One of the first big Startup Grind events was with Anthony Soohoo in June 2011. Anthony came and spoke about a variety of topics including Dotspotter (acquired by CBS) and his varies roles at companies like Yahoo!, Apple, Inktomi, and Bain.
[00:00:27] QUESTION:Well, we are stoked to have Anthony tonight. For those of you are not familiar with Anthony, Anthony worked at Apple in the nineties out of school, he then went to business school at Harvard, and he came back and worked at a number of different startups and had a number of different roles. Finally he ended up at Yahoo and had a senior executive role there, left Yahoo, started his own company that he called Dotspotter, which I will let him tell us a little bit about. Dotspotter was acquired by CBS one year and one day after it was founded. Wouldn’t that be nice. Then Anthony subsequently ran CBS’s interactive business for a number of years and he recently left to found another company, Booyahlabs. What is Booyahlabs?
[00:01:23] ANTHONY: Its still in stealth mode as they say its in the consumer internet space. At the intersection of mobile and health care.
[00:01:33] QUESTION: So, hopefully no one is working in that space. We are going to talk about a number of different things, we are going to talk about some career things, your untraditional path – in some regards, in some regards its not – and then startups and move into advertising and some of those different models. Where you always an entrepreneur, you started at Apple, did you leave school thinking I am going to go start a business? Or was it, I am going to go learn how did that process work for you?
[00:02:11] ANTHONY: I grew up in a family, I would say my parents were lower middle class, would be the best classification for it, so as a kid I was always looking for businesses to start and make money. That kind of behavior continued when I got to college and I actually started a computer repair business, which paid for all of my expenses in college. When I left college I actually had a few routes to take when I left in the early nineties, one of my passions growing up in the Bay area was actually Apple because when I was thirteen I always played with an Apple, I always loved their product. They weren’t hiring the year I was looking so what I did was actually ended up cold calling them every business day for six months. I got an interview, got a job there and that’s kind of how I ended up there. I always had the intention though of starting my own company. Even at a younger age I thought that I could benefit greatly from seeing how companies are run, and larger enterprises. I think that at least made sense to me because if you think about building something you always want to know what the end result looks like. In a lot of respects if your company will be successful, which hopefully it will be, your either going to get acquired by a larger company in which your company has to fit in or your company is going to grow and be large. So, from that standpoint I thought it would be great to actually understand what the end product is supposed to look like. So I spent a number of years at Apple, I then took off to business school and there I picked up more of the process. It didn’t really teach me anything per se that I couldn’t read in a book, but I think it allowed me to learn quicker in terms of business models thinking and making decisions. Then I graduated and six months later started my own company.
[00:04:29] QUESTION: And I noticed that some of them are conspicuously missing from LinkedIn profiles, we had Naval here last month and we started naming some of the companies and said whoa, whoa, whoa I don’t take credit for some of those companies, but talk about some of these stories about early failings, early stories from before you were sitting in the Startup Grind.
[00:04:58] ANTHONY: So, when I started my first company I didn’t really understand what I was doing. I had an idea – I was working at a company called Inktomi at one time they were the premier most dominate internet infrastructure company. They were in three different multi million dollar businesses, web search, data caching CDN, and the third was comparison shopping. They were number one in every one of those and gave them all up, At the time when they were in the number one position, I actually had an interesting perspective in terms of being able to see what was working and what wasn’t working on the web and their CDN business that they controlled, I noticed that about twenty five percent of all traffic on the web was going through AOL and other partners, going through their caching product. Actually they were displaying internet, they were corporate internets. So I thought, wouldn’t it be great, back in nineteen ninety nine, to think that you could start a user generated video company. I think the big lesson I learned there was that its much better when you start a company to be about five feet ahead of the next guy instead of being eight miles ahead because when you’re eight miles ahead – and never tell an investor that you are eight miles ahead because basically all you are telling him is that they are going to be helping you subsidize education for an industry. So, we were way early, I mean the first think we put up was my lasik eye surgery thinking, I wonder how this would hit. We put it up and have three million views in two weeks and we thought, wow there’s something here. So, on that idea we decided to go raise money. It took us about a week to raise about three million bucks back in ninety nine and we raised three million bucks on basically five PowerPoint slides -- on Dotspotter we didn’t have PowerPoint slides at all and we raised a lot of money – so, what happened was we launched this thing and one of the things we realized back in ninety nine – this was before Windows MovieMaker, before there was really an ability to upload your video – we realized that it was actually going to be very difficult to get content. So, one of the things we stumbled upon was the fact that there were all these film festivals and film makers that were looking for a way to exhibit their work because what they want to do is be found at these film festivals. We decided to go into the business of trying to be a farm team for Hollywood. Being young and naïve, and being a new entrepreneur with no other options I decided to start cold calling every Hollywood studio telling them my bright idea about that we could make it a lot more efficient, we could basically allow them to see films that were going to be hits before they launched. It was a great idea to me and so I sat down and actually had a meeting with Tom McGrath who was a number two guy at Paramount at the time. I got in through a business school connection and so I walk in and tell him about how efficient my market was going to be and we would actually help them find the next generation of stars. About two minutes into my conversation when I said efficient and when I said easier he stopped me in my conversation and almost swore me up and down and said I am at Paramount, I don’t make anything, I don’t manufacture a thing, I don’t actually finance anything, I get paid for getting in the way so why the heck would I want your product, I love talking to guys like you so I can kick out out of the office is basically what he said.
