I’m really psyched to announce that Highland Capital Partners and Charles River Ventures have invested $3.1M in CampusLIVE. In just a few short years the CampusLIVE team has grown from 1 to over 15. This is by far the most exciting time of my life. Thanks to all who have been a tremendous help to me and the rest of the CampusLIVE team.
A great article was just posted on the Harvard Business School website (http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/3348.html), listing out the most common legal mistakes made by entrepreneurs. I thought it would be worthwhile to see how many of them I’ve personally experienced – the answer is many more than I’d like. The good thing is, it just takes one time to learn these things. My future ventures will benefit from not having to learn all these mistakes.
The one that really bit my ass was #7. If there is ONE thing you do right in your startup, file the 83b election in a timely manner. If you don’t, you will get screwed, intensely hard by by the IRS – in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars kind of screwed.
The List:
(mistakes i’ve personally been through are underlined)
#10: Failing to incorporate early enough.
#9: Issuing founder shares without vesting.
#8: Hiring a lawyer not experienced in dealing with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.
#7: Failing to make a timely Section 83 (b) election.
#6: Negotiating venture capital financing based solely on the valuation.
#5: Waiting to consider international intellectual property protection.
#4: Disclosing inventions without a nondisclosure agreement, or before the patent application is filed.
#3: Starting a business while employed by a potential competitor, or hiring employees without first checking their agreements with the current employer and their knowledge of trade secrets.
#2: Promising more in the business plan than can be delivered and failing to comply with state and federal securities laws.
#1: Thinking any legal problems can be solved later.
Amazon is on fire adding new features to their Amazon Web Services (AWS) lineup. It seems like ever month a new major product is released, and I inevitably have to stop what I’m doing and hack something together with it. Route 53 is Amazon’s answer to DNS-As-A-Service, competing with the likes of UltraDNS, EasyDNS, Dynect and others. As a CTO/sys-admin, this is in intriguing service, because running my own DNS takes time, monitoring and money. Except for the lack of a GUI (which I’ll get into later), I think this service is awesome.
Pricing
$1/month/zone +
$0.50 per million queries – first 1 Billion queries / month
$0.25 per million queries – over 1 Billion queries / month
For the average/moderate/large website, this is an extremely nominal line item.
Setup
This was harder than it had to be, due to the fact that there isn’t an official GUI to manage your zones from within your AWS manager. After signing up I expected a new tab to appear in my management console. Much to my surprise, you need interface with an API to add/edit/delete zones. Isn’t this 2011? Seriously, how long could it take them to create a tab in here to make everyone’s lives easier?
This is where some entrepreneurs come in and build a business around creating GUIs for Amazon’s CLIs. DNS30.com is a simple front end for the Route 53 service that simply works. You enter your AWS authorization keys and then create zones using simple forms. For my setup I was simply moving all my DNS from in house servers to AWS, so I didn’t have to worry about downtime. My steps were:
1) Order Route 53 Service
2) Create new set of Authorization Keys for DNS30.com to use, separate from the one I use to spin-up servers with.
3) Signup for beta DNS30.com service. Once logged in and setup, it will give you 4 AWS nameservers to use.
4) Create identical resource records on DNS30 from my current zone file
5) Test that zone is working correctly using DIG…. # dig @ns-xyz.aws-dns.org mydomain.com a
6) Once I verify that AWS is returning correct zone data, I went to my registrar and pointed my domain to the AWS provided nameservers.
Testing
As I mentioned earlier, using DIG at the command line is an easy way to test DNS response times. It appears from my tests that the AWS Route 53 dns servers are slightly slower than my homebrewed VPS setup, but 10 milliseconds isn’t the lowest hanging fruit in my site optimization strategy for CampusLIVE. The example test resulted in a 70ms response time.
jared@ubuntux:~$ dig @ns-335.awsdns-41.com campuslive.com a
CampusLIVE is changing banks in the next couple weeks. We’ve narrowed the search down to two recommended banks, both of which would provide close to identical services for us. In the end the decision came down to their responses to a few questions we had – on a Friday night at 5pm. We emailed both banks an identical set of final questions about costs that we needed answered before we moved forward. Banker 1 picked up the phone and called in less than 5 minutes of the email – explaining everything to us. Banker 2 emailed back saying he would try to put some information together for us on Monday. One provided exceptional service, one is just doing enough to get by.
I was catching up on some episodes of Parks & Recreation last night on my Netflix connected XBox (awesome). All of the TV shows on Netflix have zero commercials. I find this interesting because the actual reason I pay $9/month for Netflix is not because of it’s commercial free content, but because I get to watch TV on my schedule. It’s convenient. Regular TV doesn’t allow this. In fact I’d still pay $9/month if every TV show and movie had commercial breaks in it.
So why doesn’t Netflix offer a free version of it’s service with commercials in the TV shows and movies? It can’t be too difficult to monetize this enough to earn at least $9/user/month. Or let’s say someone has to watch at least 4 hours of programming a month for them to break even with advertising – well, just bill them $9 if they watch less than 4 hours in programming per month.
Consumers like free. We like to enjoy entertainment on OUR schedule. We have accepted that ads are part of life.
Amazon recently invested $175mm into the group buying underdog – LivingSocial.com. Of course it must be said that for an underdog, they are still doing extremely well – printing money.
I wondered what the first big move might be to establish themselves after jumping into bed with Amazon. Today I found out – $20 Amazon giftcards for $10. Brilliant. They have now far surpassed the $11mm in gross revenue brought in by chief competitor Groupon during their $25 for $50 Gap deal.
As of now they’re up over 1 MILLION sold. We can now count Amazon’s total investment in LivingSocial to be at least $185mm.
It’s getting to the point where Facebook’s developers should just include a “Give My Life Away” button for Facebook Connect. What percentage of people actually click through and allow an untrusted app ALL of this information? The conversion rates must be awful.
From my experience with CampusLIVE – asking for this many permissions from the user typically puts the Allow button below the fold so it’s not even click-able. This happened to us with 8 requests. RockMelt has an amazing 11 requests for information.
