Dave McClure, who describes himself as Startup Investor and Troublemaker is the founder of 500startups.com – an internet startup and seed fund and incubator program in Mountain View, CA. Dave has been geeking out in Silicon Valley for over twenty years, and has worked with companies such as PayPal, Mint, Founders Fund, Facebook, LinkedIn, SlideShare, Twilio, Simply Hired, O’Reilly Media, Intel, & Microsoft.
Dave talks about global trends on the web. Accoring to him there are more and more old people and young people online nowadays. There is also more bandwidth and more video online and a growth of Global languages (there are more than 1 billion Mandarin and English speakers and more than 500 million speakers of Spanish, Hindi, Arabic and Portuguese). This means that you can build projects for your local market in one of these languages that appeal to all the world.
Another obvious trend accoring to Dave is the smart device proliferation – phone, tablet, TV, console, etc – as well as the acceleration of global payment and e-commerce. On the other hand product development and customer acquisition have more and more reduced costs.
Dave’s advice is to dominate your local/native market first or to move so that your local market is bigger (China, US).
Dave recommends a few books – “Spent: Sex, evolution and human behavior” by Geoffrey Miller, “Influence: the psychology of persuasion” by Robert Cialdini and “Understanding comics: the invisible art” by Scott McCloud.
Dave’s opinion is that you don’t need to be in Silicon Valley, but Silicon Valley needs to be in you wherever you are in the world.
The main conclusion of Dave’s presentation was: Start local, hustle global.
The prize for virality goes to paper.li – a startup that organizes links shared on Twitter and Facebook into an easy to read newspaper-style format.
The prize for technology goes to Waze – a social mobile application providing free turn-by-turn navigation based on the live conditions of the road.
The prize for originality goes to Super Marmite
The Startup Audience Choice Award goes to City M – a car-sharing application
Apparently caffeine together with enthusiasm fuels startups as the main sponsor of the competition was Nespresso. Congratulations to everyone!
One of the most inspiring talks this morning at Le Web was Loic’s chat with Phil Libin, Evernote CEO. Although the talk belonged to the “Money Talks” session, Phil’s main theme was that that you should not follow the money. What Phil advised entrepreneurs was to search for an idea that could save humanity or change the world and build upon it.
Phil’s presentation was entitled “From a Simple Idea to a Global Success” and this is exactly what he thinks was the reason behind Evernote’s success – a very simple idea. The company came from 2 teams that came together in 2007 and launched a service in the summer of 2008, 2 and a half years ago.
The company has definitely become a global success as Evernote has just passed 5 million registered users a few weeks ago and gains around 18000 users every day. One of their highest growth rates is in Spain and Libin stated that they have no idea why are that he is planning a visit there. This growth was organic they didn’t do any SEO or advertising. As far as revenues are concerned, Evernote gets around 160,000 premium users. I really liked Phil Libin’s open attitude towards sharing company information. The reason behind this openness is probably exactly what he shared: “If you think of all the things that can kill your startup at every point in time, competition is actually not on top of the list. We don’t think about what other people are doing, we just try to do what we do best”.
Evernote is a proof of the freemium model at work – Phil Libin’s philosophy is that “people pay for what they love. So the easiest way to get 1 million people to pay is to get 1 million people to fall in love with you. If people know that they can leave when they want they will probably stay with you for the rest of their lives”.
Agreeing with the previous speaker, Alexander Tamas from DST International, Phil stated that from his point of view, “the worst reason to start a company is to make money. You’d better get a job. You have to love your idea and wanting to save humanity or to want to change the world is a much better reason”. “Starting a company is a bad way to make money,” he added. “On average, it’s a terrible way to make money. But if you want to save humanity from boredom or mediocrity or from the city of Paris shutting down from an inch of snow, then start a business.”
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Mission
 How to Web aims to support Eastern Europe’s grounbreaking tech experts into becoming web trendsetters, developing the next world-changing, innovative web products. |
How to Web Conference
 The How to Web Conference, organized once a year in Bucharest, Romania, reunites hundreds of entrepreneurs and tech professionals with great speakers and investors from Europe and beyond. |
How to Web Blog
 The How to Web Blog aims to become an important source of information for and about the Eastern European startup scene, covering news, offering useful pieces of info, tips and advises. |
Contact
 How to Web is a project by Wembrio. E-mail: news@wembrio.com. Address: Stelea Spatarul 21, Bucharest, Romania. |