician bill, Mr. Lacy is getting a little antsy about all the money flowing out of our accounts. YouNoodle just made me feel a whole lot better.

The new startup boasts an algorithm that crunches all kinds of data to tell you what your company will be worth in three years. SarahLacy.com will be worth...click for it....

Facebook Shares! Get Your Red Hot Facebook Shares!

I wasn't planning to write about the story sweeping the tech blogosphere about Facebook reportedly allowing employees to sell shares, mostly because I thought others covered it well, and as Peter Kafka points out, we're talking about a small amount of money and a small amount of equity.

But I wound up doing a tech roundup post for TechTicker today and started to get into it, so I figured I'd post some thoughts here too. If you know my writing, you're probably not surprised that it's the larger cultural ramifications of the move that concern me.

Cool

It's actually hard to pronounce Cuil as "cool" once you've seen it written. I was so busy trying not to visualize the spelling I had to do the intro to this video about 45 times, but hey, at least it made Aaron and the guys in the control room laugh! Bill O'Reilly I feel your pain!

Needless to say, I'm not a fan of the name, but I hope the new search engine can live up to some of the hype. As I say in the video below, I've been hearing about this company for a while from people I really respect and trust, so I was a bit bummed that the site was down so much today. Also, in my informal tests there were nowhere near the quality of results that are on Google. Although this seems to change moment to moment. I searched "Sarah Lacy" and it gave me zero results versus nearly 400,000 on Google. For a moment I was elated! No record of the tumultuous ups and downs of my Internet life? I searched again and got 77,000. And none of the first few pages had links to my blog or any of the hundreds of things I've actually written. That's pretty sub-par search for something so hyped.

Still, I trust my sources on this one. I plan to continue to give Cuil a chance. For one thing, I like the UI and I love the privacy policies. If they can come close to Google results, they'll build a solid fan base with those features alone. They may never really threaten Google, but it's great to continue to see innovation in this space. Search is so important to our everyday lives and not even Google does it perfectly.

Ooooooh! Maybe Valley Innovation Is about to Restart...

As a Valley-based business reporter I get chills (the good kind) when I read Jim Cramer -- or another of his pretending-to-get-tech Wall Street peers-- say something like this. Because as soon as people say innovation is dead in the Valley, it seems to slowly restart. Among other bon mots, Cramer told an audience at New York's "Hey! Us too!" Internet Week that there was more innovation going on in the Rust Belt than Silicon Valley.

I've been outspoken that there's not a lot of great Web innovation going on right now, but Cramer's statement is a stretch even for me. You know what Cramer misses? (Other than the under the radar work happening in clean tech, biotech, etc. The Valley is a big place after all.) He's focused on product innovation, which has somewhat stalled in the Valley's Web scene in aggregate. But business model innovation is where the Valley is at as Web companies and others in areas like open source hunt to find ways to turn insane audiences into cash. Memo to Jim: That's what made Google worth $175 billion today. The search engine was hardly a new-fangled application.

What I love about guys like Cramer is they tout they were rabid Google bulls "early on." Early = Once the S-1 was filed and we all saw the kind of numbers Google was putting up. Props to them for knowing the stock was worth more than $85 a share. But that's not the same thing as spotting "innovation," Wall Street. Just wondering how often Cramer actually comes out here....because I seem to see him on the Mad Money set just about everyday...or goes to the Rust Belt for that matter...

All snarking aside, I don't usually bash Cramer, because I think he's an amazing showman and knows the public markets better than I do. And I have a total appreciation for the rigors of being on camera everyday. But don't try to play the startup game, pal.

Oh! My favorite part: Cramer says TheStreet.com is one of those lone well positioned Web properties. Because so many young people are flocking there. Yeah, that one doesn't even need a snarky graph.

China Walloping India

Where have I been all day? Looking through VC numbers. Here are a few segments I did for Tech Ticker on yesterday's mixed news about U.S. venture capital in China, and below a piece on today's news about U.S. venture capital in India.

Both regions became the new black a few years ago and billions were invested, offices were opened, partners were relocated. And most VCs I talk to regret it, but at the same time don't feel like India and China are markets they can afford to ignore. I don't think this gets covered enough here, given it'll heavily influence at least the next 10-year venture capital cycle, which you can't divorce from the health of the Valley as a whole. We're in the midst of a huge change in this asset class in a lot of directions and local to global is one of the most pronounced that could make or break firms. It's important enough I plan to visit both India and China in the next year (hopefully!) to check out the startup scene first hand. Enough extrapolating from data!

But for now, back to the data...This quarter we saw some retrenching and refocusing in a pretty major way. Watch the videos for the details. Spoiler alert: China is waaaaay hotter than India. That was a surprise to me because I hear more hand wringing about China anecdotally.

VCs + Crystal Balls = Mobile Boom?

This is a little delayed, as I wasn't at the event. But here's a video Eric Savitz and I did for Tech Ticker on the Churchill Club's Top 10 Tech Trends event, held last week. Interestingly, almost half of the trends were about mobile. I've also reported on Tech Ticker that some Web entrepreneurs like Kevin Rose also thing real mobile innovation is about to happen. Here's Eric's report:

It's hard to know. Anyone who has been around the Valley has heard the mobile hype before and we have little in the name of real innovation or huge public companies to show for it. Two good things could come out of the current mobile excitement. (It's not quite hype yet.)

One: We will finally see some true innovation in mobile apps. Handsets are great and all, but software is where the magic happens. A bad UI can make the sexiest phone abominable to use. Thanks to the iPhone real software and real apps are possible for the first time on phones. Who isn't excited about that? Even I am and my fingers are too cloddy to work a touch screen keyboard!

Or, two: Companies aiming for the mobile market will get bogged down in regulation and fragmented markets, die a slow death after raising too much money, and we won't have to hear about MOBILE! for another few years.

Let's suspend reporter cynicism and hope it's different this time, that younger people and products like the iPhone will actually make us as mobile-centric as Asian markets-- hell, even European markets. I'd love to have a phone that didn't anger me at some point in the day for one reason or another.