Category Archives: Trends

March 28, 2011 · 11:48 pm

The Anti-Advisory Board

Last week I did a guest post for VentureBeat on building an Anti-Advisory Board. I’ve included my original (unedited) post below.

Your anti-advisory board: Leverage for lean startups (and life)

Umberto Eco, encyclopedic Italian author, philosopher, and semiotician is known, among other things, for the size of his private libraries. Just one of them is thought to contain over 30,000 books – and among private collections, is generally the stuff of legend.

When asked if he has read each of these tomes, Professor Eco is said to have explained that the value of such a collection was not in the books that he had read, but in fact in his assortment of unread books, his “anti-library.’  “A private library is not an ego boosting appendage but a research tool.” writes Nassim Taleb author of the induction-defying Black Swan. In other words, knowing what you don’t know can be even more valuable than what you do.

Sounds to me like Umberto Eco was building an awesome Advisory Board.

Your Company’s Advisors

I’ve been fascinated for some time by the leverage that comes from distributed expertise. Building a board, whether of the Advisor or Director variety, is about finding the experience outside of your four walls that help you know what you don’t. And done well, this can mean the difference between life or death for any venture.

Take for instance a company like Evolution Robotics (one of our investments). Evolution Robotics is the creator of the award-winning Mint, and focuses on bringing state of the art robotics technology to consumer products. Early in the company’s existence, this meant partnering with consumer brands to augment their existing products. If you wanted to take your phone or vacuum cleaner or mobile device and give it the brains to autonomously interact with the real environment, you’d leverage technology from ER.

But the company also wanted to launch their own consumer products — and it was in that context that having the right advisors was critical. To help with design, Evolution tapped award-winning industrial designer Yves Behar, designer of the Jawbone headset and One Laptop per Child. To help with retail and CPG, Evolution reached out to people like Michael Merriman, former CEO of Royal Appliance, maker of the Dirt Devil vacuum. The talent and expertise of these and other strong advisors ensured the company could think through the unknown elements of a new consumer product launch, and help the engineers invent an entirely new consumer product category: autonomous hardwood floor care.

Your Personal Advisors

Advisors aren’t just for companies, though. They’re useful for any anyone. A few years ago I found myself having trouble executing on the “important but not urgent” things I wanted to accomplish. I was passionate about social entrepreneurship and film, two interests outside of my day job that just kept getting pushed off.

A friend and peer who understood my enthusiasm (and was tired of my whining) finally suggested that I put together a “personal board” to hold myself accountable. The idea was to assemble a group of people I respected, and with whom I’d check in on a regular basis to make sure I was staying on track with my personal goals. In my case, that meant spending more time to work with awesome social ventures and with film projects that I found meaningful. My personal board has also helped nurture my career and guided me through some of my toughest negotiations.

It’s something I’ve sworn by ever since.

Your Crowdsourced Advisors (aka your anti-graph)

There is a new frontier in the world of distributed expertise. We share our status with them on almost an hourly basis. They’re virtual, often consist of thousands of people, and they give us feedback immediately. They’re our social graph.

Anyone who’s asked a question to their Facebook friends or Twitter followers, or been floored by the responsiveness of the Quora community, can appreciate the power of virtual, distributed brains to help give you immediate feedback on vast array of topics.

A couple of weeks back I asked a very mechanical question to my Facebook friends and the Twitterverse related to data around venture-backed startups. While the information I was looking for didn’t actually exist in any one place, someone in my network actually wrote a script to mine the data from CrunchBase and other sources (thanks Oussama!).

I’ve used my social graph in real-time to share cab rides from airports, to connect with people when I’m visiting a new city and even to test ideas for articles. But a far greater power is to keep you accountable and ahead of the things that really matter. And in that respect we’re just getting started.

Umberto Eco is clearly a man ahead of his time. I can only imagine the size of his anti-social network. :)

Saad Khan is a partner and anti-VC at CMEA Capital. He’s a seed and early stage investor in Blekko, Pixazza, Jobvite, and Evolution Robotics. He occasionally blogs at SaadWired and tweets the anti-verse @saadventures

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January 20, 2011 · 8:55 pm

Why the Arab World needs Heroes

As a number of friends may know, I’ve been on a pretty aggressive travel schedule over the last couple of months. Its been a blur, but I finally put some thoughts together about my most recent trip to the Middle East.