[00:09:10] QUESTION: Did he?
[00:09:11] ANTHONY: No actually, not until I asked him if he’d give me validation for my parking. But I think it was at that point that I realized that business was not going to work, but we actually ended up selling shows. Its funny because as you know when you start a company you never know where you’re going to end up. You kind of have an idea, you try to attack a big market and then along the way – whoever tells you they have it all figured out is probably lying – but, you continually learn the industry and you adjust in your behavior accordingly. One of the things we realized was we actually had really terrible films on our service, but people were watching these things and we thought if we had one crappy film maybe we can suggest another crappy film for you to watch, so we built this recommendation engine and that was a piece that was interesting to movie tickets dot com, they were owned by Hollywood media. They were doing all the ticketing for AMC theater at the time, I think they still do. They really liked our recommendation engine and thought that it could apply to their company, so that was a wild story. I think the other wild story came out of that startup experience. What I would say is that nine months into it we had a buyout offer, a company up in Redmond, for a lot of money and it was going to be quite a return for our investors. This was like still middle two thousand, so they had just bought a music site and thought they wanted to get into film a bit. We were jumping for joy thinking this was going to be awesome. Our first offer, the board was like just get the deal closed, this is great. There was kind of a delay in the negotiation process and the thing went from tens of millions of dollars to why don’t you join us we will give you a nice sign on bonus because that was how quickly and violently the market had crashed on us. Also, I think if we look back there were a lot of things we could’ve done differently and better. One of them was to figure out our business earlier than we did, but you know those were learning experiences and at the end we ended up with a great outcome for our company.
[00:11:33] QUESTION: And you talked about in the beginning about entrepreneurers acquiring the skills, that you want to build this great product, but you also want to build this team or build an entity that is acquirable and desirable to companies. Can you describe some of those traits that make a young company interesting to a big company?
[00:11:51] ANTHONY: So I’ve been on both sides obviously, I’ve been on the side of the startup where I sold two companies to larger companies and then I’ve been either Yahoo or Inktomi or the last one I was at CBS where we were looking for companies to buy and what I would say is that there is not really a cookie cut formula for what companies are looking for. As an example, I think what you’ll find in the valley here or when you’re trying to sell to valley companies a lot of people talk about platform and a lot of people talk about these great technologies. When you sell to media companies, which a lot more startups are selling to, actually platforms and technology matter a lot less, in fact they don’t get the premiums that you might think they will. Big large media companies actually acquire based on talent of the staff that you have because they are used to it from dealing with stars. The second thing they are hot on is audiences, so that’s a different perspective than—
[00:13:00] QUESTION: So, not that actual size of the audience, but actually --
[00:13:01] ANTHONY: No, no it’s the size of the audience of the, hopefully it’s a consumer services company or a consumer company. If it’s a consumer company they are looking for large audiences because then they can plug into businesses. You know when I was at Inktomi I think we purchased based upon quote unquote talent as well, but there was a huge emphasis there at Inktomi on the technology that we were buying. So it really depends and when you are talking to a lot of these companies you really have to adjust and understand where their head is at because if you say the wrong things obviously, you know they will make up their mind I would say within the first two or three minutes.
[00:13:38] QUESTION: Do you think, I mean in your history with video and in the consumer space, where is video going? Do you feel like, is there still opportunity?
