Jambo

Jambo has been TWIT’ed. (This week in TECH’ed). Leo Laporte talked about us on this week’s podcast. Dvorak and Laporte talk Jambo. Have a listen.

Jim and I first met on a National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) course in East Africa in 1993. We became best friends spending three months climbing Mt. Kenya, trekking through the Masai Mara, and trying to avoid any chance encounters with a carnivore. Unfortunately, after the program, we lost touch (Jim lived in Argentina and the UK, I was in NYC) . However, ten years later I was in a meeting in Dallas with someone that had the same first and last name as Jim, a chance encounter I didn’t try to avoid this time (maybe because he wasn’t trying to eat me). It turned out it was Jim’s father and within an hour Jim and I were reminiscing about NOLS.

Reconnecting with an old friend is one of lifes greatest moments, I remember how alive I felt reliving those stories. Within no time, Jim and I became best friends again and about a year or two later, we started Jambo to help people discover others they want to meet nearby, whether its reconnecting with an old friend or meeting a new one.

Jim and I are excited announce that we have partnered with NOLS to launch a Jambo NOLS Alumni Group. Created by NOLS grads for NOLS grads!

NOLS means a lot to us because the experience made such a strong impact on our lives. We learned a lot about teamwork and leadership and have applied those lessons to Jambo. Now, I am really looking forward to meeting and reconnecting with other NOLS grads and prospective students that are nearby. Who knows who I will run into next week? If I’m lucky, I might even find someone to go hiking with too.

If you don’t have a Mac yet, it’s time to buy one. If you have both, it’s time to put away your PC and say Jambo! Mac.

Jambo Networks has just released its latest version for the Mac and it’s awesome! Since Jim and I and most of our team are all Mac enthusiasts, we are excited to announce that Jambo for Macs is now available for download at www.jambo.net. Thank you Jay for all your hard work and for allowing me to finally return to my 12 inch powerbook! Life is good.

Just in time for Labor Day Weekend travel, Jambo deployed its social networking service to La Guardia Airport in partnership with Concourse Communications, the WiFi hotspot service provider for LGA. Since Jambo can work both online and offline, travelers can use the software throughout La Guardia Airport and on their next flight, at 30,000 feet in the air. Travelers can download Jambo from the Concourse WiFi Hostpot Welcome page.

We are very excited about this because airports are hubs for chance encounters. Over 24 million people pass through LGA every year. The chances that some of those people also share something in common with one another is very high. I’ve run into old friends and even gotten a job from meeting someone on a flight. I know several people who have dated someone they met on a plane. Yet, those interactions are just with the people that happen to be in a seat near them. We’re now extending those opportunities to everyone on the same plane or in a nearby terminal. So there is an huge opportunity for us to connect them together, whether in LGA, on their flight, or wherever they land.

A few months ago, I was traveling through LGA to go to my reunion at Cornell in Ithaca, NY. I ended up missing my connection and had to spend the night in the airport to catch the early morning flight. I passed the time by blogging about my experience (at 3am in the morning), but I would have preferred to discover other travelers that shared something in common with me. I kept thinking I might run into an old classmate. I would have paid a lot of money for a good connection then, anything to help me stay awake. . . . . I was traveling with three laptops, one of which I hadn’t backed up in while, so trying to fall asleep probably wouldn’t be a good idea, particularly since I had to wait in baggage claim until the airport opened at 5am. Unfortunately, we hadn’t rolled out to LGA yet, so I was out of luck. Now, if I get stranded or delayed there again, hopefully I will be able to discover some great contacts nearby. If you find yourself in a similar situation, check out Jambo. Since it works everywhere, you can use it any any airport or flight, among other places and hopefully it can make your experience a little more exciting or productive.

We were featured in this month’s NOLS Leader Alumni publication. Its a great article and I think it really captures what we’re trying to build.

“Imagine you’re sitting in a coffee shop while traveling, trying to decide the best place to stay for the night. Suddenly, your cellular phone alerts you that another NOLS graduate has just entered the coffee shop. In striking up a conversation, you learn that this fellow grad is a local and they know all about great campsites and hiking in the area.”…

Download the pdf!

Since launching at the DEMO Conference last February, we’ve received a lot of terrific emails from people all over the world that are passionate about Jambo and asking us if they can be early users.

