Yeah, well I'd just as well tell Kristopher to just clam up and deliver when it comes out. No disrespect intended, but it does no one any good to tell everyone another date for release and have something potentially get in the way.
Not that it will, of course -- but if it does, is all. ;)
Robert Scoble
· 2 years ago
Yeah, I agree with that. Setting expectations and then not meeting them hurts more than exceeding them. Kristopher knows this, circumstances got away from him.
Chris
· 2 years ago
"To me, though, it points out why you need SOME funding behind you."
If you can't put a million bucks worth of VC into a startup, you better forget about it ever hitting the top 100. All the sites everybody thought were independant such as youtube and myspace turned out to be corporate creations of rich beverlyhillbillies. Especially a startup that is a leech service.
If you have employees and you're website is bombing, do yourself a favour and have them work on stuff that does make cash.
This type of service is "go big or go home".
Chris
· 2 years ago
typo on that last "your", you get the picture. :)
Shelley
· 2 years ago
This would be considered true 'old school' and old fashioned and not hip, but if at any of the corporate jobs I worked at, we had a system take a week to roll out because of 'unforeseen problems', someone would have been canned.
This demonstrates not only lack of money, but lack of infrastructure experience. And planning. And foresight.
Sure it's cute and cool that Kristopher has a live stream of his face, showing him working -- but that's just another aspect of using 'coolness' to make up for ability, experience, and just plain good common sense.
Perhaps a lot less hype, and a lot more technological know how would have suited this application. As for Kristopher being 'brilliant' -- brilliant developers don't take systems down for a week.
Thomas
· 2 years ago
Have users stand behind you is parting of building your brand. Build a good brand, and you will build loyal users. Be upfront and honest about what is going on, and you will get support. It sounds like Kristopher and Thomas have done a great job building customer loyalty. Now they have learned the lesson about making deadlines, and meeting expectations. Sometimes things get out of hand, but that is why you must have backup systems and fallback plans. Good luck.
SB
· 2 years ago
One week or two weeks, it's worth the wait. Who else is offerring unlimited upload limit other than zooomr. That speaks for itself.
Somehow I dont like VC's . You do the hardwork, and they take the major share of the pie when the company gets sold.
As for as funding is concerned, Kris and Tom should go the donation route.
I wouldnt mind paying couple of dollars to help thier financial situation and I am sure they are quite few like me like that you want to help them.
Adrian Sutton
· 2 years ago
I'd say the lesson to learn out of this is to not go for the big bang release - it's really hard to get that level of integration right. Instead, release early and release often. It not only means that your releases are smaller and less likely to cause problems, you also get more practice at doing releases. The first thing to learn is to have a way to roll back if it doesn't work - sounds like that's sorely lacking at Zoomr at the moment.
We all learn these things and it's this kind of experience that really distinguishes between a 19 year old prodigy and a great developer (who might just happen to be 19 years old). I'm sure Kristopher will either learn those skills (he now realizes how important it is) or he'll focus on his business skills and hire someone else who has those skills. Nothing wrong with either approach - the key is just to get the right skills.
Zian
· 2 years ago
@Kelly Not to start a flame-war or anything but I think the skillset of an IT department and the skillset of a software developer don't overlap perfectly.
Just because someone is fantastic at writing code doesn't mean they're genius network admins, and vice versa.
Adrian Sutton
· 2 years ago
@Zian Generally I agree, however the lines between the two are really starting to blur a lot. If you're developing web apps you really need to know how to deploy and roll back correctly. Throwing stuff over the wall to your IT department to deploy is a major source of pain and deployment issues. If you have to do it all yourself you are more inclined to make your software easy to deploy and rollback which makes it less likely you'll "do a Zoomr".
jonathan
· 2 years ago
Pretty high profile teeth cutting exercise.
There is a lot of goodwill attached to zooomr, but ultimately there will be a bunch of unhappy people if their "user generated content" that they OWN is damaged or misplaced...
Adrian Sutton
· 2 years ago
That's the world we live in these days - very public and a lot of people making it big before they're completely prepared to handle it. Not that I think Kristopher isn't capable of making Zoomr successful, just that in "the old days" it was harder to get public attention than it is now, so you spent a lot longer messing up things all by yourself with noone noticing. These days it's easier to get started and get further with programming and it's so much easier to get public attention. The downside is that your mistakes are more public too.