The folks at Forbes were kind enough to let me share it in my third guest post for them. It’s a little longer than usual, but I’m anxious to hear what you think about it.

(text of the article below)

The Arab World Needs (Entrepreneurial) Heroes

Jan. 20 2011 – 8:23 pm | 345 views | 0 recommendations | 0 comments
Posted by Eric Savitz

Saad Khan: We can be heroes.

Written By Saad Khan

Dubai is a city that defies the laws of physics. It is a place where architects are regularly commissioned to build the Dali-esque. Tallest building in the world? Check. Islands in the shapes of Palm Trees? Done. Want Whistler-like ski conditions in a shopping mall or an underwater hotel? Double check. It has more cranes than any city in the world today with the exception of Shanghai. Its airport terminals are a microcosm of the city-state:  epic in size, unabashedly commercial and catering to a cross-section of humanity that is simply unparalleled (how exactly do Seychellois communicate with Ethiopians?)

In the middle of the barren desert, Dubai has built one of the most impressive balance sheets of hard assets in the world. It is the showcase for entrepreneurial vigor (and renewal) in the Middle East. Yet in 2010, it was barely rescued by its neighbor Abu Dhabi from the verge of bankruptcy. So what gives?

Simple. Dubai, like much of the region, needs heroes.

A few weeks back I presented at the 2010 Celebration of Entrepreneurship conference, hosted by Arif Naqvi’s Abraaj Capital. The conference was a first of a kind Pan-regional unconference (a cross between TED and TechCrunch for the Middle East). Over 2,000 entrepreneurs, innovators and stakeholders in the region’s were buzzing to connect, share and hear the stories and lessons learned from entrepreneurial practitioners from around the world. Silicon Valley personalities like Mike Cassidy, Joi Ito, and my colleague Jim Hornthal, talked about their experiences, alongside regional innovators like Osman Sultan, CEO of du, a telco in the United Arab Emirates. Everyone shared pages from their playbook and themes that are all-too-familiar for Silicon Valley types, including embracing lessons from failure, failing forward, and nurturing a culture that encourages risk-taking.

My own talk was entitled “Why Entrepreneurs are the New Asset Class,” a follow-up to a meme I’ve written about before for Forbes. I discussed the characteristics that I’ve seen in people, some of whom I’ve invested in, that personify great entrepreneurs. I mentioned the stories of Rich Skrenta, Tim Westergren, Renaud Laplanche, Salman Khan, and Leila Janah – all of whom embody the spirit of entrepreneurs for me in different ways. Yet I realize now that their stories, while instructive, fail to stir local imaginations in one distinct way — they aren’t homegrown.

The new Archetype

But there are many stories that are. Take conference co-host and entrepreneur turned uberangel investor Fadi Gandour. His is a story of a local Jordanian boy who made good. Fadi is the founder and CEO of Middle Eastern logistics company Aramex, the “FedEx of the Middle East.” Gandour’s prominence as a local entrepreneur is now only eclipsed by his role as an angel investor and enabler for young entrepreneurs across the region. Walking the conference floor with Fadi is an unending sequence of high-fives, broad smiles and a friendly arm around countless young entrepreneurs seeking advice from his playbook and funding from his checkbook.

As an angel investor, his story intersects with another local success, Jordanian Internet pioneer Maktoob, the leading Arabic language portal, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2009. Virtually every local entrepreneur I meet, digital aficionado or not, knows the story by heart: two local Jordanians Samih Toukan and Hussam Khoury, bootstrap their way from consulting company to web developers, to an Arabic web email service. They expand the vision to build the Yahoo of the Arab world, and after years of lean-living, Yahoo completes the endorsement and buys the company in a deal rumored to be somewhere north of $100 million. As a mentor and investor, Fadi tells the story on his blog. Young entrepreneurs use this as their fuel to be the next success story from the region.

