We’ve let our advisory board lapse somewhat and I think it’s wise to put that together again with the hope of actually getting their feedback on big milestones (most notably the re-relaunch of the hosting and support program).
I did a bit of research last week on what startups normally do with their advisory boards. Fortunately, OnStartups Answers has a few really valuable threads on this topic. Basically, there are two directions we can go. One is to recruit a board of advisers that is volunteer, not necessarily required to respond to queries, and that we talk to occasionally. Two is to recruit a board of advisers that we compensate in some form and have a more formal relationship with. After talking this through a bit, it makes more sense to go with the former with where we are currently. Albert made a good point that if we are depending on the advice and input of any one person heavily, it would probably just make more sense to hire them as a consultant.
I see the steps as:
- Email the people we want to have as our advisers and see if they’re interested
- Put together a Google Group or some sort of mailing list for conversations
- Encourage them to subscribe to this blog and send the bigger things we want input on to the list serv
Related, there’s a really good interview with Giacomo Guilizzoni, founder of Balsamiq, that a couple of threads pointed to:
We don’t have any formal agreement nor do we meet regularly. Mostly I email them whenever I have a question I know they’ll be able to the answer, to or we meet on Skype once in a while (we try to shoot for once a month but somehow haven’t been able to keep a regular schedule with anyone. Things get in the way.) We all got together for a big crab-dinner feast in San Francisco in May, something I hope to turn into a yearly tradition.
It’s pretty informal, but every time I have some sort of contact with one of my advisers, I learn something. Or they say something that gives me an idea, or gets me unstuck. That’s what talking to smart people will do. I always say that one could do a lot worse than trying to be excellent, because “excellence attracts excellence”, and when you’re in that circle, even once in a while, magic happens.
He’s got an example letter for when we want to put together an advisory board page. I’m also very interested in his approach to transparency on the company blog, and want to reopen the discussion on how transparency applies to us in the form of a blog post when I have the time to put it together.
Hometown News Service is a hosted content management system for small to medium local newspapers. They have an application into the Knight News Challenge as well where they want $250,000 funding to continue developing their CMS, make it easy to deploy, and then open source it. They have 75 paying clients right now and 12 employees so I’m not entirely sure how this fits into their strategic goals.
We should see if we can get in on their webinar. I’m going to shoot them an email.
From a Google Group I joined recently:
If you plan on using bayesian categorization, i would suggest ruinning the raw text through a Shannon Information theory-like filter to identify the most relevant words in a text. With even a mild cut on the relevancy you can reduce the index size while increasing the overall quality of the matches…. and all this would be language-independent.
Regarding the tagging as trusted or not trusted: having trusted editors is always good, but then you risk not being able to scale, and to be attacked for enforcing a left/right/religious/atheist/whatever point of view. What I would love to see is a system that correlates info,a and then lets users understand it. For example: I have A, B, C, D, and E submitting reports. A, B and C tell me that the sun is yellow and the grass is green, D tells me that the sun is red and the grass is blue, E tells me that the sun is red and grass is yellow. The system will cluster A, B, C, and give me a value that determines the cluster veracity as a function of the veracity of the 3 people submitting the reports, while it shows that D agrees mildly with them while E doesn’t on any point. As as user, I can see a computed veracity that will point me to the most likely truthful reports, but if I know for a fact that the grass in that region is yellow, as E states, then maybe I will trust E more than the others. This system would offer several advantages: besides lowering the challenge of identifying experts on the field in a short time, it would show who departs more often from the truth, and allow users to choose their “side” of the truth, while being aware of other points of view.
No specific thoughts on how this applies to the Connection Engine yet… I just wanted to record it to reference at a later point.
I spent some time this afternoon researching how we should split up equity. Here’s a dump of links and notes:
Equity distribution amongst startup co-founders ? | OnStartups Answers – The options seem to be 50/50 or distribution as a function of contributed value. People answering the question lean more towards the latter and offer some suggestions as to how to do it best.
Dividing equity between founders | cdixon.org – chris dixon’s blog – Variables to potentially consider include: past and future contributions, career success, and who had the big ideas (and whether those ideas have any technology or intellectual property associated with them).
Equity-Split Results, Part 1: When Do Teams Split Equally? | Noam Wasserman’s “Founder Frustrations” blog – Interesting chart comparing different situations. An equal split is more likely amongst smaller teams coming from similar backgrounds that divide equity at the start of the project or company.
Calculating Partnership Equity Splits | Journey of a Serial Entrepreneur – Potential formula for equity distribution: break down money to be invested, time to be invested, and experience of partner into percentages, and then determine percentage contributions of each partner. This breakdown then determines overall split of shares.
Startup Equity Distribution | Force of Good – It’s all about the K.I.S.S. approach. Lance argues against equal equity distribution and for dividing it based on contributions of time and expertise. One approach is to determine the valuation of the company, and then use a function of proposed wages and time contributed to divide up ownership.
My goal is to have a draft proposal for how we’ll do this by this weekend with the process completed by the end of next weekend. We’ll do the final negotiations at the team dinner on Friday night in Austin and loop team in by conference call as we need to. If you have opinions about this process, now is a good time to start helping me with research and speaking up 
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