Alex and I have been doing a lot of meetings for Path 101 and one of the most difficult things has been adjusting the flow and content of the meeting for the audience.

So, for example, we took a meeting with a VC that we knew well and whose demeanor is usually pretty fun and casual (not Fred, just fyi).  So, we decided not to run through our slide deck and instead stayed at a high level, conceptual, throw some ideas about the space around, kind of thing...  conversation was kind of all over the place, admittedly, and today we got the "sorry, not for us" e-mail.  I'm not sure I would have invested in us either, because we probably seemed a lot more all over the place on product than we really are at this point.  It's unfortunate, b/c we really didn't feel like we put our best foot forward.... basically got fooled on a pitch and looked bad for it. 

Conversely, we tried to walk through the slide deck with another VC and it was 45 minutes before we got past slide two and that conversation was excellent...  and it was our attempts at herding the cats back into the slide deck that actually made the conversation less interesting.   

Predicting what someone needs to see is incredibly difficult.  If you've ever pitched at USV, you know that you should just walk in and show them the product, throw some ideas around, etc...  It will become more like a hack-a-thon than a pitch meeting... and you need to be able to roll with that flow... b/c that's how they like to get to know businesses.  They want to poke and be imaginative about what you could become, who you run into... what is the scope of possibilities for this business and how flexible are you and your model.  Not all VCs are like this...and if you bet wrong, you might not get another meeting.  I like to think that we never held slide deck dependency against any entrepreneurs at USV, but it sure does make it difficult to get in an engaging conversation with someone.

What we've found incredibly useful has been meetings with other entrepreneurs... not for funding or biz dev, but just to see what others think, and also learn a lot about how partnerships and teams function.  We met with Paul and Rony from Indeed the other day.  They have an incredibly focused strategy and clear vision on what they want to be.  We're quite a bit wider and perhaps a little amorphous at this point and so it was an incredibly valuable conversation to have... not just to help us think about focus, but to help marketing our focus.  We know we'll be building something comprehensive, but we don't need to overwhelm the audience with the comprehensive vision before establishing the viability of the first thing we want to build. 

Yesterday, we met with Pete and Josh from Reprise Media (and got to meet the infamous Kate from Searchviews).   As we did with Paul and Rony, we tried to gain a little insight into their working style, which would be hard to match since they were childhood friends.  Still, hearing about the process of hiring, collaborating, product management from people who've done it successfully is invaluable.   Josh finished up our long diatribe on what we were doing with, "You need an elevator pitch", and Pete responded, "So do we."  That's our next step, in addition to all the product strategy work/research we're doing now...  culling the message down to its basic points and tailoring that to investors, schools, the public, etc.

Alex and I were talking about opening this whole company creation process up...  like doing some kind of a regular open meeting where people can just show up and essentially give feedback and here about our progress so far.  I don't know what the right venue for that would be... we'd certainly like to make it as casual as possible, but also somewhat functional.   Perhaps once we wrap up this funding, we can do it in our own tiny little cramped office.  In addition, we'll be adding a wiki to our site and a blog of course to further expose ourselves in public.  :)

I was excited to see that Yahoo! thinks there's an opportunity in the college career space.  They're supposedly creating a new social network called Kickstart.  From the Path 101 perspective, I say, "Bring it."

Man, I can't wait to see this. 

So, when's the last time a big media giant created a really successful social platform from scratch?

[crickets]

It seems like we're not even sure if this is just vaporware, but even if it isn't, I'd say there are at least five things that Yahoo! is inevitably going to trip up on.