[00:13:50] ANTHONY: Yeah. So, the funny thing is after I sold the first company I left the space in early two thousand and one, because the promise of video had not hit yet. The funny story is I had a friend who was going to join YouTube in oh five and I told him not to do it because there was going to be no money in video. He joined and five weeks later they got acquired so, the moral of the story is don’t listen to me. Actually when CBS acquired us and I went back and actually ended up running the entertainment division at CBS, which the majority of the business is actually video, I realized – there were two observations – one is that a lot of the players I had left in two thousand one were still in their existing startups doing the same thing, the second thing I realized was that the audiences that we were talking about now had all gravitated online, I mean, the business I was running at CBS was about two hundred, three hundred up to eight hundred million streams a month. And when you look at those type of numbers, and where the dollar is going and where the innovations can happen, I think the video space is actually one of those things that is actually under hyped not over hyped. I think that there are a ton of opportunities in the video space. If you just do a search on YouTube or on Google and when you get back the results and you’ll feel in some respects how the web search used to feel back in ninety eight ninety nine before Google existed. So, I just think that there are a lot of white spaces in the video space. Everyone wants to be the navigation guide, but actually you have thirty different companies going after that space, but if you look at the underlying infrastructure, if you look at the underlying economics of the space there is a lot of pockets where there are opportunities.
[00:15:49] QUESTION: And a lot of that content is predominately funded by advertising, right? Or correct me if I am wrong, if you’re a young startup trying to get into that space or trying to get into any sort of advertising model space, where do you start? Do you start doing that on day one or do you wait until you hit a certain point?
[00:16:08] ANTHONY: I think the idea of trying to build a consumer service or consumer audience company, like YouTube, where you’re a startup and showing video like that, I think that’s been done. Its call YouTube. The video market is splitting up into two, on one side you have professional premium content, those are the Huluu’s of the world, CBS dot com, Business Iran, TV dot com, those kind of businesses and on the right hand side you have a lot of what we call audience plays where they’ll watch anything and advertisers are just buying the audience so they don’t care what they are watching they are just specifically trying to message and target that audience. I think there are businesses on both sides, but they probably wont be in terms of a website that says I have more videos than YouTube because that’s not going to happen. There is going to be interested niches in terms of how people do curationss for instance as well as how people think about monetization and I think if you look at video consumption the interesting thing that I find is that – I don’t know if you guys realize that a stat over the last ten years people watch more t.v. and videos at the same time, the average person watches up to six and a half hours of video a day. And there is a larger percentage of people shifting online too. So, its definitely a market that if you look at it the t.v. industry is a hundred billion dollar industry and half of that comes from carriage fees where people are paying subscriptions. Right now online about a hundred percent of that is predominately advertising. So there is probably a lot of innovations that can happen on the business model side, there is a lot of innovations that can probably happen on the audience side or on the advertising side because all we are doing right now is taking straight thirty second ads and moving them online.
[00:18:12] QUESTION: And in terms of that, you told a story about when you originally put that video of your lasik eye surgery you got three million view, probably I’m assuming through email or posting online--
[00:18:21] ANTHONY: No I stuck it up on my old Harvard business school website before they turned me off. I just stuck the video out, I sent it to maybe five people saying hey check out my surgery. And I didn’t know if it would work. At the time if you remember if you played it Windows media need to load it was actually a really painful process. It was actually you know equivilent to today i think it would bring about three million views
[00:18:52] QUESTION:And so today so it feels like we’ve had this big wave of like the Linkedin and the Yelps really built their infrastructure built their sights on the back of Google and the back of Yahoo search engines do you see with the types of video views that you seeing, are they still coming for search engines? Are they coming from social sharing? Where are these views coming from or do you
see them--
[00:19:14] ANTHONY: I think video by nature because the search experience is so crappy you typically don’t get a lot of good quality traffic coming from search right now. Its in fact, I think that there’s companies that have video surf and other that are trying to fix that problem, but it hasn’t been solved yet. So, a large majority of recommendations are really coming from, I would say good quality traffic are coming from their social network sites and so I think that there were periods of time when I was at CBS where we would see days and weeks worse the social networks would eclipes in the traffic it would receive from Google.
[00:19:55] QUESTION:And the interesting things about that to me is that its very difficult for people
who are uncertain about our own social search, right, because it’s not embedded into Google, its not baked into their algorithm and the guy for Event Bright did a video this last week where he said that majority their traffic comes from Facebook, so I don’t know does that sound right that if you can build something that’s compelling enough, that the content is good enough you can potentially rise very quickly and you know, are there streamline ways of getting to Facebook and getting driven through?
