Sequoia’s Greg McAdoo On The Opportunities Of A. Wired Editor Chris Anderson On Freemium Business. Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson is now speaking at Y Combinator’s Startup School about Freemium Business Models. Anderson likened freemium to handing out muffins on the street to entice people to start eating your muffins. But with muffins there’s a significant cost to giving away each muffin. With digital goods, you can give away 90% of your product for free, without any cost for those goods.
He says ‘free users’ aren’t free loaders, and that it’s okay to let the minority (paid users) subsidize the majority. Because the free users will recommend to friends, it’s a great form of marketing. And for those paid users, many of them are very strong customers — they may be price insensitive, with very little churn. Anderson says that for Wired, the magazine is sold in various forms (news stand, subscriber, digital form online). Anderson than started talking about the very popular game Club Pengiun, which is free to play. What will people pay for?
Time Limited Easy to do. Ev Williams And Biz Stone Admit Even Twitter Tho. Ev Williams and Biz Stone have just taken the stage at Startup School, where they’ll be taking many questions form the audience. You can submit questions by tweeting a question like this “@poll _________” (where the blank is your question). I’ll be liveblogging the session.
Q: What was the original motivation behind Twitter? Biz: We should start with Odeo. We were working at Odeo, we weren’t as passionate about the podcasting service as we should have been. We weren’t using it, and that was a problem. Twitter got started because Ev gave us some freedom to think along different lines. Biz: We (Jack Dorsey and Stone) did a thing where we had two weeks to build something and demo. Q: How long did the first version take to build? Q: What about scaling, was that a problem? Q: How did you estimate the size of the market? Q: Any advice you got early on that you didn’t take that you wish you had? Q: What advice to you have for anyone developing projects on Twitter? Q: Geolocation. Mark Pincus Talks About Becoming A Great CEO, Wi.
Zynga founder Mark Pincus is the final speaker at Y Combinator Startup School 2009. My notes on his talk are below. Pincus kicked off his talk by asking the audience how many wanted to become great entrepreneurs (much of the room raised their hand). But fewer raised their hand about becoming a world class CEO, which is something Pincus says they need to address. Out of college, Pincus says he went into banking and then business school, after which he worked in major corporations. He says that sometimes entrepreneurs are born after finding that nothing lese works for them, explaining “I got kicked out of some of the best companies in America”.
Pincus’s first lesson: You should set a goal for what you want to accomplish. Pincus says he was Fred Wilson’s first consumer deal (“he loaned me $250k and gave me four months to do something”). Pincus then started another company, called Support.com. Support.com had core technology that let you clone old PC into new PC called MoveIt. Second Thing. An Interview With Mark Zuckerberg. 37 Signals has some lessons for European st.