george tziralis log

You guessed it right, it’s my birthday today, a day when famously continuous evolvements are celebrated as incremental ones. And it’s not that I’m feeling older or anything like that, after all I’m yet at the beginning of almost everything I ever pursued. But, let’s face it, abdominal muscles and hair are gradually getting fewer, while hopefully brain cells are getting a little bit more mature. More of you are reading these lines though, so I may kindly ask you to add any wishes of yours here (instead of anywhere else). To me, wishes are generous forms of personal advice and I’d like to take this annual opportunity to receive yours. So, thank you very much for your wishes everyone!

Comments

It’s already 20-10, but, to repeat last year’s personal annual report I thought of value, I’m trying here to summarize the most important of my professional activities that took place during 2009. The very limited posts that appeared in this blog didn’t help that much, so I decided to move on to twitter, and search across the 2340 tweets I posted in the last year to find, in between the noise, the ones better described my progress.

Calendar

January - Mostly research
- A paper of mine on holistic investment assessment is now available for early view - http://ub0.cc/49/16 (tweet)

February - Research and more
- Back from a friend’s PhD defense, clearly jealous (gotta isolate myself for 3 months to finalize my own one, too…) - (tweet, tip: I’m still looking for those 3 months…)
- The datamine.it team is getting 10 members strong and much more experienced - (tweet)

March - Interesting developments in various ends
- Just received a cease & desist letter on http://datamine.it for using the *brand* (?!) “datamine” in greece, sounds fun - (tweet, and relevant post, datamine.it was rebranded as to mineknowledge)
- RT @askmarkets new blog post: What’s in it for me? http://ub0.cc/4c/0h (tweet)
- Data mining paper on bioinformatics sent, moving on to a book chapter on prediction markets as a dss for competitive sme intelligence - (tweet)

April - Open Coffee grows strong
- packed, as usual #ocgr - (tweet)
and enables a trip to the Valley, including Stanford and Valley’s Disneyland, among others
- Open Coffee Greece goes… Stanford! - http://ub0.cc/bd/2p #ocgr #occ - (tweet)

May - Meanwhile I took the time to give lectures in various universities (I think 6 in total during 2009), looking forward to expanding these in 2010
- lectures in 3 different unis within two days, the joy :) - (tweet)

June - After almost a year of preparation, the Openfund is announced!
- What an audience, thank you all http://twitpic.com/6h7bh #ocgr #occ (tweet)
- Introducing The Open Fund (slides) - http://ub0.cc/7H/16 - (tweet)

July - Full details on the Openfund released
- RT @openfund The Business Plan - http://ub0.cc/9p/7r - (tweet)

August - Legal Openfund R&D took August to digest
- 6k legal doc is almost over - (tweet, legalese was clearly one of the most harsh tasks to accomplish within the fund)

September - Spreading the word before the application deadline
- Early thoughts on how to apply for the Openfund - http://ub0.cc/36/5j (warning, 3k blog post :) - (tweet)
- Kathimerini newspaper on @openfund (in greek) - http://ub0.cc/g5/09 - (tweet, among the various mentions in both new and old media we gathered throughout the year)

October - Call for proposals concluded, initial screening
- RT @openfund First Round of Applications Concluded - Some Insights http://ub0.cc/4j/9l - (tweet)
- RT @openfund A letter of acceptance -or not- has been sent to all our applicants, including full reviews. Looking forward to the interviews! - (tweet)

November - Final selection takes place, very happy with the results
- RT @openfund 1st Round of Applications - Progress Update http://ub0.cc/7f/pd - (tweet, including a detailed business plan template)
- Just finished a 10h25m long conference call of @Openfund interviews, excited :) - (tweet)
- RT @openfund The Openfund, Round I: Start-ups Selected - http://ub0.cc/2y/nf - (tweet)

December - Another cycle begins
RT @openfund Applications now open - http://ub0.cc/sf/3j - (tweet)

As it is clear from the above rough summary, the Openfund expanded to literally almost squeeze each other activity of mine during the second half of 2009; clearly launching a seed capital fund based in Athens wasn’t expected to be much easy after all. I may also mention that the process and what was till now performed required essentially what I may call “reinventing myself”, in terms of required skills and virtues, next to experiences and expertise developed and accumulated. Needless to say, I’m really happy with the team we built and excited of the start-ups we work with; I’m looking forward to delivering expectations starting 2010.

Quotes

Scanning through my tweets for 2009, I also realized that some few of them may be of value extending the short attention span a tweet typically deserves, so I decided to list them here to those of you who may find them worth a read.

