At next09 I had the pleasure of being the moderator of a meeting of the titans in social networking, with LinkedIn, XING, and StudiVZ. Conspicuously absent on the panel but present in the discussion were Facebook and Twitter.

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Peter Turi hat ein Video - Interview geposted, dass er mit mir auf dem DLD 09 geführt haben. Darin stellt er solche spannenden Fragen wie:

1) Ist Rezession eine schlechte Zeit für Startups?

2) Wird sich bei den Startups die Spreu vom Weizen trennen?

3) Wird YouTube sevenload verdrängen?

4) Was ist das “nächste große Ding?”

Hier sind meine Antworten:

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This year, all Las Vegas was abuzz with the expectations of attendance to CES - and how they were not met. From cab drivers to convention exhibitors, everyone was touting the scale of the downturn.

To us, the convention presented a more mixed picture. As often is the case in downturns, in an overall downbeat environment, a few interesting developments could be observed:

1) The Slingbox by Slingmedia: offering some 14 Mil. subscribers of its parent company, a midsize cable operator in the US, the opportunity to access Web TV content through their cable content.

2) The advent of HD to TV and other screens, including a number of interesting personal camera devices.

3) The increasing dissemination of “cloud” (now there’s a buzzword) logic to the consumer world: first through “thin client” notebooks that are not much more than windows to web services, and second through a push towards homes servers, ranging from Windows solutions to proprietary home hifi systems. Its too early to name this a significant consumer trend, but slowly we are seeing the first applications for the “internet of things”, “cloud computing”, and “semantic web”.

Recession is the best time for entrepreneurs, Ken Morse (and others) says. Now is the time to see and grasp the potential of these new technologies as they slowly approach end consumer relevance.

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Amidst all the depression caused by the financial crisis, attending SIME this year was like a breath of fresh air. Ola Ahlvarsson worked his magic once again. A very entertaining 60+ year old professor of medicine demonstrated an exciting new technology to create visual statistics called Gapminder, which was acquired by none other than google.org. Rockstar entrepreneurs and investors ranging from Morten Lund to the founders of Bwin infected the audience with entrepreneurial spirit.

Blowing away any clichés about a gambling company, Bwin demonstrated that they have a particularly modern HR Policy.

David Sifry showed how a leading rockstar blogger can become a travel tour guide entrepreneur. Among the most fascinating aspects of the conference was a panel of leading entrepreneurs from exciting international markets such as Vincent Fong for China, Joi Ito for Japan, Mahesh Kumar for India and Michael J. Wolf for the US. That was especially exciting for me as sevenload is in the midst of its internationalization. The most inspiring thing about the conference was the infectious “can do” spirit that the entrepreneurs’ presence radiated, especially those from Holland and Sweden- two countries with a distinct positive attitude that I sometimes miss in Germany.

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A lot is being said and has been written about how strategies and market mechanics determine the success or failure of ventures and large companies. But any entrepreneur will confirm that it usually is execution which decides the fate of the company, especially in venture companies. Thus, leadership capabilities may be the most important skill set of venture management.

Leadership, management, and the principles which guide how employees are motivated and directed in their tasks are usually treated either as a self help topic in management books or as the HR side of company organization.

It might be time to focus on leadership and HR capabilities in the strategic dimension they have for the company. This means to recognize that the best company strategy can be killed by the wrong leadership methods. Good leadership is not only an important requirement for management. It is the necessary condition for company success!

In the region of North Germany where part of my family comes from we say that a fish always stinks from the head, which in my opinion puts in a nutshell the essence of leadership. If your venture team is not motivated or doesn’t excel, start at the head.

Ted Levitt once said that

organizations exist to enable ordinary people to achieve extraordinary things,

which I believe is only a way to say that things happen only if people do them. The success of a company is only achieved if the employees and the managers of that company willingly take the necessary actions to enable that success.

That is certainly first and foremost a question of deciding which of the actions that are available in a given situation is chosen, but it is equally importantly a question of ensuring that every employee executes that strategy in the way that best ensures success, including feedback and adaptation of the strategy when problems arise.

Achieving this, however, is a question of leadership.

Since all dictatorships eventually fail, leadership cannot be reduced to the ability to bark orders. All great historic figures acclaimed for their leadership, from Julius Cesar to Napoleon, from Spartacus to Martin Luther King, are all admired for their ability to inspire, to motivate, and to convey a sense of purpose to a large number of people, i.e. to the organization that they led.

