App State Speaking, HR Focus, VC Breakfast, VC Coffee, Inventions & Windows Vista

Yesterday I spoke at stop three of the Extreme Entrepreneur Tour at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. Thanks to Jason, Hayes, and Caitlin for making the event great. About 175 students came out to hear Adam Witty, Michael Simmons, Sheena Lindahl, Jason Berry, and myself do two keynote speeches, a panel, and a workshop.

Next I’ll be in New York October 23-25 for the Clickz Email Marketing Conference, then in Columbus speaking at Ohio State on October 27. Then coming up on November 2 and 3 I’ll be in Chicago doing speaking events with the Windy City Roundtable, SCORE Chicago, and the Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization.

Today was a busy day. I woke up at 6:30, attended a Southern Capitol Ventures breakfast at 7:45 at the headquarters of ReverbNation, a web 2.0 music community startup with serious potential, then got to work around 9. I met with Steve Peha from Teaching That Makes Sense at 11am, then drove to American Tobacco Campus in Durham to have coffee with Intersouth’s John Glushnik.

This afternoon, I had meetings with two employees working out some operational/human resource issues, reviewed the stats on our Google Adwords campaigns, and met with an employee to review the Product Backlog and plans for the next development sprint.

This evening I randomly went off on two random tangents–first creating a list of inventions then reviewing the beta release of Microsoft Windows Vista, the next Windows operating system scheduled for Business release in November and Consumer release in January as well as looking at Office 2007 and the RSS Feed integration in IE7 and Outlook 2007 and the blogging capabilities of Word 2007. Microsoft seems to have gotten a good deal of inspiration from Mac Tiger OS X. It’s been six years since the last OS release and I think from what I’ve seen they’ve got some pretty good things up their sleeves that we’re going to start seeing over the next few months.

Just a few moments ago, I submitted an application for Broadwick to present at the SIIA OnDemand Conference.

Oh, we passed 6,000 customers for IntelliContact today! Cheers to that.

In the Wall Street Journal

On Tuesday a quote from me made it into the Wall Street Journal on page B5 in Kelly Spors’ column on entrepreneurship and search engine optimization. Here’s a link to the PDF.

Speaking in Lexington, KY with the Extreme Entrepreneur Tour

I left on Wednesday morning and drove the 8 hours on I-40, I-77, and I-64 over to Lexington, KY for the second stop on the Extreme Entrepreneur Tour. This stop brought us to Bluegrass Technical Community College.

At the event, I spoke with 24 year old Doug Fath of Faithful Investments of Philadelphia and Michael Simmons and Sheena Lindahl of Brooklyn, the tour organizers.

I arrived in Lexington Wednesday evening thoroughly sunburned–for some reason not realizing that five hours in the sun driving in a convertible might do that to me, even if it was only 65 degrees out. But I survived and quickly fell asleep at the Holiday Inn Express of Lexington.

Thursday morning brought a breakfast introduction to Doug Fath then a couple hours to work on my presentation. Around 1:30pm, I drove Doug over to Applebee’s Park, the Lexington Legends Baseball Stadium where the event was being held.

From 3pm to 8pm Doug, Michael, Sheena, myself, and four other entrepreneurs from the community alternated doing keynotes, panels, and workshops with the student attendees. The theme of the day was two fold–one: how to find, follow, and pursue your passion in life, and two: how to get started today.

Among the audience were students interested in starting restaurants, hotels, salons, fashion lines, real estate investment firms, salsa product lines, and cake stores.

My two favorite quotes of the day came from participants Coleman and Anne. Anne noted at one point, “Don’t pay attention to people who don’t believe in you. Don’t listen to the dream killers.” Coleman later asked brilliantly, “If you don’t have dreams what are you?”

After the event the organizer from the college Virginia, the freelance videographer Tre, Michael, Sheena, Katie, Doug, and I went to dinner at Harry’s just outside of town. I had my usual Unagi and salmon roll with Sprite.

Today I woke up around 7am to find it raining. This wasn’t any good as the top of my convertible doesn’t latch properly at the moment and I theoretically can’t drive over 50mph while it’s raining. I made it about 30 miles out of town before my arm was too sore from holding the roof closed to continue. I stopped at a McDonalds and read and did a couple conference calls with the office for about 2 hours.

