Democratizing Talent: Guy Oseary, Greyson Chance, NowMov, IndieGoGo and the Future of Talent

This guest post was written by SGN founder and Executive Chairman Shervin Pishevar. Pishevar served as SGN’s CEO until January, when he handed off the role to former EA and LucasArts exec Randy Breen. Prior to founding SGN, Pishevar was the founding president and COO of Webs and cofounder of Hotprints and Hyperoffice. He is also an active angel investor.

I get home after a long day and there’s an email from the founders of Nowmov waiting for me in my inbox. I had recently invested in the angel round in Nowmov along with Ron Conway, Ashton Kutcher and others. Ashton had helped seed the idea of Nowmov and introduced me to the team. Their vision: to use the collective intelligence of the masses to watch the most popular videos and content on the Internet in real-time. When I met the incredible team behind them (YCombinator and former Apple engineers) I wrote the check on the spot. The idea of creating customizable channels programmed by the hearts and souls of humanity moved me. Little did I know, just how moved I would be until that little email was sitting in my inbox waiting for me to click on it.

The email was a link to Posterous where the Nowmov founders had created a forum for the investors to get updated and get feedback. I remember thinking ‘this is really neat.’ I saw a comment from another awesome angel, Andrea Zurek, a good friend and early googler who now is part of XG angels (ex-googlers). I responded right after saying,”I wish all startups communicated this way with their investors and advisors!” Then I clicked on Nowmov to help give further feedback to the founders. Immediately, the NowMov channels highest ranking video popped up showing me what video humanity was most loving that very second.

The video was titled “Paparazzi” and in it is a kid sitting at a grand piano on stage that looks like a school auditorium. My first thought was, ‘heh, he looks a lot like my son, Cyrus, who’s 12. On the piano he is playing the cords to the widely popular song Paparazzi. Behind him on the raised stage is a bunch of teenage girls about the same age of the piano player. They all look kind of bored in the beginning. After about 30 seconds, I am thinking, ‘heh, nice piano playing but I’ve seen better.” The girls in the background look like they are thinking the same thing.

But then at :33 seconds this boy opened his mouth. And out flowed a voice that immediately hits your heart. You can see the ripple effect across the faces of the girls. Theirs eyes widen. They turn to each other in shock and smile. You can see as he continues to flex his vocal skills they continue to be shocked and smile in wonderment. In their faces you see reflected the reactions of the whole word. A superstar is born before our very eyes. This boy has the potential to be his generation’s Elton John or Billy Joel. His name is Greyson Chance. It’s a name we will all know.

I immediately shoot an email to my friend, Guy Oseary, the superstar manager to Madonna and many more top stars. The title of the email said, “You must sign him today!!! He’s a superstar!!” Sixty seconds later my iPhone rings and it’s Guy. “I just met with him!”, Guy said. Guy was already on top of it and meeting with him and his mother all day. Meanwhile, over 40 other competing agents were trying to get to them. But when you could have Guy Oseary as your manager why would go anywhere else? The video quickly to over 4 million views in one day, after Ellen then featured it, and has now crossed 20 million views. The next day he performed on Ellen live! (Note: Guy and Greyson just announced that they have officially joined forces!)

I’ve watching this video many times. It’s playing as I write these words and tears of inspiration flow as I watch the transformation in the audience from boredom to wonderment in 30 seconds. The video captures a moment in time where this boy transforms before our eyes like a butterfly coming out of a cocoon. One minute he was an unknown somewhere in the world practicing in his living room countless hours to an audience of none and the next he is performing for the entire world.
This is the modern mythology of our planet; that anyone can pull out that magic sword and transform himself into King Arthur; The dream that anyone in the world with talent can and should be discoverable. We live in a world where true talent can be discoverable without barriers. Our generation must take it all way & democratize merit for all. In a world like this we don’t even need shows like American Idol. The collective hearts, minds and passions of humanity will discover that talent together and shine a passionate light on them.

