SortiPreneur

Groups: The Next Generation

I have been procrastinating writing about the new round of funding for Grou.ps, primarily since it had already been widely reported.  Then, Fred's post from this morning prompted me to finally post about both the round, and the other critical news from Grou.ps, the open-sourcing of the platform.

Fred's conclusion is:

So using the less is more mantra, someone should build just that, make it drop dead simple, and then build the killer API that lets everyone build on top of that. It may be that the big social nets are in the best spot to do that. Or maybe not.

Emre Sokullu, the founder and CEO of Grou.ps, commented on Fred's blog, pointing out that the needs of group members and owners differ, which is a good point and an area that Grou.ps focuses on intently.

Another thing that Grou.ps has made a huge leap in is the open-sourcing of the platform.  This goes beyond the killer API solution Fred offers and is a critical step for wider adoption of Grou.ps.  Some of the proceeds from the new round will go towards opening the whole system, which, according to Emre, will:

• Commoditize the Grou.ps platform, makes it the natural choice of all online community leaders
• Give Grou.ps the competitive advantage to hire the most talented and motivated people from the pool of open source contributors.
• Let everyone create their own modules, share it with the rest of the world
• Allow the team to rethink their framework and make it even more modular and easily extensible

Grou.ps is already getting a lot of comparisons to Ning as a competitor.  The open-sourcing should help it stay competitive on the technology front.

Congratulations to Emre and the team on the new funding.  I'm also excited to be collaborating with the Golden Horn Ventures team to make Grou.ps a winner in social groupware.

Miracle Fruit of Venture Capital

A small berry makes everything you eat afterwards make sweeter, as the NY Times reports:

[A] small red berry called miracle fruit ...  rewires the way the palate perceives sour flavors for an hour or so, rendering lemons as sweet as candy.
...
The cause of the reaction is a protein called miraculin, which binds with the taste buds and acts as a sweetness inducer when it comes in contact with acids...
...limes were candied, vinegar resembled apple juice, goat cheese tasted like cheesecake on the tongue and goat cheese on the throat. Bananas were just bananas.

The venture capital industry has its own version of these miracle fruits.  In 2005, the miracle fruit was social networking.  In 2006, user-generated content, and in 2007, web video, when mentioned in a business plan, made made it sweeter.

I am not sure what the miracle fruit in 2008 is.  It seems to be a cautious year, so maybe it's positive cash flow.

$1 Billion of Online Pizza

A CNN article reports that Papa John's Pizza has sold over $1 billion of pizza through their online ordering service.  The article is titled "Mamma Mia!" and I concur.

This puts a big smile on my face as I am one of the investors in the recent series A round raised by YemekSepeti.com, the leading online food delivery service in Turkey. 

Grou.ps Launches US Beta

Grou.ps launched its US beta today, with an improved UI.  Emre and team have been hard at work on getting the platform ready for this important milestone.  Grou.ps already has some 150K users and a great need identified with Web2.0 services proliferating without any glue to tie them together.  The US market should be a goldmine for them.

Both the TechCrunch and Venture Beat posts reporting the launch point out critical points:

Grou.ps benefits from being simple like Ning and Wetpaint, yet focused on productivity like Google and Zoho. They present a simple free solution for moderated online collaboration.

The idea is good: Right now, members of VentureBeat read RSS feeds from other sites within Google Reader, Bloglines or another RSS reader service, then chat about them together on a freestanding IM service. Grou.ps would let you do it all at once, in one place.

Congratulations to the Grou.ps team, and their VC backers, GHV.

How to Raise VC Funding

:)

(via Fabrice)

"Great" Makes a Difference

Auren has a good post on the difference truly outstanding people make in an organization, and emphasizes that this is especially true in start-ups.  I could not agree more.  I find that talent often provides the greatest bottleneck in technology start-ups and this is the single most important point in every investment we consider in the Turkish market.