Finally I wondered into a random antique/inside farmer’s market type store and bought myself two raincoats, a blanket, and a US Marines hat. I put the roof down and drove in the rain pretty much all of the past eight hours while listening to Madeleine Albright’s book on CD, Madame Secretary. Thankfully for aerodynamics, raincoats, and the blanket neither myself nor the inside of the car got very wet at all. I did get some strange looks from toll booth collectors in West Virginia though. It’s amazing what you’ll do to get home.

The tour continues next Wednesday at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. If you live in the area, you can RSVP at

Dot Com Crash 2.0? What’s Fundamentally Different This Time Around

A couple weeks ago my business partner in IntelliContact, Aaron Houghton, asked me via email what I thought about the Squidoo concept–Seth Godin’s new web site that allows users to create "lenses" of high-quality content on every conceivable topic while sharing ad revenue with content contributors or the charity of their choice. I replied to Aaron that I thought the idea was "Rather brilliant. Make money off of adsense from hi-quality user generated content. Not sure how they’re doing, but ran into the idea about 8 months ago." Aaron responded to my email with:

"I agree, the concept is great. The proof will be in the value actually created for advertisers, which may be good but it of course is yet to be determined. If he can simply get a critical mass of users and visits we both know someone will buy it or sign a huge ad contract with the site. Isn’t this the exact premise behind the dot com crash, visitors = success… and all of these business are back in that battle again, and VCs are funding them. What’s different now? Is Google Adwords good enough that it has monetized the web traffic business so effectively that .com model businesses can now thrive? If so, what really caused the bubble to burst? It wasn’t a lack of advertising options. Was it simply missing the concept of targeted conceptual advertising which actually drives advertiser value, or has consumer and business spending increased so much online that it’s now viable for the first time?"

Aaron was asking a key question–what is it that is so different now with the web that is going to allow these web 2.0 services to actually generate real revenue and provide real value to users, measurable return to advertisers, and a smart acquisition for acquirers? As the CEO of a Web 2.0 software company, the answer to this question certainly interested me. Further, as the author of an article on the causes of the Dot Com Crash back in 2003, I thought it might be time to take a new look at the question. So here was my response to Aaron:

So what’s different this time around? Here’s my take:

1. The Internet has more than 3 times as many users. In March 2000 the Internet had 304 million users according to Internet World Stats and Nua Ltd. As of June 2006 the Internet had 1.043 billion users.
2. We’re all on broadband now. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, as of February 2003, only 33% of U.S. Internet users were on a Broadband connection. This number increased to 68% as of February 2006.
3. Web technologies are developing that are making sites/web tools more useful or interesting causing people spend a lot more time online including services like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, MetaCafe, Meetup, LinkedIn, BoingBoing, Digg, Flickr, Squidoo, and Xanga. In the same Nielsen/NetRatings report linked to above they noted time spent online increased from 51 minutes per day to 61 minutes per day between February 2003 and February 2006.
4. There are developed ad networks like Adwords, Miva, MSN Ad Center, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Federated Media that have large enough scale to make it easy for anyone to get targeted, well paying advertisers with just two lines of code.

The web is finally ready to grow up.

After reading this response, Aaron added an additional insight:

5. The average American Internet user did not trust the Web enough to place frequent large purchases online. Think about how few banks had online banking during the bubble era, that’s the most basic of trust extensions for the average consumer and it wasn’t even close to mainstream then. Trust is one of the primary pillars of web 2.0. The mainstream consumer didn’t inherently trust Web sites in 2000, now they do. So, the mainstream consumer was dumping money in their personal stock portfolio into web companies but was unwilling to buy a product from one of these company’s sites because they didn’t trust buying from the company online.

So there you have it–five reasons why the Web is just that little bit more resilient now that are allowing e-retailers, web-based services, and social networking sites to generate real critical mass sufficient to actually create sustainable business models. Don’t get me wrong, the fact that there is a lot less media hype, much smarter individual investors who remember getting burned just a few years ago, and more experienced management teams that realize they actually have to generate revenue and eventually profits somehow is certainly helping as well. But the significant growth in the scale, depth, speed, usefulness, and ease of the Internet has been critical and is today making the web startup a fun place to work again with a real chance of getting acquired or going public one day and making a $580 million price tag for MySpace actually seem not too rich at all. Cheers to that!