Inspiration however, is nothing without credibility. Credibility, in turn, is only achieved through authenticity. Authenticity is only achieved through honesty. Applied to the world of the 21^st century and the context of leadership in business organizations, this means that a truly successful leader needs to combine the ability to inspire others with a set of skills and principles that are tenets of credibility as a leader:

1. An inspiring sense of purpose.

2. A clear set of unflinching values. Shifty leaders command no respect.

3. Honesty at all costs.

4. The ability to communicate necessities and convey a sense of urgency to a team.

5. The ability to define the organization as a community serving a common goal.

6. The ability to honestly admit own mistakes and address the weaknesses of the organization.

7. Relentless commitment to the company goal, including the necessary ability to “punish underperformance”, without humiliating anyone in the organization.

8. The ability to lead by example, including in personal matters such as health or respect for others.

9. The discipline to pursue a strategy and tactics that belong to that strategy and to adapt these whenever necessary, not only “acting from the gut”.

10. The intelligence to always overestimate competition and underestimate your own position.

Most of these traits require a certain level of self-assurance, respect for others, and clear view of your own shortcomings that is incompatible with most managerial egos. But while there are enough cases of at least temporarily successful egomaniacs, in the long run only those entrepreneurs intelligent enough to value, respect, and reward their performing team members, and self-critical enough to recognize their own mistakes become truly great.

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This weekend a friend of mine called me up, as he was completing - as a leading seed investor - the first round (series A) of a company that I have a minority stake in. He told me that the round being negotiated was just short of Signing, as all main deal elements had been agreed with the investor (a large and well-known VC Fund), but there was one last point of contention left, and - big surprise! - that was Reps and Warranties.

That made me think once again about the peculiar habit of venture capitalists to turn Reps and Warranties almost as much a difficult topic as in M&A. If you think about the term “Venture Capital”, the whole concept is that you venture into something and there is no precisely NO guarantee of success.

Of course it makes full sense to commit founders to proper representation of the state the company is in and to also make them liable for the so-called Title Guarantees, in effect making sure that the shares being transferred to the investor are free of third party rights, are indeed constituted legally and are not subject to any limitations. However, I do not understand why these Reps and Warranties so often go to the core of the risks of the business model, thereby in effect giving the venture capital investment more the character of debt financing, disguised in the Reps and Warranties clause.

Why do I say this?

Because if a founder signs up for - say - a 3 Mil. Euro investment and the company fails due to an event that is at the core of the typical risk of the business model, this may create a warranty case that in the worst of all contract agreements may include full damage to be paid by the founder. This then means that the investor may get up to the total sum of that investment in damages from the founder because of an event that constituted the essence of the typical venture risk.

So put very bluntly, by enforcing Reps & Warranties covering business risks, the investor covered his venture risk by making the founder liable for failure of exactly that risk.

We all know that founders who may be otherwise admirable do not like to focus on legal details and may have bad luck in a choice of their attorneys.

That can be a deadly mistake.

When founders find themselves in such a contract situation, it is not just a reflection of poor negotiation skills on the side of the founders, who - one might argue a bit unfairly - therefore would not deserve anything better.

Such contract clauses are also always a case of misguided priorities on the side of the investor.

While as an investor I have full sympathy for contractual rules that prevent an irresponsible founder from walking away, as in the old adage “with my time and your money to waste, we have nothing to lose”.

However, it is equally unfair to put the investor of a venture in a position where his investment becomes more a case of debt with higher returns and higher default risk than of real venture investment. Moreover, discussions and probable litigation about business risk damage retribution by the founder can divert vital energy from surviving the damaging event, since both the founder and the investor will bes spending considerable time hedging their risks or enforcing their rights. THat can ultimately be much more damaging than the damaging event itself.

Here is my advice to founders in any negotiation about Reps and Warranties:

1) Before negotiation of deal terms, identify the natural risk of your business model

2) Prepare to describe and argue to the investor what the typical risk of the venture is and make it clear from the outset that that risk cannot will not be carried by the founder(s).

