Venture Adventure

I bopped on over to Palo Alto a couple of days ago, joining up with the folks at the Open Coffee at Deuce France in Palo Alto.  Other than the fact that I’m a Peets snob, and don’t particularly like the Deuce France Coffee, it was great.  (Luckily, there’s a Peets in the same mall.)  Emily and Mike, both of Fatdoor, came, and we discussed fatdoor and its position in the social networking ecosystem.  This led, of course, to a discussion about facebook vs. myspace.  The consensus was that people are started to use facebook as part of their business profile and tools.

I’ve posted some photos to flickr.  Unfortunately, I was facing the morning sun, and all the shots were extremely backlit.  Even with +3 overexposure, they’re too dark in the facial areas.  Next time, we’ll get it right (or closer to right)!

Dick Costello, CEO of Feedburner, has an excellent discource on bringing in outside directors into your startup.

This brings up a tangential point, which is the number of VCs that bring in big company execs in to run startups, especially troubled startups. I saw this at one startup where the CEO was having trouble negotiating through three changes of direction in about two years. The CEO was replaced with a new CEO, and he brought in his buddy to be VP Marketing.

Although they claimed startup experience, their joined their prior startup at approximately 500 employees and many millions in revenue. Before that, they both hailed from very big disk drive companies.

One of the first things the new guys did was do an office move, spending many thousands of dollars to rearrange the cubes, and to ensure that they had the biggest hard-walled offices available. It was more than a week before they talked to the Marketing staff to understand what products they were buiding and (attempting to) selling. The end result was, of course disastrous.

The end result was, of course, disastrous. The real question, however, is why bring in these folks?

I’ve asked Dick, and we’ll see what his response is.

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