The more access the world can have to resources to develop their natural talents the better. At the same time we must develop ever more channels for that talent to shine and be discoverable. Platforms like IndieGoGo and Kickstarter are now helping fund independent talent through crowdsourcing funding. My son Cyrus is about to fund his trip to train at the Shaolin Temple and my daughter Darya is going to raise funding for her iPillow invention using IndieGoGo! They are so excited! The Bake Sales of the past are now digital. And once the talent is developed and trained we have new services like NowMov to discover them and share our discoveries on Facebook and Twitter. As an angel investor, I have learned that investing in people always trumps everything else. So a future where people and talent are ever more discoverable is exciting time to be alive.

There are countless others in so many fields who are waiting to be discovered. He might be coding away in a tiny apartment in Moscow. She might be writing the next great novel in Buenos Aires. He’s composing the next great classical sonata in Karachi. He might be designing the next great wave of architecture in Tehran. She might be painting her way to the next Picasso. He’s discovering a cure for a cancer in Kenya.
The better we can incubate the world’s talent and the better we can broadcast those talents to each other the faster we can progress and inspire each other forward. Or as the lyrics to the Paparazzi song say:

We are the crowd
We’re a co-coming
Ready for those flashing lights
Baby, there’s no other superstar…

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Gardening For Dummies: SproutRobot Sends You Seeds And Tells You When To Plant Them

It’s no secret that home-grown fruits and vegetables are usually really good, handily beating what you’ll find lining the aisles at your local supermarket. But If you’re like me,  gardening has always seemed like something of a dark art — you put seeds in the ground, add water, do some other stuff, and a few weeks (or months?) later you have some tasty fruits and vegetables. Perhaps I’m in the minority here, but I’m guessing that there are a lot of people who aspire to start growing some of their own food, but just have no idea where to start.

Fortunately, there’s a new startup called SproutRobot that’s looking to clear things up for the masses: you tell it what you want to grow, and it sends you high quality seeds, automatic email updates instructing you when to plant them, and a guide to handling everything else.

To get started, you tell SproutRobot your zip code. From there you’re given two options: you can elect to either sign up for a free email version of the service, which tells you when to plant your seeds but doesn’t actually send you any (in other words you have to go to the store and buy seeds yourself). Or you can sign up for the premium option, which runs from $20/year for three varieties of seeds to $70/year for ten types of seeds.

Eventually you’re asked to choose what you want to grow. Again, this is pretty straightforward. If you want carrots, you click the box next to carrots — there aren’t a dozen kinds of each vegetable to confuse you. There are around thirty types of  fruit and vegetable seeds available, covering everything from beets to winter squash. All seeds are from Seeds of Change and are certified organic.

Once you’ve signed up, SproutRobot will send you bags of seeds at the appropriate time, and will tell you exactly when to plant them based on your local weather patterns. Erik Pukinskis, who heads the one-man company, says that this is based on the last five years of weather data, and that he hopes to include current weather conditions as a factor too. This would allow SproutRobot to shift planting dates if there was, say, an unusually dry month or cold snap.

The site still has a ways to go. It does tell you when to do things like plant your seeds or transplant your broccoli (whatever that means). But when you click on the online directions, the site sometimes kicks you to a different website, like eHow. Sure, these pages appear to have the proper directions, but this information should probably be included on SproutRobot itself. Pukinskis says that printed instructions are included with the seeds themselves in comic-form, and he’d like to eventually have SproutRobot cover every single step of the growing process.

One thing to note: Pukinskis says that the site is still in beta, and it may have a few quirks and slowdowns. He also says that SproutRobot is still perfecting the planting calendar (he noted that some users growing tomatoes were told to plant them a bit too late), though all paid users have their calendars checked by hand to ensure accuracy.

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Diaspora’s Final Tally: $200,000 From Nearly 6,500 Backers

When Diaspora set out to raise money to build an open Facebook alternative site, they had a pretty modest goal: $10,000. Of course, they were raising the funds through a less than traditional means — using Kickstarter, an online fundraising site. Still, they shot past that goal in 12 days. And within 20 days, they had raised over $100,000. Yesterday, the fundraising closed, the final tally: just over $200,000.

Obviously, the Facebook privacy fiasco played a huge role in the fundraising success. Diaspora pulled in money from a number of prominent people on the web — and, humorously, apparently even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself. All told, nearly 6,500 people contributed money to the project — making it the largest Kickstarter project ever.