Oh well.
Chris
· 2 years ago
@Shelley.
I fully agree, BUT, when you can't afford a full scale development environment, to back up the production env, it doesn't help.
Self funded startups often times go live with stuff they didn't test to scale. It works on dev PC on localhost, so they dump it live without really planning on what it will do in a cluster.
Ideally you want to have enough money where you can have a real production and dev system, where you can seemlessly switch over the dev to production after weeks or months of beta testing. That's not cheap on any level.
Let's not give false hope to the determined candidates. Kevin Rose did it, yeah, but Kevin Rose is also uncommonly famous, and well connected.
No doubt good skilled people make a difference. As an employer I must tell you that getting those people to work at your camp is pretty darn hard. Especially with what others are offering. The idea that if you do it "just right" it may work, or that there is some sort of secret way you can beat the system when it comes to that sort of start up is foolishness. Wikipedia? Porn Mogul. YCombinator? NO. It doesn't end. People have to wake up.
Chris
· 2 years ago
"I have a feeling that because of Photobucket’s sale for $250 million to MySpace that there’ll be someone willing to bet on Kristopher."
Sorry I didn't pick up on this before. Offhand I would say no. You are talking about a VC market that got hit over the head with Friendster and Youtube clones for the past 2 years. Even Walmart tried it. Photobucket got bought by Myspace because it was there from the beginning, as old or older than MySpace itself and almost every single page on MySpace had 2 or more photobucket images. You can't simply start up and accomplish that. Photobucket leveraged it's position to make trouble on MySpace with javascript action on it's links, and they couldn't do anything BUT buy it.
Leech services just aren't very attractive. He should do what Writely did, and come out with the soup du jour web software before the rest of the world and then sell it off before it becomes too late, unlike kiko.
Mashup software seems big now with Microsoft and Google pooling their new services there.
The big new thing is web services and mashing up disaparate web content. I would think the VC is going there right about now more than anywhere else.
Kristopher Tate
· 2 years ago
Thanks for your support Robert and All -- This week has been defining all around.
The best thing about life is to make the best of what you have and continually move forward -- we're doing just that :)
It's only $99 and will let you see if moving forward is worth it.
Ben Metcalfe
· 2 years ago
As insightful/relevant your initial comments have been "Chris", I think pointing Kris to a $99 roll-your-own business plan site is nasty, below-the-belt move.
I for one have seen the shit Kris has been going through this past week. Yeah, he's done some things I wouldn't have done but he's desperately under-funded and under-staffed. It really is just him and Thomas, and Thomas isn't technical. I actually can't think of many start-ups the size of Zooomr that are run by just 1 full-time guy (Thomas still has a day-job).
I hope he gets some serious funding to take Zooomr to the next level, he deserves it.
cheryl
· 2 years ago
goodness, there are a lot of people commenting here who sound cynical, jaded and middle aged... you don't sound wise, you sound like you just don't want this to work.
the voice of wisdom would say 'this will be bloody hard work, here are some things that might help things go your way.'
i have no wisdom, Kristopher, just best wishes. there's always space for more people to be brilliant and to succeed.
"Doing a Zooomr", and therein lies the challenge and the future.
Chris, I understand about not having the money, or the system, but when you don't have either, you can still have commonsense. And commonsense would say that is you've had problems following through with grandiose promises in the past, you should consider scaling back such in the future.
This is Web 2.0 taken to an extreme. It's like serving a lemon meringue pie that's all meringue. Doing so might work once for all, or sometimes for some, but ultimately people are going to want something more substantial underneath the fluff.
You can't run a successful business purely on hype. Sure I wish the Zooomr folks luck, but sounds like they need something more than luck.
Zaid
· 2 years ago
Kris, in days following your launch, you will get to hear plenty from all sorts of people. As with *any* relaunch, there is a lot of initial "pissed off" time where folks hate the new stuff simply because it's new. As long as you listen to the constructive feedback, take care of the basics(YES backups!) you should do well in weeks and months to follow.
To all the people that say the photo sharing market has reached its max size, you have ZERO idea. You are also the same guys who would have passed on Google; or YouTube(because dozen other sites already existed); or Facebook(because Orkut/Friendster was *the* thing when facebook started.) Part of that idea comes from the assumption that every start-up is in it for a quick launch and flip. I don't sense that from Kris. I do not think Kris is expecting to be acquired in six months, or one year.
