Occam's Razor

CGS 5.0 Dinner is Sold Out

CGS dinners are back with a SOLD OUT CGS5.0 on Tuesday Dec 12 at 20:30 following the Web3.0 gathering  next week.

Bistrot Vivienne ,  4 rue Petits Champs 75002 PARIS, +33 1 49 27 00 50

Current Participant list (we have two rooms, room 1 upstair and room 2 in the ground level, as we have a very full party, i have assigned people to one of the two rooms so the restaurant can serve us dinner, we will then move from one room to the other)

  Room 1 (35 seats):

·       Jeff Clavier ; Marc Goldberg ; Rodrigo Sepulveda

1.    Alexandre Casassovici

2.   Aydin Senkut

3.   Benjamin Carlu

4.   Carlos Diaz

5.   Cedric Maloux + 1

6.   Denis (from Jiwok)

7.    Esme Vos

8.   Ivan Communod

9.   John Vars

10. Jamin Rubio

11.  Jacques Froisant

12.  Lucie Anne Radimsky

13.  Leila X (from the WSJ)

14.  Mathieu Nouzareth

15.  Mayel de Borniol

16.  Nico Guyon

17.  Olivier Maurel

18.  Ouriel Ohayon

19.  Paul Elosegui

20. Pascal Boiteux

21.  Richard Menneveux

22. Scott Rafer

23. Sebastien Martin

24. Stephanie Beaujard

25. Thomas Blard

26. Thomas Owadenko

27.  Eran Lagon

28. Renee Blodgett

29.Virginie Robert

30. isa serfaty-bloch

31. Taki Krim

32 Louis Nauges

Room 2 (43 seats)

·       Eric Plantier; Colette Ballou Lamotte ; Yves Michali

1.    Marc Oiknine 

2.   Leafar

3.   Philippe Monteil

4.   Darius Modaressi-Tehrani

5.   Philippe Pinault

6.   Julien Andre

7.    Louis van Proosdij

8.   Franck Perrier

9.   Patrick Ferran

10. Manuel Diaz

11.  Florent Boutellier

12.  guido van nispen

13.  Christian Jegourel

14.  Laurent Esposito

15.  David de JobMeeters

16.  Jacob Share

17.  Loic Moisand

18.  Thibault Hanin

19. Eric Dos Santos

20.  Stephane Lee

21. Netanel Jacobsson

22. Stefanos Vasdekis

23. John Nousis

24. Remi Poittevin

25. Jean Batiste Rudel

26.  Adriaan Verstijnen

27. Willem Vos

28. Franck Poisson

29. Kevin Slavin

30 Guillaume Limare

31 Charles Nouÿrit

32 Roy Klieger

33 Aymeril Hoang

34 Remi Poittevin

35 François Nonnenmacher

36 Sagi Rubi + 1

37 Andrew Carlton

38 Brett Wayne

CGS Dinners are Back

UPDATE: WE HAVE MOVED THE DATE TO TUESDAY DEC 12 (same time, same place)

CGS dinners are back on Tuesday Dec 12 at 20:30 following the Web3.0 gathering  next week. You can register on this post using the comments, I'll circulate the final attendee list + menu + logistic later. Seating will be restricted to 30 for room 1 and 30 for room 2 (counting with 20% no-show / overbooking, this allow for 75 people to register)...

Bistrot Vivienne ,  4 rue Petits Champs 75002 PARIS, +33 1 49 27 00

Current Participant list (8 seats still available as of dec 8, and I'm working an getting us more space for the dinner using the two floors of the restaurant, which should allow for 60 people to attend... more new on this later here  I have increased the seating capacity to 30 seats for room 1 and 30 seats for room 2 => WE STILL HAVE SPACE ;-) ) :

• Room 1:
• Jeff Clavier ; Marc Goldberg ; Rodrigo Sepulveda

1. Alexandre Casassovici
2. Aydin Senkut
3. Benjamin Carlu
4. Carlos Diaz
5. Cedric Maloux + 1
6. Denis (from Jiwok)
7. Esme Vos
8. Ivan Communod
9. John Vars
10. Jamin Rubio
11. Jacques Froisant
12. Lucie Anne Radimsky
13. Leila X (from the WSJ)
14. Mathieu Nouzareth
15. Mayel de Borniol
16. Nico Guyon
17. Olivier Maurel
18. Ouriel Ohayon
19. Paul Elosegui
20. Pascal Boiteux
21. Richard Menneveux
22. Scott Rafer
23. Sebastien Martin
24. Stephanie Beaujard
25. Thomas Blard
26. Thomas Owadenko

27. Eran Lagon

• Room 2
• Eric Plantier; Colette Ballou Lamotte ; Yves Michali

1. Marc Oiknine 
2. Leafar
3. Philippe Monteil
4. Darius Modaressi-Tehrani
5. Philippe Pinault
6. Julien Andre
7. Louis van Proosdij
8. Franck Perrier
9. Patrick Ferran
10. Manuel Diaz
11. David Grunberger
12. Florent Boutellier
13. guido van nispen
14. Christian Jegourel
15. Laurent Esposito
16. David de JobMeeters
17. Jacob Share
18. Loic Moisand
19. Thibault Hanin
20. Eric Dos Santos
21. Stephane Lee
22. Netanel Jacobsson
23. Stefanos Vasdekis
24. John Nousis
25. Remi Poittevin
26. Jean Batiste Rudel
27. Adriaan Verstijnen
28. Willem Vos
29. Franck Poisson

Managing Burn-Out

Interesting article in this week NY Magazine  on how to manage burn-out or how, in a culture where work can be a religion, burnout is its crisis of faith! Very good reading and very relevant from an entrepreneur perspective on how not to burn yourself, or the people working with you...