[00:20:30] ANTHONY: I would say that there’s, if you think that since the beginning of the internet here, consumer internet, I think every business has been built on the distribution of the network, may that be email or now everyone talks about he social networks. So I think that’s going to continue and what I think is more fascinating is that there is going to be certain networks or certain social networks that are much better at displaying certain types of content than others. For instance I find myself now spending most of my time in news readers, Twitter has become a newsreader and most of my time – I never go to Digg or any other services now my reading habits really change where I go to Twitter, I use the read later button and I read it all on Instagram and I may check out videos there too. I think that it’s important for startups to think, as you guys are building your company, what is the exact use case and try to optimize for those cases because its different probably for everyone. What we knew on the premium content side is doing commercials on television, telling people to come watch videos didn’t really work. Commercials didn’t really have a strong effect in terms of it was because no one is going to run to a laptop and when they’re watching t.v., but I think that what we found is that if you can build groups of people that have the same interests you can probably ignite that community and get them to watch it when you want to and it gives them some rewards in the process
[00:22:07] QUESTION: So, you are starting this new company. I’ve been trying to figure this out. There are clearly these different paths of if I sell my company, then I become this angel investor and I become a VC and everything -- so it’s been reported that, well, your selling price of your company was never reported, I’m assuming its either in the millions or the billions –
[00:22:36] ANTHONY: There was no B attached. So, I would say it was a nice figure. Considering that we actually never received – so part of the story for Dotspotter – is that we never actually received venture funding. In fact we just raised a million bucks and then what had happen is our first business, there original premise behind Dotspotter and reason it was called Dotspotter was when I left Yahoo, there were two different acquisitions at Yahoo actually that fascinated me when I left in oh five one was a photo company called Flickr. The second one was a geo infrastructure platform called Where on Earth and if you kind of look at it, I thought the thing that was interesting was in the real world when I was watching my friends and my wife share photos. She would typically give people these photo albums saying here is pictures I took in Paolo Alto and here’s pictures I when we were in Hawaii, but on the web at the time most of the photos that were shared were just based on tags and not very accurate ones. So I thought wouldn’t it make sense if you actually told a story of your life through maps and so in each location, when you clicked on San Francisco it bubbles up – its kind of like what [00:23:54] INAUDIABLE are trying to do except a lot more difficult problem because you’re trying to figure out proximity too. So we went out with that idea and to build up the use case that we thought people -- because you want to create where feels like a game right. So, we decided to build a game based upon celebrity sightings because when people spot celebrities they always take the picture, they always say, this is where we saw it. So we launched the Sundance Film festival I think in early oh seven and yeah it exploded. We had two users, one of them was me, so you know you start this thing and you say, wow I guess that idea bombed. What was interesting is our whole team was search guys, they were search engineers and so they decided when you show Alex Rodriguez it would be really cool to show news attached to that person as well and so that piece actually took off because we became kind of the Techmeme for entertainment news. We also, Facebook wasn’t open yet so we built a Facebook basically for entertainment space and it was the first to see the senate article and that in turn drove a ton of traffic
and we had this traffic explosion when we sold ads. I think had our peak six months after launch. We had a revenue month at about a hundred twenty K in revenue and our company spend was about twenty thirty k. So, the math kind of worked, but I think within the tenth or eleventh month we had this offer. It was kind of an easy choice because we didn’t really feel like we wanted to do the entertainment thing and the fact that we are raised a venture round it gave us a lot of flexibility of what we wanted to do. So, we discussed it as a tea and made the decision that we were going to sell. We had two media companies that were actually interested in us, CBS and another media company in New York and we went with the offer for CBS and it turned out to be a good thing.
[00:26:05] QUESTION: So what is the motivation to do another startup? I mean, financially you probably don’t need to. You could go have some cushy job I would imagine. What is it that says to you I should start all over again, you know, for the twelfth time or something?
[00:26:26] ANTHONY: Well, I would say the grass is always greener is one thing I have realized. Actually I was planning to, after I worked at CBS, to take a year off and what I realized was I actually missed building things and so taking time off with nothing else to do is actually not a lot of fun. Especially when most of your friends are working, so I went down the path of actually thinking about what I wanted to do with my life and I looked at a lot of different cases and I don’t think my personality is actually fit to be a venture capital, at least not right now. I mean I tried going away from the product side of doing businesses. I tried to be a consultant when I was in business school, I tried investment banking I first graduated from undergrad and I failed both times. My one job I only lasted a few weeks, so I missed building products and I missed building things and I almost missed, I think, the office camaraderie and so all those things kind of brought me back to kind of thinking about, you know, what to build and I think that right now when you looked at space there are just ton of opportunities I think at least in the mobile consumer internet space. Where, infrastructures ready users are accustomed to doing certain modes of behavior and its everything that, at least when I looked at this pace ten years ago, is happening now more than twelve years ago back in ninety nine. so its an exciting time to do something and that’s kind of what brought me back
[00:28:13] QUESTION: Should an entrepreneur trust his gut?