Then there are the stories of ex-pats coming back to the region. Take Usama Fayyad, formerly Chief Data Officer at Yahoo. Usama came to the U.S. to earn his PhD in data mining, now perhaps the most coveted expertise for anyone in the web business. Usama joined Yahoo through an acquisition of his former company, the DMX Group, a data mining and technology company, and then became the executive responsible for Yahoo’s data strategy and much of their research organization.

He recently launched a startup incubator in his hometown of Amman, Jordan, called Oasis500. I had a chance to visit Oasis500 to meet some of their entrepreneurs. What struck me most was how each entrepreneur I met had a distinct, plausible vision. They are clearly self-assured, fueled by the transitive property of success – if their benefactor can do it, so can they.

Creating the next origin myth

One local entrepreneur has taken this notion of Arab heroes to heart. Naif Al-Mutawa, Founder and CEO of the Teshkeel Media Group, is the creator of “The 99,” a comic book about super-heroes that are derived from local cultural motifs. “The 99” is a reference to the 99 Names of God, attributes that are commonly used in Islamic literature to describe the Almighty. Most recently characters from the 99 have teamed up with their seasoned compatriots across the Atlantic from the Justice League of America – Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman – to take crime fighting globally. One of many firsts for Muslim superheroes.

Yet the majority of the conversations I had with young entrepreneurs touched on one of the main challenges to forging new paths, namely a culture of convention. It came across from a young lady who had recently moved to Dubai from Pakistan. An established marketer by training, she was now struggling with how to leave her well-heeled job to create her own brand identity firm. From a cushy job at a multinational firm to now sleeping on a friends couch, it was clearly as much a social struggle as a financial struggle to make the shift from the gainfully employed to the gainfully happy.

In a region where nearly two-thirds of the population is under the age of 30, an emerging generation is struggling to reconcile convention with a unique vision for their future. They are about to enter the workforce, and they need new examples. They also need jobs: by some accounts 80 million new jobs have to be created to accommodate their entry in the next 20 years.

This is the very real challenge facing Arab governments. Regional leaders have publicly and privately expressed an agenda to move their economies into the next era, an era beyond oil dependence – and that requires embracing change.

The good news is that the Arab World has a rich and ancient tradition of innovation. From this unique confluence of geography and peoples have emerged some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs and innovators including the creators of the first civilizations in Mesopotamia, mathematicians (Al-Khwarizmi for example, was the creator of ‘algebra’ and the term ‘algorithm”), the inventors of optics (“The Treatise on Optics” was written by Hassan Ali Aitan), pioneers in medicine (Rhazes, Avicenna, and Averoes, authors of “Havi”, “The Book of Healing”), and astronomers (Al-Biruni introduced the possibility of the earth‘s rotation on its own axis 500 years before Galileo). The oldest surviving universities in the world today are in the region, such as Al-Azhar in Cairo, and polymaths from Edward Said to the inventor of ice-cream cones can be traced there.

So rather than embark on the next real-estate development, or free trade zone, or embellishing the regional balance sheet with the next physical asset, perhaps it’s time to reclaim this legacy. It’s time to celebrate homegrown iconoclasts.

It’s time to celebrate your heroes.

Saad Khan is a Partner at investment firm CMEA Capital and leads their seed initiative and investments in the heroic entrepreneurs behind  Pixazza, Blekko, Jobvite, and Evolution Robotics. You can follow him on Twitter @saadventures or read his blog at saadwired.com.

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· 8:00 pm

The Like-ification of 2011

Earlier this week, I wrote a guest post on VentureBeat on the Like-ification of 2011 and start-up opportunities for entrepreneurs that can figure out how to leverage what we “like”.

The piece was picked up and re-posted in the New York Times. Ironically, you couldn’t “like” it in either place. Feel free to do so below. :)

(text below)

The Like-Ification of 2011

By SAAD KHAN of VentureBeat

A few weeks ago, I was listening to my car radio and had a surreal moment. Driving down Highway 101, I heard my jam, and reached for my iPhone to press a “like” button. I quickly realized the absurdity of my action — this was, in fact, my very analog car radio.