- As you grow up, work deteriorates in Mails & Meetings (M&Ms). - (tweet)
- Free is the man who spends his time according to his interests. - (tweet)
- The earlier you say no, the easier it is. - (tweet)
- An idea’s value is directly proportionate to the time you invest turning it into reality (no time -> zero value). - (tweet, more here)
- The calmness of your sleep is the more unbiased indicator of your happiness. - (tweet)
- Success is when you build something bigger than you, and you work with/ educate people better than you, not the other way around. - (tweet)
- Best things in life are humiliating; ego is such a poor common denominator. - (tweet)
- Success is always a coin flip away. The trick is to keep flipping. - (tweet)
- You learn, when you fail. You fail, when you don’t learn. Thus, you need to fail, at first. - (tweet, more here)
- When money is rare, trust is the currency that matters. - (tweet)
- Paradise shall be inbox free. - (tweet)
- Struggle turns time into enemy, habit makes time your friend. - (tweet)
- Truth, like money, saves you time; take advantage of it. - (tweet)

Comments

It’s not that I’m trying to ‘apologize’ for the past (and future?) failures of mine, nor I’m trying to, let’s say, sweeten the pill to those that won’t make it to the Openfund, or anything related to that. It’s just that what I’m seeing around me, especially in my small country, is a default approach to the penalization of the most effective of learning processes, failure that is.

As I consider this erroneous and a fundamental reason to both risk and creativity aversion, let me share with you again here this recent tweet of mine, which attempts to summarize my weak experience in life and business so far:

‘

You learn when you fail.
You fail when you don’t learn.
Thus, you need to fail, at first.

Yes, the relationship between learning and failure is causal, so both are prerequisites to success; penalizing the first or the latter cannot lead to desirable results. But, please do not consider anything of the above as a general truth, after all general is contradictory to social and our very nature. Also, it goes without saying that I’m not suggesting you to deliberately fail in your first attempts, or I’m underestimating the charisma of learning via doing the right things, either we’re talking start-ups, or anything else after all.

I’m just providing the context in which I believe we should interpret failures, either our own ones, or the ones around us: Given that you take your lessons seriously, a failure is the biggest step you make towards your success that follows.

Comments

I consider myself as being far from a typical supporter of any political party (actually I dislike the notion of being a fan in any context), and in fact I’ve voted for three different parties in my short career as a voter so far. To be honest, I do not even “believe” in a single party or strict ideology of the existing political spectrum, I think socialists vs conservatives, right vs left etc is a detached from reality, more than outdated and obsolete classification; to me, it’s just realists vs illusionists and those who break eggs trying to make things happen versus those who let things vastly underperforming just be.

That said, I’d like to move a social step ahead and post here the person and party I endorse for the forthcoming greek elections of October 4th. I really liked the relevant meme before the US elections, when people I respect, not related to politics or affiliated to a party, publicly argued about their voting preference. In the greek political reality, however, taking such a clear stance and endorsement is potentially thorny; being ‘colored’ or politically tagged has a long history of existence (and clearly there is a reason for that), where almost everyone tries to read between the lines for political preferences and hidden interests. I believe however that truthful revelation of current political thoughts can only benefit -at least in the long-term and macro scale- the dialogue at large, and, while I confess that I’m far from a well-informed voter or closely tracking the greek political scene, I’m willing to publicly contribute my humble views and potentially wrong assumptions in changing this suboptimal equilibrium.

First of all, I think that the parliamentary system in greece cannot but fall short of expectations, given that every member of the parliament in almost every single case votes according to its party line, often due to imposition reasons. I’d love to see more degrees of freedom enabling anyone to stand up for what she believes in, but as long as this is not the case, I believe that our vote mostly regards the election of a government, rather than electing representatives of a legislative body. After all, members of the parliament typically represent their party and not their voters and this extra level of abstraction results in a critical distortion.

That said, and given that, to my limited knowledge, no party is considering a coalition, to me the choice is narrowed down to the two major parties, namely “new democracy” (the governmental “conservative” party) and “pasok” (the previously governmental, “socialist” party). (The far-right and far-fetched “laos” and secondary the communist (?!) “kke” parties were already and by default out of question for me.) And, in this context, the choice seems to be relatively easy at the given time.

But, let’s be honest, we greeks have learned not to expect radical improvements or significant changes from a new government. And this should not sound weird after all. Considering that the public sector controls (in first or second level, both directly and indirectly) the biggest part of the local economy, and the black economy being, according to various estimations, closely equal to half the size of the “real” one, it is not difficult to imagine that change is hard and painful, if at all possible, while competitiveness and innovation have to wait. So I may argue this is not a governmental but mostly a major social problem in the first place, and we probably need to dictate change in our mirror first, instead of just blaming those ‘messiahs’ at the top of the pyramid.

However, a government is elected to steer, not to follow, to be passionate about serving, not bored and apathetic, to lead by example, not just cheerlead. And, if the above sound like being self-evident to you, I’m sorry to say that, to me at least, Mr. Karamanlis, the current prime minister, stood for the latter in the last 6 years. I believe that failures, even at this scale, are maybe not a bad thing, provided that you are trying hard, to learn, to improve and finally succeed. But inaction is a completely different and unforgivable behavior, and I consider it unacceptable, especially when you manage so many hard-working and talented people who are really trying to make a difference (like Mr. Chatzidakis, the minister of development, to name an example). This view of mine of the ruling party could be radically different, if Dora Bakoyiannis, currently minister of foreign affairs, was at the top; I consider her an efficient and dynamic woman trying to get many things done. But, I’m not willing to vote again for a person standing for the Greece I hate, or making me feel ashamed the next time I see him in Brussels or next to Barack Obama.