[00:28:17] ANTHONY: They should trust their gut if they have a good track record. So, if their gut doesn’t have a good track record, then maybe not, but what I would say it is that as business people I always tell people I work with, as entrepreneurs, people that are part of running startups we actually get paid, at least some of us get paid, but really we are in this to make decisions with imperfect information and so you’re never going to get everything analyzed i think it’s important to make a determination when you want to jump in and there’s going to be decisions where you don’t have all the answers and you will have to rely on your gut because the reason there are opportunities is because the space has not defined yet.
[00:29:02] QUESTION: So, you can you can’t know for sure what factors do you use to say hey this is a good idea, this is something I should move on verses eh, just another idea.
[00:29:14] ANTHONY: Well, I would say the filters I use is I think about that the huge opportunities even if it’s undefined, but you can feel it and you can see it based upon the data, then you want to jump into it. For instance, in the entertainment business, the t.v. business in particular, it’s a hundred and twenty billion dollar business just in the U. S. alone. If you jump in and you can figure out where you fit in to that internet ecosystem, somewhere along the line, hopefully, you’ll be able find the revenue model that makes sense. If you’re jumping into a market where it is very small and your idea is a feature, then I would say maybe you should do some more analysis and kind of figured it out, but I think that if you can jump in a new market you feel like is huge and you feel like an idea is big enough in that marketplace, like you can take a big portion of either how people use the service or a big portion of the attention I think that you should trust your gut.
[00:30:13] QUESTION: What’s more important the idea of product or the team?
[00:30:18] ANTHONY: I would say in the order its probably, I hate to say this but I think it’s the culture of the company first and then it’s the people inside, and what I mean by that is if you don’t get culture right you typically, even if you have great talent it only takes you so far and when you start a company things morph so many times even inside a company like CBS, things had evolved quite a bit because our revenue gone up hundreds percentage points up and in that time people are good for certain stages, but they might not be as things evolve. I know when we hit a certain stage were we’re making huge amount of revenue that there some people that don’t want to be part of it. What you want to make sure you get right as you’re building these companies you want to get the culture right because you can hire the best talent, but if there’s ill will I think its difficult to built something bigger special.
[00:31:23] QUESTION: So that we had a series of questions we generally ask people that speak with us and they all start with this preface of if you were for a first time entrepreneur. So, if you were a first time entrepreneur would you apply for Y Comminator or the other incubators.
[00:31:36] ANTHONY: Sure, I think it’s a great program. It’s kind of like the Harvard business school for startups, I think it provides a great opportunity, especially for people that don’t have a network its a great place to start. I guess the question I would have is, that program scales and there’s other programs like it, I would rely less on the fact that there’s a platform there. Take it as an advantage that it’s a learning platform, but at the end of the day the entrepreneur is still the one responsible for running their company, so I’ve seen situations where people go in and get advice from a guy or a gal who might have looked at their business for half an hour and gave this advice and thought I need to do everything that person said. I say kind of go in with open eyes. It’s the entrepreneur’s job to go through it and filter out what is good and bad.
[00:32:36] QUESTION: Would you let would you launch your
company at a conference like Disrupt or Launch?
[00:32:40] ANTHONY: Probably not. I think that, and I say this respectfully about both those conferences – I personally think when you develop your first product its probably wrong when you launch. Every entrepreneur goes through the, I’ve figured it all out, but I think there’s a lot of stuff you haven’t figure out yet. And it probably make sense to get it right before you have a bigger splash. We’ve
all seen app companies go out. I think recently with the mentality of the agile development process, I’ll throw it out and I’ll fix it, but the problem we have nowadays, especially on the mobile side, is you actually have to get more right because a lot of times on these charts your ratings really determine if you can get future users and so I think it’s a lot more important to bake your product in front of people that are really your target market. If your target market is the TechCrunch Disrupt crowd, then by all means it probably makes sense. I think that most of us aren’t launching our business for Silicon Valley, it’s for a larger audience. And if that’s the case I would say you probably want to baked it just a bit before you
show it to people that potentially will be your power users.