Nonetheless, I proceeded to spend the rest of the day “like-ing” stuff I came across in the real world: someone brought cupcakes into a meeting — “like”; I heard an awesome company pitch — “like”; I colluded with marauding investors on seed valuations for Y Combinator companies, “like” (and tweet cc @arrington). Every time, it was as if I had given myself a virtual high-five and couldn’t wait to share it.

Clearly Facebook has trained me well.

Do I sound crazy? Maybe, but I’m not alone. According to All Facebook, last July more than 65 million people were “like-ing” stuff on a daily basis. That’s more than 17.5 billion “likes” over nine months (assuming a constant rate and no growth of Facebook traffic). In September, Mashable reported that the “like” button is now present on over 2 million sites around the Web. That’s a lot of new data about user intent, and it’s growing. Not bad for a feature that rolled out only nine months ago.

If 2010 was about gamification, then 2011 will belong to people who can figure out what to do with what we like.

Like-ification of the Web

“Likes” and the social graph that creates them represent a new contextual layer on top of the existing web. It’s a layer that brings new opportunities for discovery and personalization in a world where noise is expanding much faster than signal (see last week’s fire in the blogosphere about Google’s losing battle against spam). This has significant implications in areas like search. Bing and Blekko have already announced integration of “like” data into search results to help improve discovery and relevance. Expect better utilization of this data and new discovery services to follow suit.

Like-ification of advertising

The holy grail in advertising is when the content is the advertising and vice versa. “Like” data gives advertisers the ability to personalize their message to an audience of one and target messages only to those that have expressed intent and interest. While Facebook itself is in pole position to leverage this data, in the rapidly expanding display advertising business, like-ification also has big implications for other stakeholders in the space. Retargeting vendors like AdRoll, Retargeter, and TellApart are already using your click history as a proxy for consumer intent, and data vendors like BlueKai and eXelate are building intent data about consumers all around the web.

While I expect to see continued vigorous privacy debates as consumers lobby for the proper controls over their data, imagine the value of explicit social expressions of consumer interest as the display ad market continues to heat up in 2011.

Like-ification of the real world

Finally, “likes” are coming out of their digital cage and into the analog world. Digital metadata is being layered onto the physical world. And ubiquitous access to sensor-laden mobile devices means that user data and intent is now being captured about physical locations like “check-ins” on Foursquare and Facebook Places, personal activity with Nike Fit and FitBit, the things we buy on apps like StickyBits, and even the stuff we see (it’s not just TV — remember this awesome Word Lens translation demo?).

Smart devices are growing in number and even more stacked with real robotics capabilities (Near Field Communications chips, image recognition) embedded at consumer price points. Our personal devices can increasingly perceive the physical world, and it’s not hard to imagine the physical world increasingly recognizing us. My Xbox Kinect already authenticates my face and pairs it with my player profile. Imagine what that could mean for your status updates.

Big changes are afoot in 2011. I think entrepreneurs are going to heart them.

Saad Khan likes his day job as a seed investor at CMEA Capital and giving love to his portfolio companies Blekko, Pixazza, Evolution Robotics, and Jobvite. You can  follow him on Twitter @saadventures

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September 21, 2010 · 4:19 pm

Google Instant Proves we all want to be Rappers (and taught me how to Dougie)

Google Instant Search must be crack for sociologists. Now, I’m no sociologist (though I suspect VCs would be a good study in group-think) but I generally like to know what my neighbors are up to, their likes and dislikes. And as it turns out, one of the benefits of Google’s recently released Instant Search is that it gives you a window into what’s on their mind (based on the most popular queries in your area).

Apparently all of my neighbors are closet rappers.

Take the following query: type in “i l” and Google’s updated predictive algorithms prepopulate the query to “i love the way you lie” and instantly surfaces rapper Eminem’s lyrics to the aforementioned song and video. You would think two characters into a query, there would still be an infinite array of possibilities: sonnets with those three special little words, Valentine’s Day proclamations, etc. You would, of course, be wrong.

Or say you’re looking for the number to the voice based information service that Microsoft bought. What was their name again? TellMe Networks? Be careful, throw in an extra space and “tell me ”  instantly whisks you to the lyrics for ghetto fabulous Bay Area rapper E40’s “Tell Me When to Go” (whose van I sighted several months back at a Berkeley gas station).

