Other eventsPosted by John King on December 7, 2009 under People, Videos | 
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If you were at the last Start It! event, you may have seen John clutching a Flip camera and interviewing some of our members. Here’s the results!
Elaine Mostert, Creative Director & Management student
Darren Paskell, Computer Science student
David Valoczky, Modern Languages student
Praj Bhat, Biological Sciences PhD student
Adrian Bulley, Economics student
Fareed Patel, Economics student
Posted by John King on September 26, 2009 under Advice, News | Be the First to Comment
“Almost all the companies that I’ve invested in that have failed, or that I see fail, have business models, great products, have pretty good teams but they have no users.
Getting users, getting distribution, getting attention, becoming viral – that’s the single most difficult thing on the internet to do. And just about every product fails because they don’t have any users.
Entrepreneurs tend not to focus on that. There are very few companies that have been able to get to tens of mills of users that have failed, other than for being sued or some other reason like that.
The other thing is that the people who would pay you for things, like carriers or big companies, typically don’t want to talk to you until you have tens of millions of users. If you have a thousand users and you go to British Telecom and say ‘I want to come up with a business model with you guys’, they’re not going to sit at the table with you.
So the focus on user growth initially may sound like an internet bubble-era way of thinking about things; but if you think about statistically what’s successful and what’s not, that is usually the succsessful thing, to focus on the virality and the user growth; and once you have that, what you look at is ‘who are we benefiting?’”
Joi Ito, Chief Executive of Creative Commons, in this interview in the Guardian