Oh, if there is any expert who claims to know what the internet landscape will look like in a year from now, two words: yeah right!
--Zaid
Shelley
· 2 years ago
"...goodness, there are a lot of people commenting here who sound cynical, jaded and middle aged…"
And therein speaks the CEO of the next great Web 2.0 startup...
cheryl
· 2 years ago
nah, therein speaks someone who is working on a project that many said was impossible... and indeed it would have been if a couple of people hadn't said 'i want this to work for you'
[my work has nothing to do with the web, but everything to do with imagination... ]
Podesta
· 2 years ago
I'm with Shelley. What I am hearing is lot of superficiality. That makes me think there is an effort to distract from the question of whether Kristopher has a viable nuts and bolts operation or not. I also am skeptical about rushees (though I was one to an extent.) I mean youths who rush through school, start trying to have businesses before they are drinking age or run around the world as if there is a prize for spending time on each continent. Their rewards often turn out to be bankruptcies, drug addictions and nervous breakdowns before they are 30. What's the rush, Kristopher?
Simon Brocklehurst
· 2 years ago
Robert asks if a VC would invest in Zoomr. I'm sure the Zoomr guys could find *someone* that would be willing to invest. But here's the golden rule with venture capital - if you can't attract a top tier VC, it's probably better to pass.
One of the key questions for VCs will be: is there any evidence to suggest that Zoomr will attract a large number (millions) of engaged users?
Right now, it's not obvious to me that there is. That doesn't mean there *isn't*. It's just that it's not obvious to *me*. And it might not be obvious to the top tier VCs either. The problem I had was - from my ultra-quick look-see, it *appeared* that Zoomr doesn't have many users, and isn't growing that fast.
So... if the Zoomr guys have good reasons to believe they will have milions of users in the near future, they should be shouting about it (how many users in total now, how many users are being added per month, how many photos are people uploading etc). Then, trust me, the VCs will find them...
What lots of people don't realise is - VCs chase hot deals like crazy. So, if the top-tier VCs aren't chasing Zoomr, it's because they don't think it's a hot deal.
Fred Grott
· 2 years ago
Robert why is he not using Amazon Web Services server infrastructure?
Is certainly less expensive than buying your own servers and solves the infrastructure problems with the ability to have a mirror of a server set up to practice new features on and etc.
Tony Hung
· 2 years ago
UPDATE: Kristopher just said he’ll probably have his new version up later tonight. Me? I’m keeping my fingers crossed for him.
... and sure enough, "later tonight passes" and ... ?
no dice.
Chris
· 2 years ago
@Ben Metcalfe,
It wasn't to insult him or the website. I was serious. Even a roll your own business plan can quickly let you know whether it is worth spending a year on something or not.
Running some quick numbers and projections can let you know if you are wasting your time or not. If this is a hobby then that is different. Of course doing a startup is a risk, but you can mitigate that with a strong plan and exit strategy.
The best suggestion I would tell Kris as the owner of a social networking site and high price social software licensing, would be to try to strike deals with smaller social networking sites(you can find a list of them on wikipedia), and get them to use his service exclusively.
That won't work in the same way as photobucket, because the smaller sites will never have enough money to fund them or buy them out if they spam with javascript ala photobucket, BUT, it will get his watermark seen all over the place. If somebody offered our site, sitespaces.net that or one of our licensees such as brasilspace.com, perhaps they would have a chance of success. http://cherrytap.com has nearly a million members. So do a lot of networking sites. The draw back is that people good enough to make that software usually are good enough to rig up the image hosting as well. It would all rely on the strength of the deal, rather than the technical aspects. Any good developer can develop any current technology such as youtube video encoding, flickr ajax ect... It's not rocket science, you have to be the best business person, not the best software developer. That's a fact. Look at Scoble.
Zaid
· 2 years ago
@Chris: For the fun of it: best business persons did not create Google, nor Microsoft, nor Yahoo. They were folks playing with something until it clicked. An MBA would probably run a few calculations and sign off all of the above companies in the early days as "not worth the risk/potential benefit". Which is not to say the MBA is wrong even--that's just how young folks build something, some even something great.
