Keith Teare, who founded EasyNet and RealNames, explains why timing matters in startups. He founded RealNames in the mid-1990s before the market was ready, then later launched Just.me in 2010. Teare shares what he learned pitching investors like Draper Fisher about the difference between being too early and too late.
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If you've got that— and by the way, that's just a filtering process. If you haven't got that yet, probably from my description of it, you could figure out how to get it. It would be possible to come up with an idea that kind of met those 2 criteria. So let's assume you've got one and you've come up with one. And I'm sure some of you have, and I'm sure some of you haven't. And by the way, I've had lots of ideas that didn't meet this criteria that didn't work out very well. and others that did meet it but still didn't work out very well. And really, it all comes down to timing and market fit. So just to pull from my background, I did the first ISP in Europe for consumers in 1994. It was called EasyNet. I did not know how good a timing that was. It just was accidental, but it happened to be great timing. Everyone thought the internet was weird. in the first half of 1994, because they were all using bulletin boards like CompuServe or AOL or things like that. And the internet with this TCP/IP and DNS and email addresses didn't exist. And so when you talked about it, people said, well, why would I want to do that? I've already got AOL. And literally selling the internet was hard. There's a great TV show called Halt and Catch Fire. It's a 4-season series. And in the last season, it starts with databases and IBM PC. By the 4th season, the web's being invented, and it's about Yahoo and Google. And there's an investor meeting they do where the investor says, well, what would you ever use the internet for? And just totally didn't get it. So that's an unborn child, because it wasn't obvious. It was huge, but not obvious. When I did EasyNet in '94, the only thing that was obvious to me was it was better than bulletin boards. And it was global, which was exciting. And the web, when you could click on a link and pull content from the other side of the world, that's kind of all I knew. It turned out to be fantastic timing. And EasyNet ended up being in 29 countries within about 4 years and did an IPO after 15 months. 15 months. on the UK AIM listing. So I didn't know that was gonna happen. It was just timing. And the near future is your filter that guarantees you can't be too late. It stops you being too late. It does not stop you being too early. So I've done other ideas. I'll tell you, Just.me. was a mobile app in 2010. Here's the pitch for Just.me. Don't trust Facebook because Facebook is centralizing all your contacts and is going to mine them and make money from you without your permission mostly and share it with third parties. So now that we have this new thing called an iPhone and an Android phone, guess what? It's got an address book. And guess what? You don't need a centralized contact list anymore. We can share pictures and videos and text and audio with each other using our address books without needing to trust anyone in the middle with our address book. That was the pitch for Just Me. And it was a beautiful app, and you could take a picture and keep it private, share it with just one or two friends, or publish it. This is not Harker again. So, you know, in 2018, that would resonate, right? We've just gone through the whole Facebook thing. In 2010, I thought it was awesome in 2010, but I got half a million installs in about 3 months and couldn't get my next round of financing done because it wasn't going to 10 million. And, you know, the bar's very high to finance a consumer app. The numbers need to be really big. So it was way too early. So this framework of thinking, it can stop you being too late, it can't stop you being too early. So how— so, you know, that's where your personal creativity comes in. And remember, anyone who wants to ask anything, come and sit here and interrupt me anytime you want. So, So, but let's assume we've got that. An investor still needs to be persuaded. So let's talk a little bit about the investor canvas that I started off with that you have to deal with if you want to be successful. Firstly, Silicon Valley has gone through some massive shifts, 2 major ones, in the last 10 years. You could really go back as far as 2000 and make it 18 years. So when I came to the Valley— and by the way, Draper Fisher was my first investor— I came to the Valley in '97. My UK company was a public company by then. You can probably tell by the fact that I told you I'm a political science and sociology graduate that I was the product kind of creative guy. Yeah. I was also the CTO because I'd learned to code and I could build networks. But I'm really not a CTO. I'm more of a product creative guy. And EasyNet, when it got to be public, was a place that didn't really want product creative guys. It was in pure execution mode, very English actually. No risk. Let's just do what we said we'll do. Anything else, don't get distracted. Don't listen to it. So I grew very frustrated because I was bringing new stuff in the whole time. And so I resigned from EasyNet and I moved to Silicon Valley. And I started a company called RealNames. And RealNames was one of those just-in-time companies. It was, again, very lucky. The idea behind RealNames was web addresses in 1996 were only in Latin characters, A through Z, 0 through 9, and the hyphen. So what about the rest of the world? And so what Real Names did is create a web addressing system using a character set called UTF-8 that was— made it possible for any language in the world to create keywords pointing to URLs in their own language. Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, anything. And we basically created this keyword-to-URL mapping layer. And, you know, there's a lot more URLs than domain names. Every domain name has hundreds of URLs. So you can imagine that the namespace for keywords-to-URL— just take a company like Ford and think of all of its global operations in every country and every brand of car in every country. and every spare part for every brand of car in every country. Every one of those is a URL, and we could put a keyword on it like Ford Explorer spare wheel. It could be a URL. It could be a keyword. Not for a search result, but to go right to the page for that thing in the country you're in. And so that was Real Names. Real Names was pretty much ahead of its time. And it took me a year before I got my first deal, which was with AltaVista. And AltaVista was then the search engine. Google didn't exist yet. And they put it at the very top. So if you typed Ford Explorer spare wheel in AltaVista, there'd be the search results, but at the very top there'd be this Ford Explorer spare wheels with a superscripted RN that looks like a trademark sign. Mm-hmm. And that said, this is the place to go for that. And people would click on it and go right to that page. Well, Larry and Sergey noticed that, and they built it into Google. And they called it I'm Feeling Lucky. And, you know, way before Google had a business model, we were getting paid 10 cents per click for a paid keyword that came at the top of search. Today that's called Google AdWords. It didn't exist then. And so, you know, in the year 1997, John Fisher, who was Tim's partner at Draper Fisher, and Bill Gross, who ran Idealab in LA, put $5 million into Real Names. That was the first round, by the way. There were no seed rounds in those days. You didn't do seed rounds. There was no seed investors. There were no angels. You went straight to an A round. Or nothing. It was A round or nothing. So we got the deal, we got that. In the year 1997, we did 3 more raises. The next one was $15 million from Morgan Stanley. The one after that was $50 million. Then in '99, we filed for an IPO. We'd only been in business 2 years, and Morgan Stanley and Mary Meeker— you've probably heard of Mary Meeker, she was our analyst— We filed for a listing, $1.5 billion valuation, and Microsoft then put us in the browser. We were native in the browser. So you'd go to the browser, Internet Explorer, which then had 98% market share, and anything you typed in, anything, came to us. Even a URL came to us. And we'd say, oh, that's a URL. You can deal with it. Or we'd say, that's a keyword. Or we'd say, that's a search term, and we'd send it back to them to search. Well, by around about a billion people a quarter were using these keywords and going to websites. The Chinese government did a deal with us, and they made it official policy in China to use Chinese language keywords instead of URLs, and started to sell them. And we got $10 every keyword every year in China. So in China, I'm the inventor of Chinese language keywords. Ni hao. Ni hao.
