For reference, Sequoia Capital’s vision on what successful startups should have:

Clarity of Purpose
Summarize the company’s business on the back of a business card.

Large Markets
Address existing markets poised for rapid growth or change. A market on the path to a $1B potential allows for error and time for real margins to develop.

Rich Customers
Target customers who will move fast and pay a premium for a unique offering.

Focus
Customers will only buy a simple product with a singular value proposition.

Pain Killers
Pick the one thing that is of burning importance to the customer then delight them with a compelling solution.

Think Differently
Constantly challenge conventional wisdom. Take the contrarian route. Create novel solutions. Outwit the competition.

Team DNA
A company’s DNA is set in the first 90 days. All team members are the smartest or most clever in their domain. “A” level founders attract an “A” level team.

Agility
Stealth and speed will usually help beat-out large companies.

Frugality
Focus spending on what’s critical. Spend only on the priorities and maximize profitability.

Inferno
Start with only a little money. It forces discipline and focus. A huge market with customers yearning for a product developed by great engineers requires very little firepower.

Link

Yossi Vardi is a legendary Israeli entrepreneur well known for, among other thing, selling ICQ to AOL in 1998. He is part of our events alliance and one of these guys who consistently challenges your seriousness during during meetings as he never stops cracking jokes. This quote from a Business Week interview is particularly brilliant:

BW: When you go to invest in entrepreneurs and new ideas, what do you look for?

Yossi Vardi: let me start by telling you what I don’t look for. I don’t look at business plans. After 38 years I’ve found that 100% of business plans say that their idea is very good. I think they are useless. I found the more I liked the idea the bigger my losses were. I don’t like demonstrations because the young guys showing me are so enthusiastic they think it is the greatest thing in the world—at least in their life, and if you don’t fake an orgasm, they go away very disappointed.

Link (thx Monique for the pointer)

Then jump on the occasion to present it at LIFT08! For the first time we will hold a venture night, and with the whole LIFT community in the room, some of the world’s best media outlets and people like Pierre Chappaz or Robert Scoble in the jury, your projects could really get a kick in the r*** à la cocomment (story here).

It’s easy, it’s simple, it’s free, and it even gets you a pass for LIFT08 if your project is selected. Propose your startup now!

In the future of the web, the majority of value is in innovation and the quality of execution, not in the funding resources a company can provide… giving employees a healthy share, and a majority share in the case of spinouts they are primarily responsible for is not only not a bad idea, it’s the BEST idea.

Link (via Ouriel)

The cost of starting up is so low that funding matters less than before. Ideas and execution are key in a world were rolling out a money making application can take 3 months.

Vous êtes au sein d’une haute école et souhaitez démarrer une entreprise high-tech en Suisse? venture kick vous permet de réaliser votre vision et finance les premiers pas de votre aventure grâce � une contribution d’amorçage pouvant aller jusqu‘� CHF 130’000 � fonds perdu! Vous bénéficiez en plus d’un support professionnel dès le démarrage du projet. Votre sortie des starting blocks sera donc des plus optimales!

Link

Superbe initiative, au del� du douteux “� fonds perdu” qui semble sous-entendre un truc du genre “postulez même si vous êtes nuls” ;)

Business Week is searching for Europe’s Young Entrepreneurs of 2007.

Where are they coming from? Estonia, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. No French, no Swiss, no German. I would like to think that it is because Business Week is biased, but I’m afraid there is a lot of truth in this geographical repartition.

Part of my job is to know where are the cool and upcoming projects in Switzerland. Just as a personal reminder, here are 4 companies I wold like to meet and will closely follow

K-Team is a Swiss company that develops, manufactures and markets high quality mobile robots for use in advanced education and research.

They are the company behind the famous robot camel jockeys.

Fairtilizer is an innovative music sharing and rating platform. It will launch soon and seems very promising.

i-concerts is a new broadband and wireless syndication platform for the video-on-demand distribution of concerts and live music programming.

Bonus link: Top 15 Web 2.0 Startups in Europe?. The domain names situation is getting worse and worse for entrepreneurs (11870, trivop, hipoqih, Sclipo).

Last Friday I was invited by VentureLab to share my entrepreneurial experience with a number of Swiss students participating in Business Experience. This program is teaching them how to develop a startup project, some of them already looking quite promising.

Around 10 projects I was introduced to, Banana Security and NooTouch caught my eyes.

Banana Security is a tiny application that will help you secure your computer. The principle is simple: using the web cam of your machine, it monitors who is sitting in front of it, locking it if it is not you.

NooTouch is a “green advertising network”. They are like google adsense with an ethical twist, carefully selecting the advertisers who can use the service so publishers are sure they are displaying advertisement with an attitude.

There are more promising projects coming soon – not enough to start a Swiss Techcrunch yet ;) – I will try to keep you posted.

