Mark Suster: Branding and Commitment

First of all, your name should be your URL. If your name is wildfire, your URL should not be wildfire-interactive.com. call yourself wildfire-interactive. Call yourself anything. But this confusion in the Internet era doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Make sure your name doesn't box you into a corner. I said to Bill Gross, the guy who created Overture, in jest when he created a company called Tweetup, I publicly said, I predict within one year this company will not be called Tweetup. Why would you build something that has one channel? Twitter. Why would you build something that has one channel? Salesforce.com, apple, iPhone, Facebook. If you're building a product, you need multi channel. Now, it's okay to start somewhere, but if you don't start by thinking multi channel, I think you'll be in trouble. And Salesforce would have you believe, and I know a thing or two about Salesforce, that you ought to build on their platform, platform called Force.com and you ought to do that if you haven't thought through how to build a company. But if you've thought, I want to have a multi channel strategy and I don't want to be beholden to one individual component of that channel and one player, then I don't suggest it's a very good idea. So Tweetup is now called Postup. I was right. I should have put money on it. The second prediction I made not too long ago was that BlackBerry or the owner of BlackBerry rim, would be sold within a year. So we'll start the clock on that one and see if I'm right on that. But that's a total aside. But the thing I could teach Silicon Valley is the last one. Be careful about words that mean something else because I'm sort of flipping about it. But I see so many young entrepreneurs these days who tell me, Well, I raised $200,000, I launched and learned and I created a product. I didn't do any research. They probably don't say that, but they didn't. And the market didn't come. So I'm shutting it down and moving on to my next one. And I say, wow, why? Oh, well, I'm failing fast. Okay, how about those customers who signed up for your service and trusted you to at least give it your best college effort? How about those employees who joined you, even if it was a $45,000 a year customer support person, because they believed in your vision and that you were going to stick this through? How about the person who gave you 200,000? It's okay if it was an evil venture capitalist, because 200,000. Not that much money. But how about everybody else? I don't believe in stupidly staying with your business. I stupidly stayed for six years. I knew that I wasn't going to make that much money. I knew that the structure of what I had built had inherent problems. I knew that I wasn't passionate about it. I probably, after about four years, should have recruited someone more passionate than I was. But I felt this deep sense of commitment. And I just hate that there's a whole generation of people, and I'm not saying everybody, but there's certainly enough of them that don't feel that same sense of a commitment to see something through. When you said you were going to do it.