The other option seems to be a more appealing one. The first thing I thought about the opposition leader, G. Papandreou, when he took control of his party some years ago, was that I’d like to watch the experiment of him running the country, actually have Greece run by someone with a scandinavian background and canado-american education, as open-minded as it gets, ignorant enough for the public opinion to stand, for example, in favor of the legalization of soft drugs and the friendship with our turk brothers. During the years, however, and if running a major party is comparable simulation to running a country, I do have some second thoughts. There were both good and wrong choices, cases where he stood strong or weak for principles I respect, a leadership style I admire or some skills I do not. Maybe it’s just that politics are essentially a hybrid art, of the good and the bad, merging your good intentions with the harsh reality and vice versa. But, for now, what’s important to me in the bottom line, is that I clearly see a passionate man willing to serve the society and not his party or ego, a true believer in a number of topics I’d do my best to see my country progress in, and I’d like to offer him my humble endorsement.

That said, I don’t have high expectations. Even the best of intentions, when met with questionable implementors across the managerial chain cannot but result in questionable results. And I personally believe that both major parties carry such pathogenic characteristics, it could not be otherwise after all. For example, I can pretty well recall the feeling I got during a recent socialists’ conference I was invited to give a guest speech on entrepreneurship; I thought most of people surrounded me were nascent civil servants, and this is typically not something to be proud of in the greek context. However, I think that the shortest path to change, today and in the given environment, is trying to leverage on the good parts of this existing ‘infrastructure’, instead of setting up from scratch a new one, and this is another major reason for my endorsement, while I hope that we have more solid options in the next elections, and I’m ready to fully reconsider all of the above observations and assumptions.

So, all in all, these are my rough thoughts and intentions regarding the elections five days ahead. I’m looking forward to your -hopefully as unbiased as it gets- comments and corrections and I hope that many of the above reasonings will prove to be accurate; or else I’ll have at least a well-documented view to reconsider :)

Comments

With 30 more days to go for the Openfund’s application deadline, and as I got a closer look at a number of applications already submitted, I’d like to share with you a few comments that hopefully will prove to be useful if you are about to apply, or simply interesting if you consider the whole effort worthy of your attention. I’d also encourage you to keep in mind these directions when you invest some time in filling an application in general, while please do not consider any of the rules below as general truths or let them stifle your creativity in any way.

1. Be real. - Pretending that you hold extra-terrestrial skills does not make your application more appealing, it rather results in second thoughts about its validity. Also, having served the last 20 years in chief executive positions and holding a track record of three multi-million exits does not make you the ideal candidate; instead it raises issues on your incentives and truthfulness. Moreover, holding at the moment three exciting jobs in parallel is not that promising after all, in terms of your full-time commitment at least.

2. Be clear. - Spend time and a couple of hundred more words to present your team and describe your idea in detail. Add a link to some screenshots or a mockup, a presentation or a short video. Be concise but precise on your targets and vision; doubt typically does not serve for your benefit.

3. Be different. - Describe the market that you target at, estimate its size and name the existing players. Then, analyze your differentiator factors and why you believe they are game changers. Remember, giving wrong but truthful estimations is better than not answering at all. And localization is not innovation per se.

4. Invest time. - Not well prepared submissions deserve nothing less than a clear no go, at least for me. If you cannot commit a reasonable amount of time to come up with a unique application, for any reason, you’re giving a clear signal that your team is not a proper candidate. Or, if you cannot properly fill out an application form, then keep in mind that a start-up is a much more difficult thing to do. Also, rest assured that the above become clear from the very first text field one gets to review, so invest some time to submit a well-thought proposal and avoid a desk reject, or you’d better spare your time and ours.

5. This is for your benefit. - Getting to write up your idea, either in a short application form or an extended business plan is among the best of exercises to do when you start up. Putting a plan on paper, with all its details, assumptions and malfunctions can significantly help you to get the truth out of it, and then reshape it, prioritize and focus. After all, to rephrase Preston McAffee (.pdf, hat tip to Panagiotis Ipeirotis) “we are in the business of accepting proposals, not improving business plans”, and, even if this only partially true during the Openfund’s first steps (that is, do expect to receive proper feedback to improve your application if you submit it early enough), it makes crystal clear what your main consideration when writing your application should be: make the most out of it, for your very own benefit. And, remember, you need to convince yourself in the first place, investors and clients will follow.

If the above still remain rather theoretical, here you will find the application of Askmarkets I submitted in Seedcamp a year ago. There are still a number of errors and wrong placements (and I keep blaming myself for all these, even if it got us straight to the interview phase), however I consider it an example of an honest attempt, that makes this clear from the very first sentence, please treat it as such (and nothing more).