Evan Williams, him who invented blogger.com and whom I tried to have speak at LIFT06 (he nicely refused, saying conferences were not his stuff) has rocked the Building Web Apps workshop by candidly sharing the things he blew up while developing his current gig, Odeo, the formerly hottest podcasting company we don’t hear much about these days except in unfriendly territory. Five things not to do:

1. Trying to build too much” – Odeo set out to be a podcasting company with no focus beyond that.

2. “Not building for people like ourselves” – For example, Williams doesn’t podcast himself.

3. “Not adjusting fast enough” […] “long term is not soon enough for a startup if you’re trying to get a foothold.”

4. “Raising too much money too early”.

5. “Not listening to my gut” – “When you’ve got a bunch of money and you’ve hired a lot of people and you’re talking to your board and you’re talking to reporters, your gut can get drowned out.”

The full report is on gigaom. This reminds me of a previous post about the blink founder reflecting on his failure. And if the subject is of interest for you check my recent SHiFT talk about the lessons learned on cocomment.com.

I just finished my talk at SHiFT, I was quite nervous by the fact Euan was talking at the same time than me but people showed up to listen to the lessons learned on the cocomment project.

I am pasting my notes below and you can get the slides (with comments) by clicking here.

What I learned with coComment.com
A few lessons from a wild ride.BEFORE YOU LAUNCH

• MERITOCRACY
We now live in a meritocracy. Money, VCs, and the press no longer decide what will be successful. Great products/services with intuitive designs that solve a real problem win.
You might make it big. It’s possible!

• PRIVATE ALPHA � PUBLIC BETA
Don’t turn private alpha in public beta. Bloggers need the scoop. help them build trafic, but when the time is right for you.

• PREPARE FOR CONTRIBUTIONS
Use wikis for everything, prepare for peoples contributions. Either they’ll do it on their site (nobody’s interest) or on your, where the community will benefit. Prepare to channel all the energy

AFTER YOU LAUNCH: DISCUSS

• BLOG, BLOG, BLOG
blog, blog, blog, tell your story. you can’t control the conversation so improve it, humanize your company, show who you are.

• FEAR THE HYPE
keep the hype down, don’t use codes or closed system because people who haven’t tested will talk about you anyway, very often over hyping and creating huge expectations.

• FLATTEN YOUR FEEDBACK
don’t over-react, look at big picture. keep track of everything in a wiki, then look at the big picture on a weekly basis. Don’t act on the last thing you read.

• IGNORE RELIGIONS
don’t get into religious fights. some people will never like you

• RELATIVIZE
aggression will always look worse than it is. don’t take it personal. Feel like you’re a trophy and there are wose position

• BE PATIENT
be patient, let passionate users do the talking for you, don’t panic. Always wait one day before answering an attack

• GIVE BACK
people give your their attention, give them back your. Link, promote, buy tshirts, etc..

• BITE THE BULLET
Take the blame when you f**** up.

• BE ACCESSIBLE
be accessible. don’t separate the company from the users, everybody should participate in the conversation. Every member of the team should have an email address available on the website.

• CARE ABOUT THE SILENT MAJORITY
care about the silent majority. check your mails, check your stats (google analytics on site stats), understand all users, not just bloggers

AFTER YOU LAUNCH: GROW

• BE FAST
Move fast, really fast. Our competitor registered his domain name 4 hours after Scoble blogged us.

• COCOON CORE USERS
Capitalize on core users. Wordpress: 100 core users, thousands of regular user. Outsource specialized documentation, prioritization, translations, widgets

• CONNECT WITH COMPETITORS
Meet your competitors, connect to them. they have the same problem than you, are probably much more transparent than you think. it will give you ideas.

• LOVE GOOGLE
Don’t fear google. If they step in your market it’s a sign you are, well, in a real market. And that might get you a call from Microsoft and Yahoo.

• THINK OUTSIDE THE (TOOL)BOX
Don’t focus only on user requests. Users help you think inside the toolbox, your job is to grow the toolbox.

• WEB2.0
Don’t care about the web 2.0 standards. Do things if they make sense, not because they are a web 2.0 standard (if such a thing ever existed…)

• TAKE RISKS
It’s not because every move you make it commented and analyzed you should stop taking risks. Risks are what took you there, keep on taking some. The web allows to come back very easily.

AFTER THE LAUNCH: MAKE MONEY

• FLEX YOUR ADS
Put the ads day one, even if you’re ok with losing money. they are part of the design, that’s it. ads are also the only safe metric when it comes to page views

• GET YOUR ASS KICKED
Meet the VCs, any VC. they’ll help you define your business model and challenge you

• INVENT METRICS
Create metrics: technorati, delicious, # users, g-metrics.com, you will need metrics.

ADVISES FOR INTRAPRENEURS

• FORMALIZE POST-LAUNCH
Prepare what happens next before it happens.

• PREPARE FOR POLITICS
Everybody loves you now, you’re not alone anymore!

• FOCUS
Don’t eat the cheese

That’s it. My talk is behind me so I can now relax and enjoy the great program Pedro and his team have put together. Seems like these guys won their bet, SHiFT is a success so far!