3) Make the investor acknowledge these risks early in the process of negotiating the terms

4) At term sheet level make sure that the basic principles guiding an equal distribution of reps and warranties rights between founder and investor include the following

a. Liability of founders is limited to willful behavior and gross negligence

b. There must be a cap of a certain percentage of the investment, in my opinion not more than 50% of the investment sum.

c. For all cases of non-willfull behavior the warranty term should be at most 12 months

d. Each founder is only liable for the fraction of the cap that corresponds to his fraction of shares in the entire company, so a co-founder who has 20 % of shares in a company shall only be liable up to 20% of the cap.

e. All shareholder managers with shares smaller than 7% should be exempt from any liability unless there is a specific reason for that.

f. Damages should be paid only to the extent that the Founder / Manager liable had best knowledge of the Warranty issue.

g. Retribution of damage should be limited to the damage that is incurred directly by the damaging event, confirmed by court ruling and could be reasonably expected. There should be no damage retribution for a loss of valuation of the company, which should be explicitly excluded. Valuation loss is usually covered by downround protection clauses.

h. Retribution of damage should be limited to such damages as cannot be corrected or “repaired”.

i. No damage retribution should be given for damages that are incurred due to lack of cooperation on side of the investor. This could include anything ranging from late payment of investment funds, lack of cooperation in litigation cases, failure of the board members dispatched by the investor to agree in litigating to avoid the damage, and so forth.

k. The most important advice that can be given to any founder signing Reps and Warranties is to put a large amount of energy into the due diligence and disclosure process and the documentation of that due diligence and disclosure process. THis is where attention to detail is a very necessary evil. The contract must include a clause that no events or fact about the company that were or could reasonable have been expected to be known to the investor at the time of the investment can lead to a claim of the investor against the founder. Thus claims are excluded if the the facts that led to the damage were known to the investor.

l. Negotiate all these points, then focus on disclosing well all risks that are part of the business model or lie within the company.

Often investors will present the founders with tough Reps and Warranties basically to incentivize them to puta significant amount of energy in thinking through the risks of the company and the development stage the company is at.

However, founders should rate their investors on the basis on their willingness to accept clauses that correspond with or at least resemble what I advise.

Good Luck!

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We spent the past months preparing our relaunch and securing our next, series B round of funding. I am very happy today because we just received confirmation by the German Antitrust Office that our Funding round is approved.

Our relaunch brings us to the next level, where we simplify channel navigation, combine it with social features, and open our business model one step further to content owners, by letting them have a larger share in our advertising revenue. We still have a lot of optimization work ahead, but the metrics of the past weeks suggest that we are on the right track.

The round of funding we just secured will lay the groundwork for our further expansion, and I am happy and proud that we now have French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Russian and of course Turkish localizations.

Here’s our official Press Release:

http://corporate.sevenload.com/sevenload-secures-new-round-of-financing/

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Recently I had the nice experience of being interviewed by the blogger / founder of http://www.easn.de or Everything A Startup Needs. He asked me to relate:

- how dw capital grew out of denkwerk

- what makes our positioning unique

- what are my criteria for investment

- and how much idealism a Founder can sustain

Of course, an [edited] video interview cannot convey all the things and remarkable people that shaped the rich history of 10 years of denkwerk, but maybe the interview gives anyone interested an impression of the philosophy behind our seed venture unit, dw capital. So, here goes:

Video Interview of Axel Schmiegelow

For the record, and because I also have an agency background:

I do believe in Branding, but I don’t believe Branding should be an excuse for bad conversion of a media campaign.

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In a recent discussion I had at a meeting of which I am a non-executive member, the eternal discussion of

whether priority should be given to monetization or to reach and internationalization

was brought up. The debate centered around the question of whether or not the exit perspectives of the venture (of which I am also a shareholder) would increase or decrease, depending on whether the business model was first proven, at the detriment of international reach, or whether monetization should be allowed to lag because entry into several international markets at once would be a priority.

To me, this debate simply has the wrong starting point. While it is true that exit markets, such as the stock market or the M&A market, are - just like any other market - subject to buyer preference analysis, and while there is some credit to the claim that understanding the decision making “fashions” of typical M&A acquirers does help you in setting the price of your venture at exit,

timing towards such an exit market is more of a gamble than a company strategy.

In my experience, having now gone through two boom and one bust phases, the best strategy for a company to pursue is to

create a viable business model that creates value for customers that customers are prepared to pay for.

This may not always be the “sexiest” portrayal a startup can give itself (as opposed to: we are the next Facebook), but to paraphrase the old saying about design following function or form following function-

PR and the Elevator Pitch should follow the strategy and not the other way around.