What’s that, you want to learn a new skill? Try “teach m” and Cali Swag District will teach you how to Dougie. Seeking parenting advice? “Parents j” will confirm its hopeless because Parents Just Don’t Understand. Entrepreneurs — you want to be billionaires (and on the cover of Forbes magazine)?  “I wa” may help.

Even benign query strings like “in we” lead to Will Smith’s lyric “In West Philadelphia born and raised.”  Futile attempts at punctuation like “hyph” lead me straight to Wikipedia entries about the Hyphy movement. Most any query construction that fits the grammar  ‘I ’ + a letter of the English alphabet is on the verge of transporting me to a key refrain in someone’s anthem (apparently musicians are self-centered people). Everywhere I go I’m surrounded by Tupac’s battle cries (“hit e”) or Cyndi Lauper’s cheesy songs from the 80s (“girls j”).

Which is just another way of saying that Google’s most recent effort to engineer our collective experience from the long tail back towards the fat head is reinforcing our shared humanity. And apparently what’s holding mankind together are SEO gods Eminem and Rihanna.

I’m just glad they turned off expletive search.

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August 20, 2010 · 11:23 pm

Entrepreneurs Are the New Asset Class

For many years now I’ve seen my role as a VC to invest in people, not companies. I finally decided to put it in writing. :)

Here is my second in a series of guest posts on Forbes as to Why Entrepreneurs are the New Asset Class (and why we ought to invest in them).

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July 23, 2010 · 10:31 am

Blekko IPO, Day 1 (July 19, 2010)

For many months now dozens of people have asked me about what’s cooking at Blekko. And for many months all I’ve said is “Blekko is a big, bold, bet in search. It’s bad-ass, and it’s in stealth. Stay tuned.”

Well,  today I can finally give them an answer (and it feels great).

And here it is, in video form (thanks Mike Arrington):

Here’s what Blekko’s founders Rich Skrenta and Mike Markson had to say:


You can also see Rich and Mike’s perspective on their respective blogs, here and here.

Finally, here is the original TechCrunch post on Blekko (I’ve included snippets and screenshots below):

What Makes Blekko Different?

Blekko is a full web search engine, with regular crawls of billions of web pages. But they know that they can’t beat Google at size of index, relevancy and speed right out of the gate. So they’re differentiating themselves in  another way – by giving users tools to do new types of searches that they can’t do elsewhere. And by providing an unprecedented level of access to the algorithms and data that Blekko uses to determine relevancy.

That doesn’t mean Blekko’s relevancy isn’t great. The company says they’re on par with Google and Bing for most queries. But the differentiating feature are the query refinement tools they call Slashtags. These tools, like /news or /date or /amazon or /blogs, or any combination, make it very simple to quickly filter results to what you are looking for.

Users can create their own slashtags based on a group of URLs. I’ve created one that lists all TechCrunch sites to do easy site search. Others have created slashtags for conservative or liberal blogs, top tech sites, etc. If they make those slashtags public, others can use them, too.

The company also lets users search via a variety of APIs. Add /amazon to search on Amazon. Or /twitter to search via the Twitter API. Or just type /whatever.com to search just that domain.”

Blekko Is Instantly Likeable

Anyone who’s used to advanced search tools on Google will instantly like Blekko. It’s much quicker than using things like “site:” modifiers on Google, and some of the searches you can do on Blekko you just can’t do on Google at all.

Will less advanced users like Blekko, too? The founders think they will. And since Blekko works just like the search engines they’re used to as well, they think people will quickly get comfortable creating and using slashtags.

Transparency

Blekko is also showing just about all the behind the scenes data that they have to determine rank and relevancy. You can see inbound links, duplicated content and associated metadata for any domain in their index.”

I think it’s about time someone started pushing the envelope again in search. And I’m betting that Rich, Mike, and the Blekko team are the guys to do it.

I’ll have a lot more to say about it in the coming weeks, but that’s my answer for right now. Stay tuned. :)

Rich, Mike, and team — congrats again on sharing your baby with the world!