Team Members
George Tziralis
Role: cofounder & CEO
Date of Birth: 18/01/1982
Email Address: ******@askmarkets.com
Skype Username: george.tziralis
Current location (city, country): Athens, Greece
Education: Diploma in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering - National Technical University of Athens PhD in Operations Research - National Technical University of Athens (expected late 2008, or dropout)
Work History: various research projects during PhD, among them senior researcher of the Olympic Games Impact Study for Athens 2004, under the IOC. also teaching Data Mining and Forecasting at a graduate and post-graduate level in NTUA. Full research CV is accessible here: http://ub0.cc/0M/D
Connection to Seedcamp: I have exchanged some email with Saul before, due to serving as organizer of the Open Coffee meetings in Greece. Met with Reshma a month ago in London, enjoyed some fruitful discussions with her on Seedcamp, OC GR and askmarkets.
Personal Website(s): http://gtziralis.com
Completed Projects: askmarkets is my first start-up, so I may now point to some pet projects of mine, like opencoffee.gr and websource.it. Some others are yet to come.
Impressive Accomplishment: helped to create a vibrant greek start-up community almost from scratch - see Open Coffee meetings in Greece and http://opencoffee.gr
Confirmation of Relocation: Yes
Confirmation of Commitment: Yes

Efthimios Mpothos
Role: cofounder & CTO
Date of Birth: 20/09/1981
Email Address: ********@askmarkets.com
Skype Username:
Current location (city, country): Athens, Greece
Education: Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering - National Technical University of Athens MSc in Engineering - Economic Systems - National Technical University of Athens PhD in Computer Science - National Technical University of Athens (expected late 2009, or dropout)
Work History: various research projects during PhD, among them senior researcher of the EU IP Project LABORANOVA. Intracom - Telecom engineer Siemens - Telecom Engineer
Connection to Seedcamp: -
Personal Website(s): http://www.linkedin.com/pub/4/6A1/371
Completed Projects: -
Impressive Accomplishment: graduated on time from the much demanding NTUA School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Confirmation of Relocation: Yes
Confirmation of Commitment: Yes

Questions & Answers
What is your company called?
AskMarkets UnLtd

What are its contact details?
url: http://askmarkets.com e-mail: ******@askmarkets.com mob: {…} address: {…}, Athens Greece

What are you creating?
Markets (stock, betting, flea markets, etc) essentially bring people together, they sum up their information and transmit it through prices. Askmarkets intends to bring this functionality to the masses. And we’re creating a web service for (prediction) markets, which consists of virtual marketplaces for information trading. You may find more a more detailed description of the concept at our blog, http://blog.askmarkets.com

What is really new about that?
We like to say ‘everything’. There already exists a bunch of prediction markets sites, but we tend to differ, starting from our core {…} and its simplistic implementation, till the approach to interface design and our way of introducing/marketing the whole concept.

How long have you been working on this? As a team?
Our inspiration on the markets concept stems from about 3 years of PhD research on the topic, for each one of us. We met up and started working as a team in Spring 2007.

What customer need will you solve or why do people need your product?
We do believe that our service is valuable in all cases that concern and could benefit from dynamic aggregation of information and its incorporation into a single metric, aka prices. Take the case of enterprises. Many employees possess valuable information and insights on various and crucial topics of interest. However, available ways of sharing typically extend to meetings and surveys, being time and cost inefficient while lacking incentives and being static by nature. Now, turn a typical survey question about the future into a market, where all ‘traders’ could anonymously ‘bet’ on the probability of an event occurring, and earn some profit or reputation when predicting correctly. What you now have is a playful way to efficiently extract information and people’s opinions, with practically no cost and in a 24/7 fashion. And we think there is a huge amount of latent information and potential to be discovered. Apart from the intra-enterprise / private marketplace solution, we also provide public marketplaces, to aggregate and filter the information of the many, plus create communities of traders and foster conversations via market prices on topics of interest. We think that such a product may serve as the next generation of polls, among others.

What specifically is your target market and how is it being poorly served today?
We focus both on b2b and b2c. Regarding b2b, an obvious target market will be the one of surveys, plus this of decision support tools. Regarding b2c, polls stand as a big market to target at. However, the novelty of the tool and the variety of the platform’s potential applications may mature to other markets that yet remain to be discovered.

What gives you an unfair advantage?
First of all, we are fans of being fair and open, and we believe that these virtues return in the middle and long term much more that any ‘unfair advantage’ can give. But we do also believe that we bring into the table our team’s unique mix of expertise (background knowledge, leveraging {…} findings of our PhD research), passion and creativity (as our work till now demonstrates), and this very mix put us in the right position to execute our idea in a highly successful way.

How will you sustain that unfair advantage?
We do aim at enhancing our mix of talent and expertise with experience, by quickly gaining a significant number of users and customers, in a way that makes this very mix and our brand loyalty unable to be copied.