This is why I literally get angry at classic venture capital thinking that sees company strategy solely in the dimension of “How will this fit my exit market? How can I sell this story to an acquirer?”. I would always strongly advise any founder

to have a clear and separate vision of their business model that cannot be influenced or swayed, save by the customer

and to work relentlessly on proving and creating that.

Incidentally, succesful American start-ups have often proven that this is the best strategy since they have always focused on gaining size and growth in their home markets before over-focussing on internationalization. In general, this has given them the size and clout necessary to, if need be, acquire whoever it was in a landscape within a specific market. It is true, that this does not always work and that some local markets have been lost even for giants such as Yahoo! and E-bay because they haven’t gone local on time, but conversely there is no known example of a company that went for reach without a viable business model and survived.

Eventually, you do have to pay the bills.

So if you do have to reach several international markets at once (because you are in a European market with too small a home market or because your board is adamant or because you have that peculiar megalomania that most entrepreneurs - including me - indulge in, I would advise the following order or priorities in formulating your company strategy:

1) Define your Business Model

2) Prove it by acquiring your reference customer base

3) Identify the growth factors in your business model with respect to paying customers

4) Identify the multipliers or incumbents in other international markets

5) Internationalize on a sales / business model driven basis by acquiring reference paying customers in those markets

The perceptions of your target exit markets can change faster than you can change the positioning of your company.

But a functioning business model and a continuous revenue stream are two realities that a) always let your survive independently of your VC backing and b) always find an acquirer.

Where there is a business model, there always eventually is an exit market.

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As the winter of discontent of content owners and YouTube begins, a certain rumbling is growing. If you look back at the first Blog posts describing the Web 2.0 phenomenon, they often called it an illusion, overrated or a bubble. Very often it is pointed out that while YouTube was sold for $1.6 Billion, it in effect only had $15 Million in revenue last year and now a host of other problems (if you count all litigation issues and tech issues, the costs of YouTube may well be above $1 Billion or so). That is assuming, of course, that Viacom and Co. will manage to convince the courts of their point of view.

However exaggerated this view may be - it has, on a fundamental level, one merit. The YouTube Business Model, as far as it is now established, is based on an unjust usage of copyright and the equity of copyright.

Now I would be the first proponent of the theory that the internet, as John Perry Barlow put it, is “the end of copyright”. In the sense that transmitting, copying and distributing knowledge and information has become so easy through the internet that an author who wants to earn the fruits of his labor is well advised to find new ways of establishing himself as a person and establishing derivative business models off the content he produces, rather than relying on licensing fees alone. Nevertheless, YouTube does not even give that to content producers and content owners. It is like a giant attention lottery, where the very few motivate the very many, through their success stories of 15 minute world fame, to copy their endeavour and try to achieve that kind of world wide recognition. However, who of those authors, even of those who have achieved that kind of short-lived fame, has actually managed to earn money off it?

That is why YouTube lacks the value chain one needs for a viable business model. That is not to say that YouTube did not achieve something very important. It created a platform for ubiquity of video content and facilitated the exchange, commenting and sharing of that kind of content. It taught users an important lesson- that broadcasting is not the prerogative of a few publishers. From there, to a viable business model is a different step.

Google may use the YouTube technology to create Google video ads and to create a platform for viral marketing (which actually may be a sound business from the position that Google has) but, anyone trying to copy the YouTube model must fail if he does not devise a value chain, a sound and profitable value argumentation, and defines what his market is.

In essence, the markets the emerging video platforms target is the advertising market or the market for sharing and licensing content- the latter being a very difficult one. The key to monetizing that kind of tool and achieving success in that kind of market will be to define the value chain and to make it track-able, so as to be able to calculate an operating margin and to devise ways of building a business.

None of the me too(s) and copycat models of YouTube has achieved that yet.

None, except one- sevenload.

sevenload is one of the most exciting business ventures I have ever been a part of, by defining a value chain which, because of its self-reinforcing nature, we call the “value mill”. By devising a technology to track not only usage of content, but also the revenue generated by the individual video stream and by devising a way to create specific audiences that add a lot to the advertising value that a video can have, sevenload has in effect solved the 3 main problems of any video business model.

For now I don’t want to describe, in too much detail, what sevenload does as we still have to establish our market leadership. But stay tuned to see how the first viable video business model on the net will continue to be established.

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