I do think Kris should stop giving dates or blogger interviews until he just launches. At this point he risks being questioned by even his most ardent fans. That's that just human nature. If you give me a half dozen missed promises, it will get annoying after a while ESPECIALLY if I really am looking forward to it.
Chris
· 2 years ago
@Zaid,
You are wrong about Microsoft and Google. Not sure about Yahoo. To call Gates anything less than the most ruthless business person is inaccurate in my opinion. Those who started RH and Google were also very well educated in business. Google only really took off when Schmidt took over anyway. I have no idea about the origins of Yahoo. I could never characterize Gates writing Altair basic at Harvard as folks playing around with something. They didn't even have an Altair to do it with and built it solely from the specifications. Likewise with Google and Pagerank. Page and Brin were hardly playing around with something, and they were hardly short of interest or funding. Just wanted to clear that up. If I'm wrong, somebody quick jump in and correct me. I welcome it.
Yuvi
· 2 years ago
I stand by Zooomr, and will. Afterall, it's an effort by a friend of mine, even though I've never seen him.
Chris, don't attack me: You'll be arrested for physically abusing a child :D
Chris
· 2 years ago
@32,
I'm not trying to attack people. Sorry if it came off that way.
They could actually make a lot of money(millions) by selling the server software now that I think of it. I'd buy a license for sure. A lot of social networks would. It would have to be secure as crap to have the src out there though.
Robert Scoble
· 2 years ago
I think we can all agree that Kristopher and Thomas have made a bunch of mistakes in overpromising and under delivering. That said, I like the service and if they can get it up the new version will bring lots of people to it.
They have 100,000 users and have 10 terabytes of photos stored.
Zaid
· 2 years ago
@31 Yes Chris, most successful companies to grow need a great business strategy and/or guy. But at MOST of these companies, it isn't the BUSINESS side of them that makes their product take off. Google took off because it was better technology. Yahoo took off because it was just damn useful directory of links. Gates spent much more time on product development than business strategy in his teen days.
It's obvious you need great business understanding inside your company to build something of financial value. But to suggest that the original strengths of past great founders have been their business acumen would be wrong. Kris may or may not have the business acumen or skills to get the right guys--but he's not even at the stage where we know the answer to that. He's still on step one where you build a product of some value.
--Zaid
Robert Scoble
· 2 years ago
Oh, and they are looking into Amazon's Web services. The trouble is, they say, those services are too slow for their liking. Good for backup, but not good for main servers.
Zaid is right. You gotta prove that you can build a service of value first to attract capital and people.
This is why most businesses are built by people who have past business success.
If Kristopher succeeds in a resource-depleted environment he'll learn a lot of lessons that will prove valuable later when he gets funded. And if he doesn't get funded he can always go and work for a big company for a while.
Chris
· 2 years ago
@Zaid,
"Gates spent much more time on product development than business strategy in his teen days."
One word answer, Traf-O-Data. Do your homework. Best example I can give is RedHat. They were/are selling something everybody was/is giving away and does to this day, and they did it because of marvelous business and infrastructure. 10TB is certainly impressive sounding, but with 1TB desktop drives now out, that's about 2 Rackmount 2Us or 2 power macs plus a space in a cage at a datacenter. Again, not undermining, but stating reality.
Simon Brocklehurst
· 2 years ago
@34 100,000 engaged users is a significant number. I'd want to know the number of users they're *adding* each month before trying to figure out what they're worth though. And how many users did they have last month; three months ago; six months ago.
Also, as a sense check, 10TB of storage doesn't like a huge amount to me if they have 100,000 engaged users. 10TB = 10,000GB. So that makes 0.1GB per user, or 100MB per user on average (maybe 25 photos) Is my arithmetic wrong? I'd have thought an engaged user would have more like say 250 photographs. So, perhaps Zoomr really has more like ten thousand engaged users? If that were true, that's *not* a significant number.
So, I think the devil is really in the detail as to whether Zoomr has any value *right now* to a high-quality VC...
Robert Scoble
· 2 years ago
Simon: I doubt there were very many engaged users of the service like you point out. There aren't many people who post as much photography as Thomas Hawk does, though.
Josh Stodola
· 2 years ago
What is the deal with that mini smiley face at the bottom left of each page?!
Robert Scoble
· 2 years ago
Josh: it's a tracking device for Wordpress.com so that Google's analytics can work.