How will you make money?
We employ a two-tier pricing strategy. Normal users at our default marketplace http:// askmarkets.com will be able to enjoy our services for free, while we may monetize their attention and time spent on the marketplace with various forms of advertisement. But, our main and directly monetizable product regards custom marketplaces, in separate domains, as a paid service (on a monthly basis, adding a specific cost per user and transaction for example).

Why is this team the right one for this company?
We feel that we have mutually complementary skills, expertise and experiences, while we share a common research background on prediction markets, plus a strong entrepreneurial attitude and same cultural roots; all of which have matured our cooperation so far into being real soulmates.

If you are incorporated (as a company): who owns what, and what is the detailed funding history? If you are not yet incorporated: who will own what percentage of the company?
We are incorporated (UnLtd) in Greece since summer 2007. {…}

To date, what specific progress have you made in building your product/company (e.g. development milestones, feature additions, customer sign-ups, etc.)?
Our product is already fully functional. We have progressed from a demo to an extended alpha phase with about 200 testers and now we’re in private beta and nearly bug-free, while we’ll probably go public during September. And we constantly add or upgrade our various features to finally ship a fully-fledged, yet ultra-minimal and attractive web service. We have no enterprise customers, at this moment.

We are really impressed by teams that get stuff done. Please provide a URL (with login details if necessary) to a prototype of your product, or failing that to a video of a prototype of your product. Keep it live from 11 August through 19 September.
You may log-in at http://askmarkets.com using your email and password “iminvited” to enter the service. We may also create a specific marketplace for the needs of Seedcamp, for example at http://seedcamp.askmarkets.com, to enable public “speculation” on the winners or private aggregation of the views and information of the Seedcamp board. Some explanatory/promo videos are available at http://askmarkets.blip.tv/ and http://opencoffee.gr/2008/08/01/tc-oc-askmarkets-video/

When will you have a prototype/beta?
see previous question.

What tools will you use?
We are developing in Ruby on Rails, hosting our site in Amazon EC2, and using scalable Mongrel web servers for databases. We have also utilized some of the latest technologies, for example Adobe’s Flex for the graphs, among others.

It is always good to evaluate all your future options. If you decided to sell your company, who would be the likely buyers for the business, and why?
The options are many, including all the big potential users of our services to the companies that may find our offering complementary to theirs, ranging from Google and SAP till Gallup, Deloitte and Betfair, you name it.

What measurements will you use to value your business in a year? What will it be worth? What are key milestones that will account for the growth in value from today to 1 year from now?
We believe that each single visitor of askmarkets who gets introduced to or inspired by our markets’ concept essentially adds value to the service. And each transaction in our default or custom marketplaces adds value, too and that’s why we provide these metrics at the homepage. Speaking of milestones and more tangible metrics for estimating our service’s worth in one year from now, we believe that our 100,000th user (aka trader) and our 100th client (aka 100th separate marketplace) are the targets to beat and will serve as proofs of a seriously considerable value of askmarkets.

Who are your main current or potential competitors as well as identified potential new entrants? (Think hard before you say ‘none’)
There exists a bunch of public marketplaces out there, either with real or play-money, among them Hollywood Stock Exchange, Intrade, Newsfutures, Inkling and the late entrant Hubdub. You may add some betting sites, too, with Betfair being the most prominent one, if you consider betting as an alternative view of trading (which is valid). However, our core monetizable product is not our default public marketplace (we won’t wait breaking even with ads) and this marketplace actually serves as a engaging demonstration of our application’s uses and potential. So, our main competitors include the providers of market services and these, for the time being, are Consensus Point, HSX, Inkling, Newsfutures, Intrade, Nosco and Xpree. And we do believe that all of them are far from unbeatable, while our offering already presents various critical innovations and the market to compete for is literally limitless - imagine every organization running markets next to or instead of surveys.

What is the single largest competitive threat to your business that you can identify today?
Well, most young entrepreneurs and web start-ups are usually scared of a software giant entering their field. And there was rumors of Microsoft creating Prediction Point, a software for prediction markets, while Google already uses such an application internally. But we like to see threats as the one side of risks; the other side regards opportunities. So, in the slight possibility that such a move takes place, we feel that our chances of being acquired will be significantly higher, while the market for our product will immediately grow and mature; and both these are welcome.

Planning for the worst is a key to great success. Think hard: what might go wrong? How can you minimize those risks?
Regarding our public play-money marketplace and the limited number of alpha testers so far, we had a difficult time convincing them to return and trade again and again, or create their own markets. Traders’ ranking wasn’t enough of an excuse to spend time on the site and this is still a problem for us, while yet in private mode. This may prove to be a chicken and egg problem -if the users are few, there is not much liquidity on markets, so there are no reasons to check it back soon. And we plan to go public soon and spread some invites into major blogs to get things running, while we are working on a really engaging and hopefully viral facebook application -which shares its database with our public marketplace. Another reason we consider important is the uber-horizontal character of the marketplace, resulting in a lack of focus on the topics that each user potentially considers interesting. We plan to bypass this by -already- developing a structure that {…}: for example, {…} that will result into a more engaging experience, user and ad-wise.