Now for the hard part.

While Diaspora has plenty of money, they have yet to make the actual Facebook alternative site. The four NYU students will now begin that process over the course of the Summer. As they wrote yesterday, “You may not hear too much from us in the coming months and we will try our best to provide regular updates, but our silence means we are hard at work.”

By September 2010, the team says it will release the first iteration of the project, fully open-sourced under the AGPL. Here’s the feature they say we’ll see:

• Full-fledged communications between Seeds (Diaspora instances)
• End to end GPG
• External Service Scraping of most major services (reclaim your data)
• Version 1 of Diaspora’s API with documentation
• Public GitHub repository of all Diaspora code

After that, the project will move back to New York City where they will begin work on building out their secondary ideas for the service.

When Diaspora started getting a lot of press, many critics were quick to point out that this group of kids didn’t actually have one line of code written yet and were trying to take on a site with nearly 500 million users. And the truth is that many of these open alternative sites fail against their bigger rivals. Still, it will be interesting to see what these guys come up with with the $200,000 now in their pockets. If nothing else, they have a great sense of timing.

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Eric Schmidt And Founder Collective Giiv Mobile-Gifting Startup $3.35 Million

Mobile gifting startup Giiv raised $3.35 million in a series A round announced today. Investors included Google CEO Eric Schmidt (through his personal seed fund TomorrowVentures), Saban Ventures, Founder Collective, and SK Telecom Ventures. Schmidt was already a seed investor.

If the investors could have texted the $3.35 million into Giiv’s bank account, they probably would have. Giiv is a mobile gifting service which works via text messages, an iPhone app, and a Facebook app. It’s tag line is “texting with benefits.”

Giiv makes sending gifts easy by letting people text a redemption code for a store credit to a friend. Instead of buying someone a gift card, you can simply send them an SMS code via Giiv which they can use in both physical and online stores, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Macy’s, and Fandango.

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Investors, Entrepreneurs Discuss NYC’s Rapidly Growing Seed Funding Community

Last week at TechCrunch Disrupt, some of New York City’s most notable investors and entrepreneurs took the stage to talk about New York City’s seed funding situation. The title of Startup Mecca still clearly belongs to Silicon Valley, but as panel moderator Erick Schonfeld noted, the number of startups making their way to the Big Apple is on the rise and dealflow in New York is quickly heating up.

The conversation touched on quite a few subjects, including what kind of companies tend to do best in New York. Betaworks CEO John Borthwick posited that many of the startups doing well in NYC — Tumblr for example — tend to focus largely on the UI and user experience. He says that many of the web’s building blocks (AWS, etc) are already in place, and many of the services that will do well are building off of those.

Blip.tv CEO Mike Hudack agreed with this, saying that we no longer have to classify all web companies as “technology companies”. Rather, they can be media companies leveraging online content. Jalak Jobanputra, SVP at the New York City Investment Fund, says that while a lot of the infrastructure has been built, there is still much work to do in mobile. She also noted that many people were coming out of Wall Street to start their own ventures.

Chris Dixon, who has blogged extensively on raising money and other topics, says he doesn’t like to think about investing in terms of NY vs Silicon Valley (though he does wish there were more startups instead of lawyers in NYC). Rather, he wants to bring an SV-like ecosystem to New York. He also said that the notion that finding real estate in NYC was an issue was a red herring (Hudack added that if you can’t handle the real estate, you shouldn’t be doing a startup).

Regarding the trend of taking seeding funding from large VCs, most of the panelists seemed to think that it was a bad idea, namely because it could lead to issues down the road if your VC does not decide to follow on.

For more, check out my live notes below and the video of the talk.

Here are my notes from the talk:
John Borthwick, CEO, betaworks

Chris Dixon, CEO, Hunch & Angel Investor

Mike Hudack, Co-founder & CEO, Blip.tv

Jalak Jobanputra, SVP, New York City Investment Fund

Erick – Percentage of companies we’ve covered that were from NY increased in the last 18 months.

