Nevertheless, when you do so, you will inevitably be told — repeatedly — that you’re doing it wrong, that you are following The Rules*, that you’ll fail. The central refrain of this track reflects that (from the perspective of someone who knows his brand of Different happens to be Good — Roni Size is, after all, the king of breakbeat). The track may not be the best on this mostly deservedly classic album, but if you listen to it a few times through, you’ll quickly grow numb to the doubters. You can then feel free to rebel at will.

Hey! Who told you could do that?
Who told you you could do it like this?
You can’t do it like this!

*Note that we’re not talking about laws here. Those you should follow. Even the ones you don’t really like.

Everybody loses, right? Well, not exactly. The web wins.

If the TV season sucks, that will mean that viewers spend less time in front of the set, and instead hit the other glowing box in the house to spend their time. More significantly, though, TV advertising will be less effective as it reaches fewer viewers. All those huge advertising budgets won’t go to waste, of course — they’ll be redirected to other outlets. E.g., the web.

We’re not even just talking commercials. Consider film studios. A huge venue for advertising new releases is the talk-show circuit, as the stars hit one after the other to promote their new films. Well, you’ll notice that talk shows, with their day-long write/shoot/air schedules, will be the first to disappear from the airwaves. So how to promote new movies? That’s right: the web, again.

Advertising dollars are going to get a nice little shot in the arm. Buy GOOG.

All this, of course, is the short and medium term. In the long term, this could hurt the entire TV and film industry enough to help topple what’s already a threatened distribution mechanism under fire from digital distribution technology. Once again, the web wins.

Good thing there isn’t a software engineers’ or HTML designers’ union, eh?

We’ve cheated on this track by creating an ad-hoc medley, but it was necessary in order to allow the great Tom Waits to provide bookends for the startup experience in one tidy package.

What’s He Building? provides a spoken-word narrative of a startup in stealth mode (work with me, here), from the perspective of a curious and apprehensive world which fears anything different — and definitely anything new. We hope neither your competitors nor your customers are quite as creepy as the narrator, though.

(Excerpt)

What’s he building in there?
What the hell is he building in there?
He has subscriptions to those magazines
He never waves when he goes by
He’s hiding something from the rest of us
He’s all to himself
I think I know why…

On the other hand, How’s It Gonna End, from the masterpiece Real Gone, speaks of any startup’s natural obsession with the exit strategy (again, work with me).

(Chorus)

I want to know the same thing
Everyone wants to know
How’s it going to end?

These two pieces describe the arc of a startup’s life, from creation to liquidation. However, we wouldn’t really recommend patterning the middle of the story after any Tom Waits songs, as that’s not likely to work out so well.

The shouting could be heard outside the conference room and echoed down the impeccably maintained hallways, but that far wing of the building was deserted by this hour. Likewise, the screams of the partner and junior associate died unheard in the expansive office.

The next morning, the receptionist arrived first to find the Flacker CEO lounging in the chair of the front reception desk, looking more peaceful than he had in months. The bullet had gone directly through his skull and left a red splatter on the wall opposite, while the small but apparently sufficient gun lay in a red pool on the floor where it had been dropped by his lifeless hand. The partner and junior associate were found in the windowless conference room illuminated only by the light of the projector, still glowing with the light of a revenue projection graph. The junior associate’s empty eye sockets had been desolated by a ballpoint pen, while blood stained the floors where it had flowed from the partner’s jugular, sliced cleanly through with a shattered shard of a pitcher of ice water.

Flacker had that firesale a few months later, of course, and the few remaining employees held an alcohol-soaked wake for the company and the late CEO. This, however, is not the end of the tale.

Several months later, another foundering startup went under after a long, slow decline of its once-promising customer base. Curiously, that startup had also been funded by Smithers-Jones. Its assets were sold at a bargain to a much larger competitor. Nobody thought much of the incident, as the technology field is littered with the corpses of failed startups.

Later in that same quarter, a very promising young company had its market inexplicably turn sour and business dry up quite suddenly; it too ceased to exist within months. This company, too, had been funded by Smithers-Jones.

But nobody took notice until a third firm — a small but stable B2B company which had developed a revolutionary new bit of search technology and was itself in search of funding to rebrand and relaunch — spiraled out of control as if possessed until its business shriveled and died. Only after this did some begin whispering of something strange going on. This startup, you see, had never received Smithers-Jones funding, but its founders had recently attended an exploratory meeting with the VC firm. A meeting which none of the partners had actually attended, nor — as they realized after the fact — had any other Smithers-Jones associates. A meeting held at the end of the day in a windowless conference room in an isolated wing of the vast offices. A meeting from which the startup founders had been seen exiting quite suddenly, their faces pale as the moon, as though they’d seen a ghost. A meeting in a room in which, the next morning, the janitorial staff had a terrible time removing the drops of blood found surrounding the seats in which two murders had occurred months before.