What about your business are you most uncertain about?
The concept of markets as a decision support tool, in enterprises for example, is fascinating and useful, but new. And, while we do believe that we have innovated a lot in popularizing it enough, we still feel somehow uncertain about convincing a ‘conventional enterprise’ and its ‘super busy’ or IT-avert employees to actually use it; or at least that was the premature feedback we had in some rare and early attempts we made on local enterprises. But the enterprise world is more about imitation rather than innovation -regarding the enterprise tools, at least- so we are positive that a few good case studies in the begging will get the ball rolling. Plus, we are not targeted at enterprises only, but at any kind of community a marketplace may serve.

What fact would make the most difference to your confidence that your company will succeed? How and when will you find that out?
Closely to the previous answer, we do feel that a dozen of pretty successful case studies and marketplace’s implementations till the end of this year will significantly boost our already high confidence and bring askmarkets really close to success, by enabling nearly exponential further growth.

Is your team working full time for the company? If not, what needs to go right for this to happen?
No, we are working part time on askmarkets, being at the same time PhD researchers, while trying to maximize the synergies among these. The initial target was to end up our PhDs first -and we are close to that-, but the entrepreneurial world seems to fascinate us more than the slowly moving academic one, no matter how strong our passion for research remains. Thus, we are willing to switch into full time, provided that askmarkets is viable (we have developed everything so far with zero funding) and their potential keeps growing tangible.

What do you hope to get out of the Seedcamp experience?
We applied to get at the top. But, even if not, we address the seedcamp experience as a process of maturing and we do grape its fruits, already since filling out this application form.

Does any founder have a conflicting future commitment? If so, what? Are any of you involved in other projects?
No. We are yet involved in our PhD research, but we’ll hopefully manage to graduate soon. Or, hopefully not.

Apart from open source software, was any of your code written by anyone not on the team?
No.

Does any actual or potential legal restriction or limitation apply to any team member which we should know about (e.g., non-disclosure, non-compete)?
No.

Let us say you have 15 seconds to pitch your business. Can you describe your business?
Markets. Stock, betting, flea markets. They all bring people together, sum up their information and transmit it through prices. Now you can make it happen, too.

What is your favourite movie of all time?
Pi, by Darren Aronofsky.

What question do you wish we had asked? What’s the answer?
Could askmarkets be operated with real instead of play-money? Yes, absolutely. {…}

Comments

A recent tweet of mine may deserve some proper discussion, let me elaborate it here a little bit more:

Let me also state that this is not a ground breaking discovery whatsoever, but it may help you put things into the right perspective and focus where you need to, especially if you are an aspiring entrepreneur in your very first steps.

‘

An idea’s value is directly proportionate to the time you invest turning it into reality.
Corollary I: no time → zero value
Corollary II: your time is bounded, so is your idea’s value
Corollary III: given your abilities, what only matters is time spent on execution

Simple as that, end of story.
Or actually not. I could go further providing some examples and my train of thought before converging to such a simplistic approximation of an evaluation model, next to its implications for entrepreneurs, but I’d love to hear your feelings and feedback first.
Discuss.

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The most analytical yet lean 101 text on venture capital investing I was lucky to discover so far is the exceptional MSc Thesis of Shikhir Singh at Cass Business School back in 2005, entitled as “Structuring Venture Capital Deals”.

Firstly, I’d like to highly recommend it to all of you who would like to have a good understanding on the subject, potentially targeting a VC investment in the foreseeable future, rather than just having a casual interest by scanning the twittersphere. You may read the full thesis or download its pdf via scribd at the end of this post.

And, remembering back in the engineering school, most students were avert to anything with the cost/profit/economy keywords attached, even if the math were much more easier than literally everything else they have ever tried. You’d better not replicate such an approach here, geeks can and should know the VC stuff, and it is to our very benefit to know the basics.

Moreover, I’d like to stress out some critical points and differences to the local greek legal framework that have turned out to be serious difficulties in setting up the Openfund (a more official post will follow-up, outlining the solutions we were finally able to iron out).

Terminology

To start with, let me first attempt to briefly summarize the most common VC terms, as shaped out by Singh. You may also use the list below as a quick reference.