This early feedback made us realize that we were on to something very big, yet it also made us more committed to our original market strategy. . . . . to ensure that we didn’t screw it up either. We’ve always been focused on places where users can experience Jambo in an optimal environment. Jambo works best when there is a network effect and we want everyone’s first experience with us to be positive. So, we have targeted markets where we can create a localized network effect such as university campuses and technology conferences. These are all places where WiFi is already deployed, and where people are already motivated to meet others around them.

Setting expectations is a must in any industry, particularly the tech industry, which is littered with companies whose early adopters had negative experiences with their products. Positive experiences help companies cross the chasm. However, the Internet has taught us that people can now mobilize very quickly around a common cause or interest. We have seen it with the Dean campaign, ebay, and countless others.

The more I think about it, I wonder if early adopters aren’t more understanding than we think they are. I’ve been an early adopter of many technologies and have accepted the growing pains that goes with it. Early adopters get excited about being among the first to use a new technology. They provide feedback out of self-interest so that the technology better meets there needs, which is the ultimate goal of any company. The more feedback they provide, the more committed they are to the company’s success. This feedback is important, because it makes the company stronger and helps it climb up the hill of the early majority. Early adopters now have much more power than they used to because they can now blog about a technology or send out invitations to all their contacts, enabling one user to reach hundreds if not thousands of other potential users.

So, if early adopters are asking for a product, should you feed their hunger or should you stay the course? Common business sense says go where the early adopters are. Yet, since our technology involves a network effect, it’s a little more complicated. Most startups struggle to find their early adopters and here we have early adopters knocking on our doors asking to use it and provide us with feedback that will make us better.

Jambo has listened to you and we’ve decided to open up our service to anyone that wants to download it and try it out. Just go to www.jambo.net, and create a bio, discover when those you want to meet are nearby you and then meet face-to-face. The more people you tell, the more value you will receive. The more feedback you provide us, the better we can customize it for your needs. We hope you enjoy it!

I’ve been doing alot of flying lately. Yesterday, I was on a flight from LA to Dallas, and things went pretty well. We took off on time, the service on the flight was friendly - smooth ride, smooth landing, quick taxi to the jetbridge.

And then it all fell apart.

They had already signaled for everyone to stand up and begin de-planing, but the jetbridge was having trouble connecting to the plane door. This is probably the worst time in the entire flight to have a delay - at the end. People are ready to get off the plane and it is extremely frustrating to have to wait, after you’ve arrived at your destination and your loved ones are just outside the door.

There are points during the customer experience where failures are more visible than others. These failures should be avoided at all costs. In the airline industry, visible failures are things such as plane crashes, but also more subtle things like jetbridge failures. Waiting an extra twenty minutes before you get ON the plane is very different than waiting an extra twenty minutes before you get OFF the plane, after you’ve arrived at your destination.

Just think of everything that has to go “right” in order to deliver passengers safely and on-time from one point to another. Its a pretty complex process with lots of ways things can go wrong, resulting in a delay, or even something far worse. But if we focus on preventing these most visible failures, whether we are running a billion-dollar airline, or a little software startup, we’ll deliver a better cutomer experience. For Jambo, we should spend some time thinking about what is the equivalent of our jetbridge.

We presented at IBD Network’s Under the Radar Conference today in Mountain View, CA. There were about 200 or so people present, mostly VCs and entrepreneurs. It was focused on consumer technologies, so there was a mix of social software and mobile content plays. I saw some interesting companies such as Rojo, FiveAcross, PubSub, PeerFlix, among others.

I was surprised to see a number of mobile content plays. It looks like history is about to repeat itself. The mobile market seems to be following the same patterns of the Internet, when everyone originally thought content was king. People ended up balking to pay for content on the Internet, but have been more than willing to pay to connect to other people through sites such as Ebay, Match.com, Hotjobs, etc. - proving that community or social interaction, not content is king.

I think we will find the same conclusion with the mobile market as well. Who is going to pay to watch a movie on their cell phone, particularly when we have plasma, LCD, and flat screen TVs that make watching TV the traditional way a vastly superior experience. Yet, the reason so many companies are focused on mobile content is that carriers are desperately seeking more ways to monetize their user base. This is the old solution looking for a problem issue and history has proved that those ideas never work. Content is often overvalued because it is a commodity.