Nothing was to be done, of course; everything was supposition and rumor, and the founders in that meeting refused to discuss it. Nevertheless, every few months since then a promising startup finds itself out of control, its revenues strangled inexplicably, all starting shortly after a late meeting in a small conference room, a meeting of which Smithers-Jones has no record.

No worries, we’re back up to speed. 90%, at least. And these anonymous nemisii have failed to realize the side-effect of their stratagem, and have unwittingly aided our weight loss endeavours. Try what you will, fiends, you shall not stop us.

You often hear that the core idea on which a startup is based really has very little inherent value. This is true as far as it goes; ultimately the things that have value include (among other things) intellectual property, a client base, and branding — and these, in turn, are based on a team and that team’s passion. But an idea is a necessary catalyst for both of these. The core of a talented, dedicated team can generally only coalesce and succeed based around a reasonably decent idea. Building such a team, from finding a cofounder to finding the next half-dozen passionate individuals — is one of the hardest yet possibly the single most important pieces of the startup puzzle. If an idea marketplace based on giving away ideas could help facilitate this process — even if it could bring two or three like-minded potential cofounders together — then it would be of immense value.

So I’d propose a site to provide such a marketplace. Have a good idea that you’re not currently executing on (or would like to be but are having trouble assembling that core team)? Post it on the site. Interested in participating in a startup? Browse through the ideas and mark the ones you like — or simply pick one and start executing. Interested in investing? Mark (privately) the ideas which interest you and, if they become the basis for a startup, you’ll be put in contact with the team. When an idea has a critical mass of prospective team members — taking into account roles, commitment levels, geography, etc — then cordon it off and let the individuals who marked it as interesting decide if some subset of them want to work together on executing it. If so, they can form a company and the system will notify potential investors (or not — that part isn’t entirely necessary). From there the site’s work is done, and it’s up to the newly-formed team to run with the idea.

Sounds like a startup idea in itself, eh? If only I had somewhere to post it…

The benefit of having a blog, on the other hand, is that one is free to give away ideas. This one has the potential to have a meaningful little life — it’s not the next Google, but neither does it try to be, and would be a great social experiment, taking a wave and riding it to its logical conclusion. If it tickles your fancy, by all means, run with it. I only want a token percentage of your company, the rest is yours ;-) All the technological components already exist, and many have been put together in somewhat similar ways for different purposes. This one’s unique not because of technology, but because of what it uses that technology for.

Conferences have lately been shedding their formal structure. The unconference trend is the most prominent example, typified by Foo Camp and more lately the grassroots BarCamp. Others are more targeted at specific purposes and niches, such as Startup Weekend. All are characterized by spontaneity and a shift in focus from the agenda to the participants. Today, this trend is mostly centered in the hardcore techie world, but there’s no reason it should remain isolated to that niche.

At the same time, it’s becoming clear that social interactions online are growing exponentially, from Facebook to Twitter to TokBox, facilitated by the sudden ease of accessing rich functionality while armed with nothing more than a browser.

Pico Conference – which needs a better name – would take the trend of informal, highly interactive, niche conferences to its extreme by forming impromptu conferences online with only a handful of attendees interested in a particular topic.

First you hit the Pico Conference site (or use the corresponding FaceBook app) and tell it what you’re interested in: clothing design, Ruby development, investing, indy filmmaking, whatever. For each topic, you let the system know roughly how experienced you are. You give it your email address or IM or what-have-you, and you’re done.

When enough individuals have expressed compatible interests (allowing for the fact that only a particular fraction would actually be likely to attend) — e.g. 20 intermediate-level Haskell users, or 10 novice poker players and one expert — the system automatically sets up a pico conference and notifies the prospective participants. Repeats for individuals are avoided; that is, if Joe has attended a conference for wilderness survivalists recently, it won’t invite him to another for a while.

The conference is held in the browser, letting people tune in through one- or two-way Flash-based video, or audio only, or even just IM. There would be a simple, minimal shared workspace to publish slides, throw up images, send links around, etc.

From there, it’s up to the participants, strangers with common interests. The goal is to have casual, intimate, and optionally highly-targeted conferences where attendees can learn from one another and freely discuss subjects of interest. If you’re a novice, you can learn, if you’re an expert, you can teach (and gradually become well-known as an expert in a field), and everybody can exchange ideas and share experience. Some conferences would set up a clear set of expert presenters to start things off, others would be purely among peers.