Liquidation event: An exit event for the VC (sale, merger, closing or IPO). Serves as VC’s target.
Pre-money: The value of the company prior to receiving the outside (VC) financing.
Post-money: Equal to Pre-money plus external funding received.
Option pool: Unallocated stock options, created prior to an investment for new hires so as not to require further dilution
Share Price = Premoney / (Shares Outstanding + Option Pool)

Grounds for the Term Sheet

The need for a term sheet is justified by potential conflicts of interest, Singh comes to summarize perfectly:

‘

The goals of an entrepreneur of a company which is seeking funding are to:

1. Create a successful company
2. Get the funding necessary to create a successful company
3. Maintain maximum value and control of the company
4. Share the risks with the investors
5. Obtain the expertise and contacts that help the growth of the company
6. Obtain a reward for creating a successful company

‘

The goals of a VC which is seeking to provide funding are to:

1. Maximize return to justify the risks and effort in funding company
2. Ensure that the company makes best use of the capital provided
3. Ensure the ability to invest in later financing rounds if it so chooses
4. Ensure the ability to liquidate their assets to match their funding cycle
5. Develop a reputation that attracts other venture opportunities

‘

Conflicts of interest arise due to differing objectives between VCs and entrepreneurs on:

1. Split of the financial return of the company
2. Liquidation of the company
3. Control of the company

After all, it is clear that an investment negotiation is essentially a power struggle, with the VC attempting to minimize risk and maximize returns, while the entrepreneur tries to share risk and receive the investment. The provisions to be described hereafter come to address the conflicts of interest, within the investment term sheet.

Liquidation & financial split provisions

The following are the most common deal terms designed to address the conflicts that may arise regarding the liquidation and financial split of the enterprise.

Redemption Provision: Penalty clauses required by VCs to speed up a liquidation event. May include paying back initial investment or multiple of it, paying unpaid dividends, appointing committee to look for exit opportunities, or providing more board seats or other special rights to the VCs.

Redeemable Preferred Stock: Special class of stock securing priority to any cash available from a liquidation event. In case of an exit, VCs owning preferred stock get first their share -their initial investment or a multiple of it- and the common stockholders follow to divide up what is left. Preferred stock holders’ upside potential is limited in this case.

Redeemable Preferred & Common Stocks: A combination of the above, which enables the VC to get first rights to any cash available, thus making money from both the initial investment multiple and the common stock.

Convertible Preference Shares: Such shares can be converted to common stock at a predefined conversion price, at various points during the life of the company (for example, when new stock is issued or at any exit). Investors use the right to convert if the pre-specified conversion price is lower than common stock’s liquidation share price.

Participating Convertible Preference Shares: Participating convertible preference shares carry the right that in case of any liquidation event other than an IPO, the VC will get face value plus get free shares as though the VC had the convertibility option. In the case of an IPO, the VC has just the liquidation preference or the convertibility option.

Multiple Rounds Standards: When multiple rounds of financing occur, it is typical for each new investor to ask for liquidation preference over the previous investors.

Anti-Dilution Provisions: Anti dilution provision in VC contracts refers to securing that the value of a VC’s investment in a company will not be decreased in a case of a “down-round” (and it does not refer to keeping the percentage of shares steady, as anti-dilution is generally perceived). In such a case, anti-dilution clauses result in the investors getting additional shares for free, providing full or partial counterbalance to their decreased investment’s value. The right to anti-dilution clauses only applies to investors holding convertible preference shares and participating convertible preference shares. The most common anti-dilution provisions include full ratchet and weighted average provision, Singh also provides a more illustrative example.

Full Ratchet: With a full ratchet, enough new shares are issued for the investor holding the anti-dilution right, so that his investment value remains intact.

Weighted average provision: This provision stands between the full ratchet and no anti-dilution. It’s formula re-prices an earlier round by issuing enough additional shares to that round to bring its investment’s value down to the (weighted) average price of both the new and the previous round.

Pay to Play Provision: In one of the few provisions that benefits the entrepreneur over the VC, pay to play clauses require that VCs participate proportionally in future rounds or they will lose some or all of their privileges (anti-dilution rights, liquidation preferences, voting rights, preferred stock or a combination of the above).

Control provisions

Common provisions to address the struggle for control within the enterprise include the following:

Board Members: The board of directors is set up to protect the interests of the corporation and the equity holders. It also monitors the progress of the management team. The number of board seats a VC gains after an investment is a point of negotiation, while in new investments the board is typically expanded. The VCs can also ask for their board members to be granted special rights.

Milestone Provision: The VC usually gives or takes something if specific milestones are met or not. Milestones may include developing a prototype, getting a large customer, sales or profit targets, among others.

Class Veto Rights: VCs almost always require some veto rights, disproportionate to their shares. These may include “mergers and acquisitions, restructuring, issuing of new shares, changes to the company charter, amendments which will alter the rights of preference shares which the VC owns, annual business plans, profit distribution and employee stock options, borrowing more than a certain amount, buying assets more than a certain amount, sale of major assets, and sale of copyrights, trademarks, or intellectual property”.

Dividend Provision: VCs can request a dividend provision where the company has to pay the VCs annual dividends. The dividends can be either cumulative or non-cumulative. Usually, the value to the dividends is predetermined.

Fees: The most usual kind of fees include deal fees, annual management fees, legal fees and due diligence fees.

Lockup Provision: The time window after an IPO during which VCs and founders cannot sell their stocks, typically negotiated with the Investment Banks to ensure the owners will remain in place.

Founder Shares Vesting: This provision requires the founders to give their shares to the company, and the company will return them back over a period of time (to ensure that the founders won’t leave the company after VCs’ investment).