In the process, Auren goes on to identify the only way a start-up can ensure hiring great people:

To me it is amazing how some start-ups choose who they hire – many seem to hire anyone that went to MIT.    That means they are outsourcing their hiring to the $40k/year admissions officer at the college who evaluated the person when they were 17! Do you really want to entrust your hiring to a bureaucrat? This is an extremely bad strategy. Of course, many people who went to MIT are real rock-stars and people who went to MIT might be more likely to be rock-stars than people who went to a lesser-known school, but most are only good … you need to work to find the great people.

By asking pointed questions and giving tough exercises, you can determine with high accuracy if someone is really amazing. In fact, I make it a point not to ask questions like “what do you like to do outside of work?” It’s better to ask them to solve tough problems and get to understand their thought-process. Great people have interests that often converge with what they do at work. At Rapleaf we do at least four rounds of interviews and we take our time. This means we occasionally lose some great people, but we err on not having false positives.

Focusing on assembling a team of great individuals is the single most important area an entrepreneur can focus on.

Information is Power

Above is one of a few clichés i could have picked for this post.  But, if anyone's doubting the premise, they can look at the news about Gerson Lehrman's new round of funding by Silver Lake, at an $875m valuation.

While i think the high revenues at GL is the fairly elastic demand by hedge funds (i.e. they really tend to be pretty generous with fees charged to them by high quality service providers), this is still a testament to the value of insight.

This news also makes the recently reported LinkedIn valuation rumours make sense.

Congratulations to Mark Gerson and the Gerson Lerhman team.

TIME Conference 2007 VC Panel

For those of you attending, I am moderating a panel today at 2:30pm.  The topic is "Suggestions from Investors to Entrepreneurs".

(2) Suggestions from Investors to entrepenours
  Cem Sertoğlu (Moderatör) - Mondus.net Chief Executive Officer - SP Ventures, Managing Partner
  Haluk Zontul - Teknoloji Yatırım A.Ş., Member of the Board and Chief Executive Officer
  Yüksel Dibekoğlu - iLab Ventures, Director
  Mae Özkan - Golden Horn Ventures, Founding and Managing Partner

BarCamp Istanbul

Emre Sokullu is organizing BarCamp Istanbul on October 20th at the Besiktas Campus of Bahcesehir University.  His blog post and the BarCamp page cover the details.

Seedcamp Calling Turkish Entrepreneurs

Emre has a post announcing that Seedcamp is coming to Turkey.  This is great news for Turkish entrepreneurs, because where Seedcamp operates is precisely the zone in the Turkish capital universe with a vacuum.  From Emre's post, my interpretation is that the Seedcamp team is not actually visiting Turkey but has indicated that they are interested in seeing Turkish ventures.  I was not able to find any Turkey-specific details on the Seedcamp website.

What is Seedcamp?

Seedcamp is an attempt to jumpstart the entrepreneurial community in Europe by putting the next generation of developers and entrepreneurs in front of a top-tier network of company builders; including seed investors, serial entrepreneurs, product designers, architecture experts, HR specialists, marketers, lawyers, recruiters, and venture capitalists.

Why is this important?

Europe has the necessary ingredients to build the world’s next generation of leading technology companies; talent, capital, ideas, and examples of success; but what it lacks is the tradition of entrepreneurialism. This makes it hard for young entrepreneurs to secure funding, develop the right connections and build teams. Seedcamp is directly addressing these challenges by bringing together entrepreneurs from all over Europe and exposing them to the collective experience of people who can help turn their grand visions into successful businesses.

What is Seedcamp looking for?

A strong team of at least two people who have a creative idea and the energy and commitment to execute. The teams do not need years of experience; in fact, Seedcamp would most benefit first-time entrepreneurs with early, seed-stage ideas. Ideas should leverage the Internet and not have previously been funded. For a full list of selection criteria, visit the website: http://www.seedcamp.com/pages/apply_application_critera

Timeline

• Seedcamp is currently accepting applications: www.seedcamp.com
• Deadline is August 12, 2007
• Top 20 teams will be chosen and invited to Seedcamp Week in London
• Seedcamp Week takes place from September 3 – 7, 2007
• The top five teams will be chosen to receive €50,000 and continued support from the Seedcamp network

I would highly recommend it to any new Turkish internet venture.