Variations are possible, of course. “Serial experts” would host a cross between a video blog and a conference. These individuals would host semi-regular sessions on topics of interest to them, and subscribers would be notified of upcoming sessions (a day or two in advance, perhaps, and possibly with a topic) so that they can attend if they like. But these aren’t just live video blogs, they’re fully interactive discussions — preceded, perhaps, by monologues by the host — moderated as much or as little as the host likes. Ask questions, disagree, whatever.

The system would even set up topical mixes for one-off conferences — such as “XML + Java” or “third-world travel + photography”.

Even though the basic service would need to be free, monetization isn’t tough — freemium with any of a variety of limits; or ad-supported; or even having money flow from attendee to presenter for a subset of conferences.

Well, there it is. I’d love it if somebody tried it — it shouldn’t be that hard to set up, and could be a very interesting (and useful) experiment.

Me, I’m back to working on Jectiv.

This track by The Herbaliser may be considered a parody of the endless legalese and paperwork in which an early-stage company can feel buried. Or it can be taken as a surprisingly applicable manifesto for a small company’s goals and, well, IP rights. Perhaps more importantly, it’s pretty much the only way we could justify getting a Ninja Tune track in here. Either way, it is our Track 5.

(Excerpt)
Point four - you’ve been warned, so before we move on, just from point four on, just so you don’t distort the order, make us go back and forth, once more - let’s repeat what we’ve recorded thus far;
Point one: we don’t believe in other people thieving the ideas that our cerebrums cultivate and create - make no mistake
Point two: we believe in unconditional control of our beliefs and our opinions - our souls, our growth, and our dominions
Point three: we don’t believe in you controlling we; I’m not obligated to do or say or listen to a god damn thing.
Point four? Point four.
Point four? Point four.
Point four? Point four.
Point four. Now, point four.
[...]
We not gonna let an opportunity get left out
We not gonna let some indecision stop what we about
We not gonna show no mercy, overflowing the drought.
There’s no doubt, no doubt.

Well, not all 270,000, but as many as a hyper preschooler is able in the span of an half hour while pushing the “next photo” button repeatedly and announcing each new pumpkin at the top of her lungs.

Followed, of course, by most of 320,000 pictures of balloons — another topic in her Top 50 — and as many squirrels as she could fit in before it was time to get a bath.

It is doubtful that Flickr’s developers envisioned the use of its search and slideshow functions as the truly exceptional preschooler entertainment system they in fact are. Luckily for your correspondent, the interface they provided just happened to fit all the requirements for this particular activity.

Most of us cannot rely on our user interface fitting every possible need, and we certainly shouldn’t try to make it do so: that way lies madness (and an interface that doesn’t actually work particularly well for much of anything). Instead, the web has begun learning what software engineers have understood in other domains for decades, since the first grep crawled out of the filesystem muck and into a waiting pipe. That is: programmer interface is king. Build the mechanism, sit back and let others use it for their own nefarious ends, and beautiful compositions will be formed which one could never have foreseen.

Twitter is used 10x more via its API than through its web site. 10x. That speaks for itself, donchathink?

Jectiv’s API is perhaps its single most important aspect — and the one we strove to get right first. We don’t know how people are going to want to use this thing, and that’s quite honestly one of the most exciting parts of the whole exercise. But we’re doing our best to make sure that whatever people do want to do, there are decent odds they’ll be able to try.  If we were building something for which we could anticipate and provide for every likely use, then we’d be building something pretty limited, and really where’s the fun in that?

Web sites in isolation can still be quite useful. But if you want to be part of whatever the smeg it is that the web is becoming, you need to provide a shiny plug for it to hook itself into. Otherwise you’re just a curiosity.

If you can listen to an entire Lemon Jelly album without breaking into a broad grin at least three times, you’re either completely without an imagination or you’re a member of the RIAA. But I repeat myself.

The core concept of a startup is that something has been brought into being which was not, previously, there. That state of not-being in defines the startup on several levels, and few illustrations of that state are as amusing, viscerally potent, or listenable as Page One, Lemon Jelly’s narrative of the moment just before that most important of startups, the cosmological beginning of time.

At another level, this soundtrack quite simply needed an entry by Lemon Jelly as their entire canon (see, for instance, Space Walk, Ramblin’ Man, and Go) celebrates the urge to go explore the unknown, now. And without this desire, what fun could it possibly be to create a startup?

Please just don’t base a startup on Experiment No. 6.