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March 10, 2010 · 1:22 am

Weak Signals

The following is a post I recently wrote for CMEA’s blog. You can also see it here.

At the World Economic Forum this past January, there was a two-hour session of the program devoted to the topic of “Weak Signals.”  This didn’t turn out to be a warning about bad communications infrastructure (as the crackberry addict in me feared), but instead addressed the concept of:

incipient and invisible changes of activity in a given area that are bound to have broader consequences in years to come.

In other words, a weak signal is something that is beginning to happen and could lead to a larger trend. The session explored weak signals across economics, science, and society; from the potential effects of restrictive immigration policy on America’s status as a research powerhouse, to the implications of global connectedness enabled by new communications infrastructure. The purpose of the program was to amplify the weak signals around the group, and by doing so to identify future opportunities while also recognizing possible pitfalls.

As someone who has the privilege of regularly interacting with many of the entrepreneurs, technologists, and designers creating the future, it got me thinking about activity and changes happening now that may point to interesting trends to watch in the months and years to come. Some of these may be things that we witness everyday but deserve more reflection; others may be relatively new additions to our lexicon.

I thought I’d start the conversation and introduce seven of the “weak signals” that have my antennae at attention. I’ll be expanding on them in future posts.

1. Free at last … Entrepreneurs are free at last

Much has been written about the “lean startup” and the ability of companies that leverage Internet technologies to be highly capital efficient. Fundamental enablers of this phenomenon include open source infrastructure, cloud resources, global talent, and new platforms that are available for viral growth and distribution. Extrapolating current trends, it’s clear that launching a software product will eventually approach “free”. What are the economics of this freedom and its implications for the venture capital industry?

2. The rise of “Micro-work”


The Internet is becoming an API onto the world’s most valuable resource, global talent. The ability to access not just the wisdom of the crowd, but increasingly the labor of the crowd has the potential to disrupt business models in every vertical where on-demand talent pools can fulfill the work that used to be delivered by traditional employer arrangements. This phenomenon will also enable an entirely new class of products and services that take advantage of this mode of work. How will the rise of micro-work impact business and the culture of labor?

3. Game Mechanics rule the world

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. My hammer for many months now looks a lot like a video game. The social games phenomenon is a testament to the power of well-designed systems to create massively engaging experiences, and provide a window into where the future of media may be headed (the video game industry has been bigger than Hollywood for some time now). Great game designers are experts at exploiting innate social drivers such as status and competition to motivate human behavior and create addicting experiences. These same principles are now being applied to a host of new and unexpected areas far outside the realm of traditional entertainment.

4. Social Data Mining

In addition to being one of the most efficient engines of communication and viral propagation, the social web has a power that’s only just beginning to be understood. The social metrics and behavioral exhaust of the social web, including the country-sized Facebook and countless others stitched across Twitter, MySpace and the Internet is the mother lode of the social gold rush. Embedded in all that data is Nostradamus-like potential to understand the collective activity, preferences, and even predict the behavior of nearly 1/6th of our planet and counting. This data is being mined to inform all kinds of real world applications, with some heady implications.

5. Intelligent Design

As many of our startups in the Valley and around the country will attest, one of the hardest hires today is a strong designer (think UI people, front-end engineers, product designers). In an era of infinite consumer choice, increasingly what separates the winners from the losers isn’t measured in megabits and terabytes, but in the usability that creates unprecedented experiences. But the question remains, what is good design?

6. Digital goes Analog:

Today digital technology for most people still means something that happens behind a backlit screen, whether 50 or 3 inches in diagonal. Increasingly, digital is moving out into our analog world, and becoming the mediating lens through which we experience reality. What opportunities will be created when technology shifts from a tethered and passive tool to a catalyst in the real world?

7. Platforms for the future (and the future of platforms)

It used to be a new platform would come around every 10 years, but these days announcements about a new API spring up every few weeks. These new platforms represent incredible opportunities for businesses to increase distribution and create new customer value. Yet many of these will never achieve critical mass. Is this frenetic activity sustainable and what will be the platforms of the future?

These are some of the things that have me thinking. Would love to hear about the weak signals that have your attention.

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