All serious entrepreneurs should apply for Open Angel Forum

It’s been a while with our heads down at Team AppWhirl, with no time for blogging as we got the product out the door.  But there couldn’t be a better time to get back to blogging the startup than when reflecting on Friday night’s Open Angel Forum Silicon Valley.

As a regular listener to This Week In Startups, and as supporters of Jason Calacanis’ drive against pay-to-pitch (some would say exploitative) investment forums we have followed the Open Angel Forum.  We applied to present to the OAF Silicon Valley.  After being shortlisted we interviewed with Tyler and were accepted in.  It was a very efficient process and respectful of Founders’ time.  We were thrilled.

Why the games industry has less to fear than the music & TV industries, in moving online

I was intrigued by the title of this article - skeptical of gaming following other media online.  But I think it doesn’t follow that because the TV & Music industries have done so badly that gaming will struggle to find their feet too.

The reason gaming will work in a move online is that it’s gaming developers themselves doing it, the creative is moving online.  With TV and music big intermediaries sat between the creative and the consumer.  This made them slower to respond, more brittle.  They broke.  They were too slow to respond to customer demand and ended up losing control of the consumer (in music’s case to either piracy or Apple).

The Lady Gaga Post

I love Lady Gaga.  I didn’t want to at first.  I was expecting another frothy pop bimbette. But I was wrong. Lady Gaga is a performance artist the likes we haven’t seen since perhaps Madonna in her most creative phase.

She understands her audience to an unparalleled degree - you’re not telling me the refrain “I’ll follow you until you love me, papa” is a lyrical accident in Paparazzi, appealing as it does on a subliminal level to a broad swathe of fans with difficult parental relationships.  The blatant sexuality of Poker Face is in line with the attitudes of these times, as is the ten minute soft core lesbian porn that is the Telephone video.  (Again, a groundbreaking masterpiece of pop art.)

Entrepreneurs Collapse The Wave Function

I’ve come to a satisfying analogy when it comes to an important core-skill of entrepreneurs.  True entrepreneurs collapse the wave function.

I am a physicist by training.  But long before I ever studied Physics at the University of Leeds I was gripped by quantum mechanics.  The picture of the world painted by quantum mechanics, and verified to incredible levels of precision, is famously counter-intuitive.

In quantum mechanics everything exists in all possible states at the same time.  One represents everything, even the reader, by a “wave function” which takes into account all of these possible states.  It’s only when one takes a measurement that anything takes on a single observable value.  This observation itself “collapses the wave function” from a particle being in all possible states simultaneously into being in one specific observable state.  The example ofSchrodinger’s cat is often trotted out here, the poor beast trapped in a box, subjected to a random event that can either kill or not kill the cat, causing it to exist in a peculiar limbo until the box is open and the dead/notdead cat is observed.

Breakfast is back... at least in Silicon Valley.

I arrived here in Silicon Valley in 1999.  Dot.Com boom roaring all around me.  This was the time of “Breakfast at Buck’s”.  Literally.  There’s TV evidence to back me up!  I was followed around for three weeks for a BBC Documentary (titled something like USA.com) with a scene in the finished product filmed as I had a meeting at a table in Buck’s.  I remember domains-guru Andrew Naylor and I driving up there for breakfast at the table right behind the CNBC anchors as they broadcast “Power Lunch” from Buck’s.

Handling external factors as an high-tech entrepreneur

This is a rambling personal entry, and may not be hugely interesting to a lot of you…

Building a company is a lot of hard work.  There’s lots of great input out there from experienced entrepreneurs like Eric Reis, Dave McClure, Sean Ellis… basically all the folks on my Startup Helpers google reader list.  And there’s a lot of great insight to be gained on the Venture process nowadays, from the blogging VCs - the must read list of VC bloggers is here.  But it’s still about working hard, working smart and being resilient.

I don’t write this entry as a way of saying look at me haven’t I had it tough - I want to make the point that EVERY startup entrepreneur has their challenges outside of the job.  Part of what makes you a successful entrepreneur is dealing with them.

How To Build A Successful Sales Channel

Mark Suster posted about channel sales today.  Nice post, as always - I think of all the VC blogs I read his provokes the most desire to respond, so he clearly picks topics well.  If you don’t read him you should.  Or just subscribe to my VC blogs list on Google Reader.

I’m English originally, so sharing success stories can seem a bit like unseemly bragging, but it’s relevant.  Channel building is hard.  I think the main problem is the belief that the sales people in the channel give a crap - not only about your product, but about what their biz dev folks tell them.