There were a few times in this interview that my BS detectors went off. Andrew asked a question regarding which VCs Noah had spoken with and Noah said he couldn't respond due to NDA. After some probing the story changed to say that only some of the VCs required NDA at the point of discussing monetary figures. Andrew did a nice job by continuing to ask questions like "what did they want you to do with the money?" and Noah again vacillated. It just struck me as odd that he couldn't remember what the discussions were about, it seems like something that should be really easy to remember. Of course, he could have just been nervous as well, but it really smelled fishy to me.
Disclaimer: I don't know Noah, I have never used TwitPic, I have nothing for or against Noah and / or TwitPic, so take all of this with an ENORMOUS grain of salt since this is nothing more than pure speculation
I've met Noah on at least one occasion. He's a very nice, and very bright guy. But he is a completely accidental entrepreneur, so I'm not surprised at all that he struggled in an interview like this. In fact, this might be the first big real-time interview he's done.
My reading of the situation tells me that he's just really uncomfortable talking about the conversations he's had with VCs, and doesn't know how to convey that without being awkward.
That said I've never really understood his motivation for handling TwitPic the way that he does, but that's definitely not my place to criticise.
That would certainly explain some of the nervousness. He seems like a nice guy, and the interview was interesting for the most part. I've just seen the NDA game ("sorry, I can't go into details, everything is under NDA with mystery players") played before so it stuck out to me.
To be 100% clear, my post was purely speculation. I was just about to delete it before I saw you'd replied.
most companies are started by accidental entrepreneurs. steve jobs was a hippie basically, larry+sergey were doing phd work, zuck wanted to get laid at harvard instead of studying for finals, etc.
In fact, it seems to me most of the succesful folks are motivated by the fact they are going to do something cool and have fun and not necessarily by the idea of making billions. That is the one thing I cannot stand about mixergy: it's always about millions, billions and gazillons.
That's a good enough explanation for me; I hope you can see why I thought it was odd. I was about to delete my comment but saw that tannerburson had replied.
Sooo... were the VCs interested in getting you to add manpower or spend money on marketing (or something else, like infrastructure)?
Yeah man power and infrastructure. The goal with VC usually is to help something move faster in the direction of success/profitability via whatever resources the startup is lacking in.
That was a joke, really. The scene here is limited. There are a few of us working on interesting things. The problem is when they take off the founders tend to move, like the guys behind Ping and Noah.
And if he didn't take "much more than 10 million" for a site that's making about $1m in profit, he either has gigantic balls or a tiny brain :-) Good luck to him though!
It depends. If it were powered by advertising, yes, yes, and yes. If it were customers paying money for goods or services, not if it were really fun.
But I'm still at that pre-$5m net worth stage where having more than that would basically set me for life. If I were already wealthy, the rules would be totally different. At the moment I just want to hop that fence, then forget all about money (to a point).
Disclaimer: I don't know Noah, I have never used TwitPic, I have nothing for or against Noah and / or TwitPic, so take all of this with an ENORMOUS grain of salt since this is nothing more than pure speculation