LayZ
· 2 years ago
@35 "Gates spent much more time on product development than business strategy in his teen days."
I'm guessing you are referring to Traf-o-Data. Well, even then Gates was more motivated by the business possibility of that than he was the geek aspect. He saw that the city could use that type of data. And then he and Allen went on to build BASIC languages and, well, SOLD them; didn't give them away. Again, saw the BUSINESS potential. And then, BOUGHT DOS and by sheer stroke of luck, got a deal with IBM. All because he saw the BUSINESS VALUE (read:$$$$$) in doing so. So, to suggest Gates was anything other than a businessman at his core is to ignore a lot.
All Comments
Not that it will, of course -- but if it does, is all. ;)
If you can't put a million bucks worth of VC into a startup, you better forget about it ever hitting the top 100.
All the sites everybody thought were independant such as youtube and myspace turned out to be corporate creations of rich beverlyhillbillies.
Especially a startup that is a leech service.
If you have employees and you're website is bombing, do yourself a favour and have them work on stuff that does make cash.
This type of service is "go big or go home".
This demonstrates not only lack of money, but lack of infrastructure experience. And planning. And foresight.
Sure it's cute and cool that Kristopher has a live stream of his face, showing him working -- but that's just another aspect of using 'coolness' to make up for ability, experience, and just plain good common sense.
Perhaps a lot less hype, and a lot more technological know how would have suited this application. As for Kristopher being 'brilliant' -- brilliant developers don't take systems down for a week.
Build a good brand, and you will build loyal users. Be upfront and honest about what is going on, and you will get support.
It sounds like Kristopher and Thomas have done a great job building customer loyalty.
Now they have learned the lesson about making deadlines, and meeting expectations. Sometimes things get out of hand, but that is why you must have backup systems and fallback plans.
Good luck.
Somehow I dont like VC's . You do the hardwork, and they take the major share of the pie when the company gets sold.
As for as funding is concerned, Kris and Tom should go the donation route.
I wouldnt mind paying couple of dollars to help thier financial situation and I am sure they are quite few like me like that you want to help them.
We all learn these things and it's this kind of experience that really distinguishes between a 19 year old prodigy and a great developer (who might just happen to be 19 years old). I'm sure Kristopher will either learn those skills (he now realizes how important it is) or he'll focus on his business skills and hire someone else who has those skills. Nothing wrong with either approach - the key is just to get the right skills.
Not to start a flame-war or anything but I think the skillset of an IT department and the skillset of a software developer don't overlap perfectly.
Just because someone is fantastic at writing code doesn't mean they're genius network admins, and vice versa.
Generally I agree, however the lines between the two are really starting to blur a lot. If you're developing web apps you really need to know how to deploy and roll back correctly. Throwing stuff over the wall to your IT department to deploy is a major source of pain and deployment issues. If you have to do it all yourself you are more inclined to make your software easy to deploy and rollback which makes it less likely you'll "do a Zoomr".
There is a lot of goodwill attached to zooomr, but ultimately there will be a bunch of unhappy people if their "user generated content" that they OWN is damaged or misplaced...
Oh well.
I fully agree, BUT, when you can't afford a full scale development environment, to back up the production env, it doesn't help.
Self funded startups often times go live with stuff they didn't test to scale. It works on dev PC on localhost, so they dump it live without really planning on what it will do in a cluster.
Ideally you want to have enough money where you can have a real production and dev system, where you can seemlessly switch over the dev to production after weeks or months of beta testing. That's not cheap on any level.
Let's not give false hope to the determined candidates.
Kevin Rose did it, yeah, but Kevin Rose is also uncommonly famous, and well connected.
No doubt good skilled people make a difference. As an employer I must tell you that getting those people to work at your camp is pretty darn hard. Especially with what others are offering. The idea that if you do it "just right" it may work, or that there is some sort of secret way you can beat the system when it comes to that sort of start up is foolishness. Wikipedia? Porn Mogul. YCombinator? NO. It doesn't end. People have to wake up.
Sorry I didn't pick up on this before.
Offhand I would say no. You are talking about a VC market that got hit over the head with Friendster and Youtube clones for the past 2 years. Even Walmart tried it. Photobucket got bought by Myspace because it was there from the beginning, as old or older than MySpace itself and almost every single page on MySpace had 2 or more photobucket images. You can't simply start up and accomplish that. Photobucket leveraged it's position to make trouble on MySpace with javascript action on it's links, and they couldn't do anything BUT buy it.