[00:34:00] QUESTION: So, leading off of that, let’s say you’re working on a startup, you’ve launched a product, it wasn’t getting any traction despite all your efforts, what would you do next?
[00:34:11] ANTHONY: If you’re in a big enough market I would look and see what things are working in the marketplace and see if you can be a fast follower or if there’s something where your product has a similarity to something else where you can actually pivot or follow. It’s okay to be, I think a fast follower knows situations and at those times, I think what you need to do though when you launch these things is go after one initiative, not go after thirty. You probably don’t have a lot of resources to begin with. I think that most problems for companies in my mind is they spread themselves too thin they don’t know which ones are working because they haven’t focused on one
[00:34:58] QUESTION: What have you seen lately that has really excited you?
[00:35:12] ANTHONY: I saw a company in San Francisco recently called, Zim Ride, they are basically building an air beam for car pulling, so if you remember back in college there were these bulletin boards saying, I’m looking for a ride to L.A. from Davis and they are moving all that into this marketplace of information to connect drivers with riders. I think that is a pretty interesting innovation in terms of how they are doing it and the whole experience they wrap around it. Because most cars if you really think about it have these under utilized seats, especially college students driving back and forth and it can make a huge impact for the environment as well. I find that interesting. When I came across Clout and how they are building their social identity and reputation score, I think the stuff that you can do with a company like Clout is fascinating and interesting.
[00:36:24] QUESTION:Do you have any advice, specifically to a mobile game company?
[00:36:48] ANTHONY: For all businesses right now the thing people have to figure out is -- and this is what Reed would often say to me when I was leaving Yahoo – you have to figure out your distribution strategy, its just as important as building a product. Most people when they work inside other companies they think about building product all day long, but if you remember before Apple had built their Apple store, first they actually had a distribution problem as well. I would say spend just as much time as you think about the product on your distribution strategy and its probably going to be time well spent, in fact I might actually spend more time thinking about the distribution strategy than I would building the product for your first phase.
[00:37:39] QUESTION:Top five, or a couple, of entrepreneurs that you admire?
[00:37:58] ANTHONY: I am actually impressed with a lot of entrepreneurs. I think every time I meet an entrepreneur I come away impressed because in a lot of respects a person who starts a company is really one of the few people that is actually sticking their neck out. And you’ve seen it, its so easy for people in a meeting to fold their arms and lean back and not participate. So, I think the trait of actually trying to do something is a trait is to be admired. In terms of entrepreneurs that I respect, Jeff Bezos over at Amazon, in terms of his vision and the direction he wants to that company is absolutely amazing. Steve Jobs, obviously, from his perspective about how he runs and thinks about products. All day long, I think that Mark Zuckerberg, I don’t mean to be so cliché with the standard names, but what he has done there and thinking through the idea of the social graph has been amazing. And then I sometimes visit these incubators and when I visit I am always amazed at the enthusiasm of these entrepreneurs that want to learn. And for the ones that are actually building products that they want to use themselves, I think they are the ones that really come out in terms of their passion and it’s a trait I do admire.
[00:39:51] QUESTION: As a company has successful products, what do you see as the top three challenges to really scale that smaller company to a mid size or larger company?
[00:40:04] ANTHONY: I think the biggest challenge for a company to become successful is to determine what are the one or two things you are going to actually determine as your factor to determine success. Its just the nature that when you’re small you can be very nimble and you can try various things and when you track it you actually get a lot of noise in the process. As you think about scaling up an operation the key thing is to figure out what will be the key drivers for making your company or your product successful. As an example, I visited a company yesterday day who I was actually really interested to invest in and they had a pretty good growth spurt up to this point. Now they are trying to determine what they want to do because they have been successful in terms of the college market, they have been successful going after the event space, and in terms of going after this other space. I think if you really want to be successful and you want to scale, you’re going to have to pick a market and what is one thing that you want to focus on. So, for the company, is it going to be revenue, is it going to be users? I think in their case, they are building a marketplace so it is based on liquidity. If you can focus on liquidity first, I think everything else, revenue, users, is part of that equation. And for a lot of companies as they are going through that growth stage, I think they sometimes put too much KPIs – Key Performance Indicators -- up and they are focused on the wrong things, in fact, a company probably can’t focus on more than one or two. We have seen that in businesses that I have run in that past, through different divisions, if they come back and say they want to focus on three or four things they usually fail.