On the flip slide, social interaction will never be commoditized. Every interaction you have is different and unique. It is always changing. There is always something new to talk about because our lives are always changing, providing an endless stream of topics to discuss. So, anyone looking for the next big thing to hit the mobile market, or any market, think about if it promotes interaction among people and if it does, then ask how it makes that interaction better than what we currently have. Ebay brought buyers and sellers together from around the world for the first time providing a global flea market. Who will be the next ebay? How will it connect people together? How will it improve the experience of being connected to someone else? How will it raise the bar? How will it move the conversation further or deeper?

Almost 2500 years ago, Plato was writing about how humans were social animals. While the world around us has changed a lot since then, the fact that we still need to interact with others is still a constant that will remain at least another 2500 years, while most of the content we now have has long been forgotten.

I was on a panel discussion last week for the Southwest Venture Forum in Dallas, TX, where I mentioned my startup reading list of books and blogs I like. Since a lot of entrepreneurs came up to me afterwards to ask about those names, I figured i would post them here. I hope you learn as much as I have from them.

Blogs:
Several VCs have started their own blogs and I have added many of them to my RSS Reader. These blogs provide great insights into the world of venture capital, what it takes to succeed, what their portfolio companies are doing right or wrong, trends they think will be big, and how they evaluate technologies, among other things. These guys have a lot more experience than we do on what it takes to succeed, so their advice is a gold mine. I only wish more VCs would share their lessons with the rest of us.

Feld Thoughts- awesome! He has had some great posts about term sheets.

Venture Chronicles by Jeff Nolan - awesome! He has had some great posts about what he has learned from portfolio companies, what he thinks about all kinds of issues that startups face, etc.

BeyondVC awesome! great insights into all kinds of issues startups face.

VentureBlog - very good.

Allen’s Blog - great list of the 10 commandments for entrepreneurs

Due Diligence

AVC

Books:
Art of the Start - Guy Kawasaki
Awesome! - Best book I’ve read so far on the subject

Fundamentals of Venture Capital - Joseph Bartlett
A slim book that discusses the legal sides of raising money. Very good info in here.

Startup - Jerry Kaplan
Story of Jerry building the first PDA. Great insight into the struggle of starting your own company.

Done Deals – VCs tell their Stories – Udayan Gupta
The top VCs telling their story on what they look for. Since you should be evaluating the VC as much as they are evaluating you, this is good for due diligence.

High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner’s Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars – Charles Ferguson
The story of starting Vermeer and its eventual sale to Microsoft to become FrontPage.

The Perfect Store – Inside ebay - Adam Cohen
An interesting acccount of how ebay was started and grew to become one of the most successful internet companies today

New Venture Creation – Jeffrey Timmons
More of a textbook for entrepreneurship classes, but has a lot of good info.

Venture Capital at the Crossroads – Bygrave & Timmons
More theoretical, but some very good chapters - particularly the one on Marketing Myopia.

Danny’s post below got me thinking about our customers. How much are we listening to our customers? What percentage of our time is focused on the customer? 5% 10%, 25%, 50%? What is the right amount? And who is doing the listening? Is it just Customer Support? Sales? Marketing? I think everyone needs to listen, because without the customer, there is no company, so the customer’s opinion matters.

The best way to interact with our customers is of course, face-to-face. When we were rolling out to Washington University’s campus about a month ago, I had so much fun talking to our customers, asking them for their opinions - learning what they liked and what they thought needed to be improved. We integrated a lot of that feedback into new features to make Jambo even better. And when we do that, I think we need to let everyone know. I liked the way Danny recognized some of the users in his blog. Let’s keep that up!

How many companies base their competitive advantage on knowing their customers better than anyone? Its one thing to say listen to your customers, its a whole other thing to say that this will be one of our competitive advantages. As a pioneer in a new market, this is an advantage that is ours to lose. New companies often develop in the wake of mature companies that have become unresponsive, arrogant, or risk averse.

Our Customers are our competitive advantage - its up to us to lose them to a firm that is more concerned about their needs. Our whole company need to be focused on how best to serve those needs. As our market evolves and our customers’ needs change, we must adapt as well. It is not enough just to let customers come to us, but we must go to them and ask them what they want.

Since Jambo is a tool to bring people face-to-face, we need to be using Jambo to meet our customers as often as possible and learn about how they are using it. Everywhere I go, I am running Jambo, so if you are a customer nearby, I hope to meet you soon!