Leech services just aren't very attractive. He should do what Writely did, and come out with the soup du jour web software before the rest of the world and then sell it off before it becomes too late, unlike kiko.
Mashup software seems big now with Microsoft and Google pooling their new services there.
The big new thing is web services and mashing up disaparate web content. I would think the VC is going there right about now more than anywhere else.
The best thing about life is to make the best of what you have and continually move forward -- we're doing just that :)
Rock On.
kristopher
As wrong as you think I am, please give this a try:
http://www.paloalto.com
It's only $99 and will let you see if moving forward is worth it.
"Chris", I think pointing Kris to a $99 roll-your-own business plan site is nasty, below-the-belt move.
I for one have seen the shit Kris has been going through this past week. Yeah, he's done some things I wouldn't have done but he's desperately under-funded and under-staffed. It really is just him and Thomas, and Thomas isn't technical. I actually can't think of many start-ups the size of Zooomr that are run by just 1 full-time guy (Thomas still has a day-job).
I hope he gets some serious funding to take Zooomr to the next level, he deserves it.
the voice of wisdom would say 'this will be bloody hard work, here are some things that might help things go your way.'
i have no wisdom, Kristopher, just best wishes. there's always space for more people to be brilliant and to succeed.
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Chris, I understand about not having the money, or the system, but when you don't have either, you can still have commonsense. And commonsense would say that is you've had problems following through with grandiose promises in the past, you should consider scaling back such in the future.
This is Web 2.0 taken to an extreme. It's like serving a lemon meringue pie that's all meringue. Doing so might work once for all, or sometimes for some, but ultimately people are going to want something more substantial underneath the fluff.
You can't run a successful business purely on hype. Sure I wish the Zooomr folks luck, but sounds like they need something more than luck.
To all the people that say the photo sharing market has reached its max size, you have ZERO idea. You are also the same guys who would have passed on Google; or YouTube(because dozen other sites already existed); or Facebook(because Orkut/Friendster was *the* thing when facebook started.) Part of that idea comes from the assumption that every start-up is in it for a quick launch and flip. I don't sense that from Kris. I do not think Kris is expecting to be acquired in six months, or one year.
Oh, if there is any expert who claims to know what the internet landscape will look like in a year from now, two words: yeah right!
--Zaid
And therein speaks the CEO of the next great Web 2.0 startup...
[my work has nothing to do with the web, but everything to do with imagination... ]
One of the key questions for VCs will be: is there any evidence to suggest that Zoomr will attract a large number (millions) of engaged users?
Right now, it's not obvious to me that there is. That doesn't mean there *isn't*. It's just that it's not obvious to *me*. And it might not be obvious to the top tier VCs either. The problem I had was - from my ultra-quick look-see, it *appeared* that Zoomr doesn't have many users, and isn't growing that fast.
So... if the Zoomr guys have good reasons to believe they will have milions of users in the near future, they should be shouting about it (how many users in total now, how many users are being added per month, how many photos are people uploading etc). Then, trust me, the VCs will find them...
What lots of people don't realise is - VCs chase hot deals like crazy. So, if the top-tier VCs aren't chasing Zoomr, it's because they don't think it's a hot deal.
Is certainly less expensive than buying your own servers and solves the infrastructure problems with the ability to have a mirror of a server set up to practice new features on and etc.
It wasn't to insult him or the website. I was serious. Even a roll your own business plan can quickly let you know whether it is worth spending a year on something or not.
Running some quick numbers and projections can let you know if you are wasting your time or not. If this is a hobby then that is different.
Of course doing a startup is a risk, but you can mitigate that with a strong plan and exit strategy.
The best suggestion I would tell Kris as the owner of a social networking site and high price social software licensing, would be to try to strike deals with smaller social networking sites(you can find a list of them on wikipedia), and get them to use his service exclusively.
That won't work in the same way as photobucket, because the smaller sites will never have enough money to fund them or buy them out if they spam with javascript ala photobucket, BUT, it will get his watermark seen all over the place.
