Jun’s Startup Life

I went to the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco last week with Ryan Geist.  It was a very eye-opening experience for me because I got to see with my own eyes how many web 2.0 companies are actually out there!  There is a ridiculous amount of companies who are literally doing the same things.  Ryan and I counted about 15 companies that are doing enterprise wikis and company communities.  I had this idea for a Gen-Y generated TechCrunch and had one of my team members start recruiting authors to build the blog; however, I went to the event and what do you think I saw?  Trade Vibes.  After taking a deep breath and looking at all of the companies at the event, I now understand the level of competition in the Web 2.0 industry and just how difficult it is to make it big and stand out above the crowd.

I listened to a few of the keynote and was actually impressed by Max Levchin, the Founder of Slide.  Even though he wasn’t the greatest orator, I found his interview very enlightening.  He is 32 (he actually looks about 26 to me) and has experienced previous failures.  Even though I am against useless application like Fun Wall or Super Poke Facebook, I must say that he has done a great job giving the masses what they want.  The first key principle that I learned is to market for the masses. If you get enough people using your site, you’ll eventually find a way to make money.

The second key principle that I learned came from Lyle Fong, the Founder and CEO of Lithium.  I learned that you must tailor your community to that 1% of hardcore users. If you can get that 1% to constantly be contributing and bring quality and value to your site, then the casual users will eventually feel the “helpfulness” of the site and want to participate in the community.

I’ll give the overall conference a B-.  There were some quality workshops and a few quality keynotes, but I really didn’t see anything super exceptional.  The conference floor had a lot of people trying to sell you and make you use your product; there wasn’t much business development going on.  The South Park Crawl (which was the after-conference parties that companies hosted) was actually very fun.  The Yahoo and IBM parties took the cake.

I will be going to Startup Camp in two weeks.  If you’re in the area (OC or LA) and would like to come, I would love to carpool with you!