Drag Along Provisions: Drag along provisions give the majority of the shareholders in a particular class the right to sell the company and force the rest of the investors to sell under the same conditions offered to them. They are designed to inhibit a situation where a minority of shareholders holds a company hostage by refusing to sell.

Tag Along Provisions: This -rarely negotiable- provision ensures that if the entrepreneur gets someone to buy his shares, all the shareholders holding those rights can sell their shares to the same shareholder under the same conditions offered to the entrepreneur in proportion to their holdings.

Afterthoughts

I do believe that the above provide you with a broader view on the subject. Singh moves on to provide some quick stats on the frequency of those terms; these are not harsh VCs reprisals, but the most common or default options a VC has available, in order to secure the most basic forms of your commitment, in return of his money. And money -next to time- is the strongest expression of commitment; you have to be reasonable to ask for them, either we speak about $1 or €1M.

So, VC funding has nothing to do with donations, or gifts, if you used to think of it like that you’d better reconsider. What’s more, valuations are rather just the tip of the iceberg, you’d better ask for the full term sheet and think hard about the total value you’re carrying forward, before you speak your mind.

Finally, to put the above into the Openfund context (and I’d be really happy if you could prove me wrong), let me mention first that the only class of stock available under greek law is common stock (update: It seems that there is a kind of “preferred stock” for greek SAs, with some rather limited and predefined rights -yet I’m missing a link in english. Still, this is not the case for limited companies). I really don’t know if this occurred out of a political axiom or anything else, but I do need to mention that it invalidates most of the financial provisions deployed above. Moreover, the notion of the Board of Directors is not valid in greek limited companies (Ltd), there are just shareholders and “administrators”. There is of course another class of companies, “Anonymous companies” or “Societe Anonyme, SA”, prescribing the existence of a Board, but a minimum capital of €60k is needed for their incorporation.

If this sounds like a pretty unsolvable problem of the “good luck with this” category, you’re not that far away. But, I’m happy to report you that we have reached an elegant solution; which is of course the subject of another post…

Understanding Venture Capital Term Sheets

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Now that other projects are unfolding it may also be a nice opportunity to re-examine what’s the status of previous ventures.

And by that I mean websource.it, a simple website that allows you to compare the number of Google results for up to five searches simultaneously. It’s a simple way to basically compare spelling of phrases or alternatively determine which of terms is most ‘popular’. As simple as the concept is, so is the business model: just display Google ads that are relevant to the terms searched for.

We started all that less than a year back and managed to achieve quite a few of what we thought back then were milestones for such a project. However, getting written up in a few popular blogs of the field and generating some buzz isn’t that important as we found out. And in that websource.it was an important learning experience for us. Your service has to be both useful and stay pretty constantly in the news in order to spread and gain critical mass.

It also demonstrated brilliantly even (or perhaps because of) its primitiveness that ads can only take you so far in terms of revenue.

We also had a few positived surprises though. We didn’t expect the service to be a hit by editors, translators and proofreaders - in their case where Google-comparing alternatives is a quick way to avoid checking the dictionary, websource.it makes good sense.

We also didn’t expect websource.it to be a hit in China and Brazil - but it was. Poor English skills, a desire to look in the developed world, who knows what the reason is - these two countries registered many hits. And also the Czech Republic - we still haven’t figured that out…

But with all its failures and successes we must admit that the project has become stale. And it really is time to take it to the next level - or to abandon it alltogether. Instead of abandoning it entirely, we thought we could do something more creative with it. So here’s the offer.

We are willing to pay 50% of the revenue for the next 3 months to anyone who is willing to take on the business development aspect of the project. The person we choose will be responsible for detailing a business plan (no need to actually write it, just formulate it), promote the service, handle marketing and SEO services, manage the community, use social and new media and generally be creative about expanding it. And at the end of the 3-month period we discuss the collaboration anew.

That’s it really. There is no restriction as to who can apply. Wherever you are in the world and whatever your background, if you’re willing to put in the hours, you’re eligible. All we ask of you is a short (one page) description of what you plan to do - and a short CV (a LinkedIn url will do). We will choose the most impressive and creative entry. You may send it here, or just put the text in the comments below, and this is it!

Cross-posted by the websource.it blog.

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It clearly took a lot of time, effort and reengineering (and I need to especially thank my friends and partners Dimitris and George for contributing the biggest part of it), but today I was happy enough to publish the document that brought us a really long way in setting up the Openfund.
To further support the term “open”, you’ll find there extensive details on the processes and structures created, next to our vision and market opportunity we target at (still, we kept some ROI details for the eyes of our investors alone). And, while the document’s extent will almost prevent anyone but those really interested from reading it, I do believe it stands as an unbiased indicator of our truly commitment and I would appreciate your comments and constructive criticism if you belong in the latter category.
Enough said, you may now just toggle to full screen or download the document to dive into all the details.

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I’m providing here the slides of the presentation I gave a few hours ago at Open Coffee Athens XXIII, introducing the Open Fund.

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