If somebody offered our site, sitespaces.net that or one of our licensees such as brasilspace.com, perhaps they would have a chance of success.
http://cherrytap.com
has nearly a million members. So do a lot of networking sites. The draw back is that people good enough to make that software usually are good enough to rig up the image hosting as well. It would all rely on the strength of the deal, rather than the technical aspects. Any good developer can develop any current technology such as youtube video encoding, flickr ajax ect... It's not rocket science, you have to be the best business person, not the best software developer. That's a fact. Look at Scoble.
For the fun of it: best business persons did not create Google, nor Microsoft, nor Yahoo. They were folks playing with something until it clicked. An MBA would probably run a few calculations and sign off all of the above companies in the early days as "not worth the risk/potential benefit". Which is not to say the MBA is wrong even--that's just how young folks build something, some even something great.
I do think Kris should stop giving dates or blogger interviews until he just launches. At this point he risks being questioned by even his most ardent fans. That's that just human nature. If you give me a half dozen missed promises, it will get annoying after a while ESPECIALLY if I really am looking forward to it.
You are wrong about Microsoft and Google. Not sure about Yahoo. To call Gates anything less than the most ruthless business person is inaccurate in my opinion. Those who started RH and Google were also very well educated in business. Google only really took off when Schmidt took over anyway. I have no idea about the origins of Yahoo. I could never characterize Gates writing Altair basic at Harvard as folks playing around with something. They didn't even have an Altair to do it with and built it solely from the specifications. Likewise with Google and Pagerank. Page and Brin were hardly playing around with something, and they were hardly short of interest or funding. Just wanted to clear that up. If I'm wrong, somebody quick jump in and correct me. I welcome it.
Chris, don't attack me: You'll be arrested for physically abusing a child :D
I'm not trying to attack people. Sorry if it came off that way.
They could actually make a lot of money(millions) by selling the server software now that I think of it. I'd buy a license for sure. A lot of social networks would. It would have to be secure as crap to have the src out there though.
They have 100,000 users and have 10 terabytes of photos stored.
Yes Chris, most successful companies to grow need a great business strategy and/or guy. But at MOST of these companies, it isn't the BUSINESS side of them that makes their product take off. Google took off because it was better technology. Yahoo took off because it was just damn useful directory of links. Gates spent much more time on product development than business strategy in his teen days.
It's obvious you need great business understanding inside your company to build something of financial value. But to suggest that the original strengths of past great founders have been their business acumen would be wrong. Kris may or may not have the business acumen or skills to get the right guys--but he's not even at the stage where we know the answer to that. He's still on step one where you build a product of some value.
--Zaid
Zaid is right. You gotta prove that you can build a service of value first to attract capital and people.
This is why most businesses are built by people who have past business success.
If Kristopher succeeds in a resource-depleted environment he'll learn a lot of lessons that will prove valuable later when he gets funded. And if he doesn't get funded he can always go and work for a big company for a while.
"Gates spent much more time on product development than business strategy in his teen days."
One word answer, Traf-O-Data. Do your homework.
Best example I can give is RedHat. They were/are selling something everybody was/is giving away and does to this day, and they did it because of marvelous business and infrastructure. 10TB is certainly impressive sounding, but with 1TB desktop drives now out, that's about 2 Rackmount 2Us or 2 power macs plus a space in a cage at a datacenter. Again, not undermining, but stating reality.
Also, as a sense check, 10TB of storage doesn't like a huge amount to me if they have 100,000 engaged users. 10TB = 10,000GB. So that makes 0.1GB per user, or 100MB per user on average (maybe 25 photos) Is my arithmetic wrong? I'd have thought an engaged user would have more like say 250 photographs. So, perhaps Zoomr really has more like ten thousand engaged users? If that were true, that's *not* a significant number.
So, I think the devil is really in the detail as to whether Zoomr has any value *right now* to a high-quality VC...
I'm guessing you are referring to Traf-o-Data. Well, even then Gates was more motivated by the business possibility of that than he was the geek aspect. He saw that the city could use that type of data. And then he and Allen went on to build BASIC languages and, well, SOLD them; didn't give them away. Again, saw the BUSINESS potential. And then, BOUGHT DOS and by sheer stroke of luck, got a deal with IBM. All because he saw the BUSINESS VALUE (read:$$$$$) in doing so. So, to suggest Gates was anything other than a businessman at his core is to ignore a lot.