1. Hell hath no fury like a media company scorned by a social network.   They couldn't buy Facebook, so they decided to make their own.  But, they needed an angle.  What do college students what?  A social network about beer?  Nope... they're underage.  Sex?  No, can't do that, not that it wouldn't be successful.  Ah!  Jobs!  Yes, jobs!  It seems like Yahoo! is starting out with the idea that what they're building must be a social network, without really considering whether or not the social network approach makes the most sense.  This is just bad product development.  You don't walk into a problem and say, "Whatever the opportunity is in this space, we're going to solve it with a social network... and a hammer."  I actually tend to think that social connecting/friending isn't what students really need... it's content, direction, guidance, tools...  Just connecting is like handing students a business card.  They don't have any clue what to do with that connection and how to get the most of it, let alone even know who to connect with in the first place.
2. Play well with others?  Ha!  Let's see...  34 million Facebook users.  14 million LinkedIn users.  Let's build our own thing and not plug in to the vast networks of existing students and professionals already out there and start completely from scratch because we want to own this category.  If you can't bridge the gap to your customers by meeting them in the places they already are, then don't expect them to come to you.
3. It's going to be all about jobs and companies.  Yahoo! knows how to sell stuff, like jobs and ads.  So, they're going to build something that is going to be immediately monetizable, meaning its going to be all about companies, jobs, etc.  There are two problems with that.  What about companies that aren't on there?  What if I don't want to work for some big corporation that can afford to pay Yahoo! to have a presence on Kickstart?  Is this going to be a place where art students are going to find jobs?  What about drama majors and people looking to work in the non-profit fields?  Doctors?  What about grad school?  Or, most importantly, what if I don't have a clue what I want to be?  What then?  Am I likely to join a social network based around job recruiting if I'm "undecided"?  I highly doubt you'll see any freshmen or sophomores on this site because they haven't chosen a field of interest yet and probably aren't sure where to go.  That's the real problem that needs solving... helping them figure out where they want to direct themselves, not connecting kids who already know what company they want to work for (which is how many of them anyway?)  Here's the other thing.  Because of their HotJobs affiliation, is Yahoo! ever going to tell a student that the best way to get a job is through networking?  What they're doing isn't real networking.  It's putting a social network around a job posting.  There's no way Yahoo! will eat its own lunch and totally disrupt the jobs space.  They'll find a way to perpetuate the old business model of charging for posted jobs at a few hundred bucks a pop.  In a pure socially networked world, there wouldn't be that kind of opportunity to extract so much value, because the right opportunities would fall into the right laps all the time in a seemless, barrierless way.
4. Professionals: Sign up and get spammed by students desperate for jobs. If I'm a professional working at a company, exactly what is my motivation to sign up for a social network based around getting college kids jobs?  If I put a profile up and people can contact me, aren't I opening myself up to just getting spammed with resumes?  The service has to work for everyone involved and if all these college kids can only find their way to a company by connecting to someone who works there, the last thing I'd want to be is the first Google employee who puts a profile up--especially since the atmosphere here is all about jobs.  Professionals love giving advice and helping students away from the recruiting process and such relationships are best built over time.  If the whole thing is just focused on jobs, its going to have the feel of one of those really bad "networking mixers".
5. Their customer is the company.  One of the advantage that startups have over bigger companies is that they can spend a little time purely focused on value to the end user first before figuring out who their customers are.  Take Indeed.  Indeed could never have gone to job boards day one and said, "We'll crawl all of you, and then you pay us to sponsor your listings and get them to appear in the sidebar results."  However, after they proved to be a very compelling consumer service with growing traction, job boards realized the value, especially the smaller ones, and got on board with what they were doing.  When you are a big media company, you don't exactly take risks with your clients, but where that leaves you is lacking in the end user value.  I mean, would YouTube have become so big if they didn't start out with all sorts of illegal clips?  Students want real insider content...  and real discussion.  Do you think any of these students are going to get into a discussion on the Nike page of whether or not they'd actually like to work for Nike given their history of human rights violations?  Have they cleaned up their act?  Is this a place I want to work?  I wouldn't ask with the recruiter sitting right there in my network, that's for sure.

