In December last year I had the opportunity to attend a presentation by Guy Kawasaki. I already wrote about this experience a couple of weeks ago.
As a co-founder of Garage Technology Ventures and co-founder of a new startup, Truemors, he explained his point of view in regards of how much capital a web 2.0 startup requires to start its operations and complete its products. In most cases, the amount needed is really low because nowadays there are so many resources available, sometimes for free, that can help when it comes to develop a new product available on the web.
All that said, I can’t agree more with Guy. I know how much it costs to grow a company and to develop new services from a strong lineup of engineers and developers. If you decide to build data centers on your own, with 500K today you can build a fully-fledged and very powerful one and host it in any of the thousand structures worldwide. Alternatively, paying a fair monthly fee, you can get some dedicated servers from many suppliers, you just have to choose a very good one.
In this perspective I’m trying to figure out what Seesmic is going to do with $6M. Hey, it’s a lot of money! Loic is surely happy with that, of course, in particular thanks to the ability of having Seesmic mentioned here and there through the most read Web 2.0 blog worldwide, TechCrunch. ValleyWag comments this way:
…including TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, whose blog has conveniently touted Seesmic at every turn.
Good move, in particular when Mike Arrington is among Seesmic’s investors and when things like this happen. Anyway, my concerns are only related to what a careful entrepreneur could really do with such amount of money. Three new startups?
Look at what pal Pat Phelan is doing with MaxRoam. They got 5M euro but they are running a service that involves infrastructures, international coverage, international agreements and a certain amount of costs and so on and can potentially disrupt the mobile market. Anyway, I strongly believe in what there is behind services like Seesmic otherwise we would have closed my company’s Hictu down months ago. I’m only highlighting that Web 2.0 services are mostly far from being capital intensive and that nowadays entrepreneurs in this space can do much more with much less.
Mike Arrington expects great things from this company thanks to him and all the buzz he’s helping to create around it. On the other hand, my guess is, as always happen, that users make the difference. Only users rule and the success of a service can only be measured when users are happy with that and are using it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that someone is thinking himself: that jealous guy is upset because his service, Hictu, is far from creating all that buzz and from raising so much money. Yes, I would think the same, but what I’m trying to do here is to raise a red flag on some behaviors that lead to the creation of “fantastic services” before they are really out and users can give their own opinion. You can make use them from your friends, that are “big names” and invested money on it, so they have all the interest to push it, but where are the real users? I mean users that made the success of Skype, eBay, YouTube and so on…
In the meantime, congrats to Loic for the goal.
funding, guy kawasaki, loic le meur, luca filigheddu, seesmic, truemors
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