JB: Betaworks is a holding company. We’re not a fund. We biuld stuff and we invest. Everything we’re doing is focused on the social, realtime web. This concept that there’s an emerging connected set of companies — we view it as a loosely coupled network of companies. We think a lot of the groundwork has been lain – AWS, etc. We think lightweight apps — they can  be huge — where a lot of the emphasis is on front end, UI, initial experience. A lot related to media business, advertising business and the like.

Why in New York?

CD: I think if you look at the 90′s, the big heavy companies were actually in Boston.

JB – We learn so much from the west coast.

MH- To the point about building blocks being bulit… A lot of businesses that are interesting are media, publishing, and communications.You don’t need to think of every company as web as technology company. Blip doesn’t think of itself as a tech company, it’ s a media company.

JJ-I think that with mobile, there is still a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built. I do think New York’s hard technology scene is still growing.

Erick: What about recruiting, office space in NYC? What are the things you need to know about balding a startup in NYC?

CD — I think the real estate thing is a red herring. Basically all these expenses are salaries for smart people. I think NY is similar to Silicon Valley in that almost nobody working there actually came from there. We recruit a lot of people MIT, CMU, Penn.

MH- Real estate is relatively easy. We found our first office on Craigslist.

JB – We went to a startup that had taken a space that was bigger than their existing capcaity and just rented some desks. If you can’t sort out real estate you shouldn’t be entrepreneur.

JB – We’ve been inspirred by West coast investors who understand value of syndicates. The value of of bringing in great investors, people who will help you at different times, different stages.

Erick – Is seed funding really challenging venture model?
CD – I think venture firms freaked out back in the 90s. Yale/Harvard was really succesful, and then everyone copied it, and there were a ton of bad funds. People really dont need that much money. These days we have more educated entrepreneur. They think about net dilution over time. There’s tons of issues with taking early money from big VCs. Biggest is that if they dont follow on you’re basically toast. Because if Sequoia gave you 500k, and they aren’t involved later, people wonder what’s going on — it’s the same signal is if I just got fired and want to find a new job, people are wondering what went wrong.

MH- I wouldn’t take that money.. Similar issues if you take a strategic investment and then aren’t acquired. People are asking what your strategic is doing.

Let’s talk about what each of you guys are doing .

JJ- I’m with the NYC investment fund. About a third of what we do is venture. I joined two years ago. We’ve set up our seed fund in response there being a dearth of seed money. We’d looking to help seed the entire ecosystem.

CD- The Founder Collective is a $40ish million seed venture fund. There’s about $15 million from entreneurs in the local area. Our thesis is that we’d rather have entrepreneurs betting on entrepreneurs rather than bankers. The advantage is that they can probably see the value better.

JB – Our model is a little different. We aren’t a fund, we’re a holding company. From investment standpoint, what we’re looking at has to be in beta — we want something we can look and feel and touch. I don’t like the abstraction of ideas, I like the real product. We love to see data, even if it’s from 50 users.

What about the second, third tier areas? Say, Pittsburg with CMU. Do you invest in any startups in those cities?

CD- Thing is, you need the critical mass.

MH- When we started Blip people had the same complaint about NYC. They said we had to move to Sf. That was only a few years ago. I dont see any reason why can’t happen in any of these cities. but it does take time.

JJ- I’m seeing a lot of entrepreneurs from secondary cities who actually are thinking of moving to NY, which does have critical mass.

JB – There’s a lot of great stuff happening in NY. Great stuff in London, Asia, and even out in the Middle East. What is happening is the wave of innovation from the first 10/15 years of Internet, which is washing through the rest of the world.

What do you think about if a VC will follow-on if they do participate in a seed round?

CD – I’ve sat in VC meetings, listened to the LPs. We’re doing this to get options.

MH-With the amount of money sunk in a seed round, your company is an option, but it isn’t a major sunk cost. They can drop you.

CD- That said, if Fred Wilson does a lot of diligence and invests 500k i think he will want to follow on. It’s the VC who meets an entrepreneur for 5 min and gives 20k — that’s bad.

Erick – If you have a first time entrepreneur, what are you looking for?
JB- At the end of the day, a lot comes down to the individual’s passion for what they’re building. Their belief in it, and understanding of the product and market. There’s a difference between someone who has had and is solving problem vs someone who comes top down, decides to look for a problem based on marketsize without having had it themselves.

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