Look, Alex and I haven't built anything yet and the proof is in the pudding, but seeing these kinds of attempts just gives me that much more confidence that we have the right approach with Path 101 and will succeed.  I've been in the classroom with students talking with them not as a corporate focus group, but as a teacher, mentor, recruiter, etc...   not asking them, "Hey, if we built this, would you sign up for it" but discussing their real struggles.  They don't know where to start and this isn't it.  Not only do they not have a network, but they don't know what to do with a network once they have it.  They don't know how to e-mail a professional.  The services that are out there don't attempt to tackle the hardest but most compelling problem in the career development space...  how to get students figuring out for themselves where they belong and pursuing those paths.  Just throwing a bunch of jobs and companies at them is window dressing and not going to really help them figure much out.  If anything, it just perpetuates the problem that most students think their only options are to become bankers and lawyers or work for big companies, because that's who they see recruiting.  Path 101 will get them talking, exploring, using tools, very much the same way TheKnot.com not only helps you find flowers for your wedding, but helps you actually think about what kind of a wedding it is you want to have in the first place.  After that, flowers are the easy part.

Looking for a partner is different than looking for just a developer, and it's a difference that was particularly important to me.  To build Path 101, I could have just scraped some angel money together, done some consulting, and pulled a spec out of my own personal echo chamber and put something out there.  But, that wouldn't have been as good as something that was vetted by someone who had a stake in the outcome--whose interest and ownership in the project inspired a true sounding board, real feedback, and new ideas.

But where to find someone in this market?  On one hand, it felt like everyone who had the technical capability to be out there building something was doing just that--and working on really interesting things.  On the other hand, this new wave of innovation had been going on long enough that there were probably a few early projects that were impressive but just didn't seem to make it to the next level.  I figured there had to be a few talented folks who may be ready for their second Web 2.0 tour of duty.

When I was at Union Square Ventures, we looked at ATTAP, the builders of Riffs, PersonalDNA and Life I/O.  I used to joke and call it the "techie commune".  It was a bunch of really impressive, cutting edge tech folks working on some very ambitious personal information management and recommendation products--all located in half of WebCal founder Bruce Spector's apartment.  The first time I met Alex Lines, he was a lead developer there and he showed us how he had hacked together a mobile geolocation system based on cellphone tower data.  It enabled a cellphone to know where it was in the city long before phones had GPS built into them.  He had hacked an exposed mobile API and did some tower wardriving throughout the city. 

ATTAP alumni was one of the first groups I went looking for to find potential partners.  Even though the company might not have reached the success they were looking for, I was always impressed by the people they had and their ability to flat out build really elegant stuff.   

I met him again earlier this summer at a nextNY event--after he had left ATTAP and I was anticipating leaving Oddcast.   I didn't know I would be working on Path 101, so our ships passed a second time in the night.  But, after scoping out some team pages, asking around, and cross referencing a nextNY softball RSVP by "a. lines", I zeroed on on Alex, who, as it turned out, had already read the original Path 101 post on my blog with some interest.

So we met up and realized that we saw eye to eye on the project from the start.  What was important to me was that we had the same approach to partnership--mutual respect for experience and each other's opinions, open communication, and a goal-oriented approach.  This was not a guy I was going to get bogged down in personal issues with, nor someone who thought he knew everything or thought I did either.  I also liked his approach to technology--focusing on  functionality and relevance to the user--above loyalty to "web 2.0 trends".  Alex met with a former colleague of mine and the feedback really summed it up nicely:

"...he is a technologist, and not predisposed to any programming language or framework. Find the best technology to solve the problem. Big plus. "

His technical capabilities extend to perl, ruby, php, c, c++, sql, korn, bourne, javascript, html, Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, FreeBSD, Solaris, Linux, OpenBSD, Mac OS X, and, as we learned last Friday, softball bats.

He's also a bit of a Renaissance Man.  At Vanderbilt, he was a Physics and English double major. 

Plus, he's also a Brooklynite (Park Slope), so how could I go wrong? 

I'm excited to be working with Alex and we're currently busy laying out our vision of Path 101, meeting with potential angels, and other stakeholders like career offices and professional societies.

We're also looking for a great front-end designer/developer to join our team, so if you know anyone, please do send them our way.  This train is leaving the station!