Silicon Alley Web 2.0 Startups: Bootstrap For Success
If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere: New York, NY! Sing it loud, sing it proud fellow Silicon Alley Web entrepreneurs and keep focused: A blinding coterie of Internet star-powered “angel” investor friends is optional, very.
While Silicon Valley’s latest French import–Loic LeMeur-hails an increasingly cliched open Web “conversation,’ his thick as honey ode to his own Web insider friends testifies to a not so open, entrenched, self-perpetuating Web 2.0 power clique. BEWARE the dazzle, though: Incestuous back-slapping, mutal promoing and “A-list” money-passing is not all it is hyped to be.
Michael TechCrunch Arrington, for big example. LeMeur offers a Valentine’s Day testimonial to “angel” Arrington for his media and financial embrace: “Michael sees hundreds of startups a week so coming from him it was a important for me of course”( excuse LeMeur’s English!).
Those very same startups that Michael “sees,” however, often bemoan the lack of a net positive “TechCrunch effect.” Just ask Mr. Web 2.0 himself, Tim O’Reilly, as I recount in Web 2.0 Startups: Will Geek Chumby ‘Fade Away’ in 2008?
O’Reilly dismissed out of hand the “obsessive” work of Arrington’s TechCrunch on the very eve of his own beloved Web 2.0 Summit in October:
TechCrunch is the #1 site on the Techmeme leaderboard, yet most of what it covers will be forgotten not merely in years but in months, and have proven to be completely unimportant: the froth of me-too company creation around ideas and trends that as yet are quite immature and poorly understood. (Michael Arrington himself told me that most of the companies he’s covered since starting Techcrunch “have just faded away”.)
BUT, Monsieur LeMeur will protest that OUI, MAIS Michael LIKES my Seesmic! Alas, if Arrington puts his money where his mouth is, that may be the biggest Web 2.0 red flag of all, as I analyze in Edgeio Web 2.0 Bomb: Michael TechCrunch Arrington Cheers $5 million Startup Loss and Edgeio $5 million Failure: The Myth of Disposable Startups.
Beware copain LeMeur’s startup advice as well, I analyse in Loic Le Meur Seesmic Formula? NO (Big) Idea, NO (Marketing) Plan, NO (Revenue) Model.
Voulez gagner dans le monde entrepreneurial? N’ecoutez pas Monsieur Loic Le Meur, n’importe qu’il parle en Anglais, ou en Francais!
Loic Le Meur is an alum of France’s take on Harvard Business School, and so am I: Hautes Etudes Commerciales, HEC. Nevertheless, Le Meur giddily, and Web 2.0 fashionably, disses all notions of solid business theory.
I do not, though. In the world of startup advice, my money would be on a different French-born entrepreneur that ventured to the United States long before Le Meur was on the French-American scene: Georges Doriot, Harvard Business School Professor and considered the creator of the modern practice of venture capitalism, a theoretically sound practice.
LeMeur proudly scoffs at the need for research, planning, marketing…What has he planned to do with all the new found money his star spangled friends are handing over then? The irony of the LeMeur Web 2.0 startup “theory” is that he ought to be able to bootstrap his way to viral success!
Fellow Silicon Alley entrepreneurs, YOU CAN TOO!
Who needs marketing? Don’t focus on getting rich? Who even needs a big idea? as per LeMeur! Just do it, he says.
I say just do it as well, but with a solid, low-cost business plan providing the fuel, NOT big name, you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours angel dust, as LeMeur hails for his own “precious” and “amazing” immigrant startup story.
Here is a bit of the “conversation” that LeMeur’s deliberate money and power fueled startup “friending” has inspired, at Le Meur’s blog:
MON DIEU WRITES TO LOIC: Congrats Loic. Having such a group of rich friends surely must have taken time to cultivate but clearly all that arse kissing has proved worthwhile and with your garlic flair and charm that was easy.
Although I think your hard work starts now because you have taken money from “friends” and they trust you to return it with a successful sale of seesmic. So no pressure then, just your reputation.
In launching seesmic and raising the money you proved two things.
1. It is more about who you know and not what you know. Seesmic is an ok solution technically in search of a mass market but somehow people have given you $6m to show it can return $600m. There are better ideas out there that will not get this level of funding.
2. It is where you live that matters. The names you drop in the post above show that you have to be in the “in-crowd”.
I do wish you well and now wonder who will buy you. Perhaps Microsoft now they have $45bn spare.
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