Okay so I watched The Social Network with Adam last night. We made it almost all the way through it with Annie in the room playing with her own toys. That's a parental milestone. But that's not the point of my post.
I loved loved loved this movie. But not really because it was that great of a movie. I loved it because it reminded me so much of life here in the Valley in 1998-2001. The VC's were crazy for smart kids to work on business ideas for this new thing called the "Internet".
The best line of the movie which I firmly believe was "If the Winklevoss twins had invented Facebook, they would have invented Facebook." Too true. And for me that's the end of the debate. Zuckerberg seems jerky, in the movie and in real life. But he executed on it. We all have had our "Could have, Would haves, Should haves."
In 1997 Mark Woodward, his brother, and I started a company that would allow Real Estate agents to get real time listings on the Internet. Accessrealestate.com. Mark's brother worked at a Real Estate firm where they would exchange MLS listings by fax. This is no lie, we started working on "Zillow", online MLS, etc. But we gave up, because well, we were 20. Such a great idea, but we weren't the ones. Damn.
Then about 2 years later we had a number of friends start again. Money was being thrown out windows in the Valley and kids our age were getting it. My top 3 favorite start ups my friends started are below.
We had Utellretail.com, a supply chain management startup that my roommate Zaw, and his friends Aswan and Ameen started. Zaw and I shared an apartment in Palo Alto and it was great. We always were having business meetings in the family room over beers, trading ideas and talking strategy. Just like The Social Network minus the naked girls and drugs. It did not succeed but Zaw is now the CEO of a hugely successful mobile advertising company. (
http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/10/a-look-at-4info-the-king-of-sms/ http://alerts.4info.com/ )
The next is Steamtunnels.com. Three friends of mine all started Steamtunnels.com. This one kills me because one of its founders was a fairly good friend and still is someone I keep in touch with, ironically (you will see why) over Facebook.
Aaron, Tuyen, and Lawrence started Steamtunnels which WAS Facebook but the school (Stanford) shut it down. This was before Zuckerberg. They weren't like the twins because they actually got it live. Don't believe me? Check out this recent NYT article and radio interview:
http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2011/01/11/a-social-network-way-ahead-of-its-time/, and
http://thestory.org/archive/the_story_021011_full_show.mp3/view and this one
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1999/09/23/MN55114.DTL&type=printable. I remember them working on this so vividly. It should have been them because all three of them are so much nicer than Zuckerberg seems. Aaron now is CEO of a company that works in my space, Adroll, and Tuyen and Lawrence both run their own firms.
Lastly was my start-up. Nightscene.com. I had bought Thenightscene.com domain as a start up idea the summer of 1999. Kerstin and I worked on it a bit and sort of lost track of it. She then went to work for a start up in the disc storage space started by another one of our friends.
A few months later an angel investor reached out and wanted to invest to start up the domain as Nightscene.com. Apparently he and Sean Parker thought the same about the "The." I ran it with a few friends for about a year before we ran out of money. I can say I had two official meetings at Garage. Garage Ventures was a VC famous for funding seed money to start ups. Our last meeting was scheduled for the day the market crashed. Needles to say, it didn't happen. When it crashed I saw grown men crying in bars in downtown Palo Alto. What a mess.
Our ambition sort of makes me laugh now. But as my dad said, and it stuck with me, "sometimes ignorance of obstacles is exactly what you need to succeed." I had tons of optimism and PLENTY of business ignorance. But I think my dad was very right. You need that to really believe your idea can make it and not focus on how reality can stop you.
Nightscene.com was a combination of Yelp, mobile geographical advertising (which didn't exist then), and Citysearch. But the bottom line is if I had invented any of those things, I would have invented them. There is nothing left of the site but one indexed page of our placeholder on the web archives.
http://web.archive.org/web/20001026124328/http://www.nightscene.com/.
I took some pictures of my pictures and put them up. This is Kerstin and I blowing out our idea for the first time at Sand Dollar beach. The first version of our Nightscene logo cracks me up.
I did finally join one successful start up, QuinStreet, which I have been with for nearly 11 years. I joined when we were very very small and now we are a large publicly traded company that I am very proud of. Was it my idea? Nope. But maybe the next one will be....