In 1981, Maslach, now vice-provost at the University of California, Berkeley, famously co-developed a detailed survey, known as the Maslach Burnout Inventory, to measure the syndrome. Her theory is that any one of the following six problems can fry us to a crisp:

• working too much;
• working in an unjust environment;
• working with little social support;
• working with little agency or control;
• working in the service of values we loathe;
• working for insufficient reward (whether the currency is money, prestige, or positive feedback).

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Maslach’s research is that burnout isn’t necessarily a result of overwork. It can be, certainly. Michael Leiter, a lovely Canadian fellow and frequent collaborator of Maslach’s, has elegantly called burnout a “crisis in self-efficacy,” which to me suggests that head-banging feeling of struggling mightily for too little or (worse) nothing in return. Ayala Pines, a researcher in Israel who’s looked at burnout in all sorts of inspired contexts (including marriage), rather heartbreakingly sums up the problem as “the failure of the existential quest”—that moment when we wake up one morning and realize that what we’re doing has appallingly little value....    ... And Farber often calls burnout “the gap between expectation and reward,”

=>  Happiness equals reality divided by expectations !!!

Paris BarCamp is on

It's now official, the Paris BarCamp will be on on Saturday June 10 2006. All registration and information can be found here.

I was one of the participant  in the KinnerNet2006 un-conference last March, where I had some of the best time and most interesting conversations.

I hope that we can create something of the same quality and level in Paris, and look forward to June 10.

Getting ready for reboot8

I'm getting ready for the reboot8 conference that will start on Wednesday evening in Copenhagen. Let me know if you plan to attend so we can meet there.

I'm also very interested in any feedback/question/idea to prepare for a workshop that's hosting on Building profitable OSS business. 

I plan to review and organise a discussion on how Profitable Businesses have been build on scalable OSS operation (MySQL, JBoss, RedHat etc...) . How do we move up the stack and build profitable un-scalable OSS businesses. The workshop will reflect on what happen as we move up into application areas (SugarCRM and up the food chain) and if/how/what can be done to build profitable un-scalable vertical OSS businesses.

Update 1: good pre-reboot8 post from Dannie Jost:

1. who we are: reboot is a gathering of 400 or so people all with a vested interest to some degree or another in internet technology, software, social software, technology itself, society. the kinds of people whom we are so fond of calling geeks. that is, those rare souls that dare to break a few old worn out patterns and to explore new territory.
2. the world that we live in: whatever it is that we want to call our age - information, digital, knowledge, techno-freaked-muddled, post-industrial, web 2.0 - it is an age where resources are plenty and easily sourced. logistics and knowledge do play

a major

role. part of the logistics is the communication, and that is where most information technology finds itself.
3. my observation/assertion: there is a paradigm shift currently taking place in what concerns creating a thriving business.a thriving business is a business that is sustainable. to me a business is sustainable when it makes its community prosper (read, happy, fulfilled, satisfied, peaceful). note that for a community to prosper, maintaining the status quo is not a requirement. all to say that business is about people.business is not  about goods or money, but about people making their world - this world now - work for them and allowing all to live in dignity.
4. my inference: in a world where resources are abundant and that is dependent on both logistics and communication, the key resource is intelligence. if

the crown

jewels of our age are intellectual assets, how are we going to deal with intellectual property rights?

Total immersion raises 4.5M€

Total Immersion raises new 4.5M€ round led by Elaia partners, with returned investors Partech and ISource. For the last  5 years the company  has invested in delivering D’FUSION, an Augmented Reality solution : .

Commitment vs. Intelligence

Very relevant essay from Paul Graham adapted from one of his talk at the start-up school. The section on commitment is a must-read.

1. Release Early.
2. Keep Pumping Out Features.
3. Make Users Happy.
4. Fear the Right Things.
5. Commitment Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.

I now have enough experience with startups to be able to say what the most important quality is in a startup founder, and it's not what you might think. The most important quality in a startup founder is determination. Not intelligence-- determination….

…You can lose quite a lot in the brains department and it won't kill you. But lose even

a little

bit in the commitment department, and that will kill you very rapidly.

…But if you lack commitment, chances are it will have been hurting you long before you actually quit. Everyone who deals with startups knows how important commitment is, so if they sense you're ambivalent, they won't give you much attention. If you lack commitment, you'll just find that for some mysterious reason good things happen to your competitors but not to you. If you lack commitment, it will seem to you that you're unlucky.

….Whereas if you're determined to stick around, people will pay attention to you, because odds are they'll have to deal with you later. You're a local, not just a tourist, so everyone has to come to terms with you.

….You can't fake this. The only way to convince everyone that you're ready to fight to the death is actually to be ready to.

….You have to be the right kind of determined, though. I carefully chose the word determined rather than stubborn, because stubbornness is a disastrous quality in a startup. You have to be determined, but flexible, like a running back. A successful running back doesn't just put his head down and try to run through people. He improvises: if someone appears in front of him, he runs around them; if someone tries to grab him, he spins out of their grip; he'll even run in the wrong direction briefly if that will help. The one thing he'll never do is stand still.

6. There Is Always Room.
7. Don't Get Your Hopes Up.
8. Speed, not Money

RFID demand acceleration

Following the recent Viagra-RFID tagging news, here is another proof of the dramatic RFID demand acceleration:

US Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns this month released a government road map that would see most farmers voluntarily tag their animals with wireless radio chips by 2008 as part of an ambitious electronic disease control system to prevent outbreaks of hoof and mouth disease and avian flu, among other things. The system will not address the spread of "mad cow" disease, as it is transmitted through feed rather than animal commingling. By 2007, the program will ask farms or households that house chickens, ducks, turkeys, cows, pigs, goats or horses to register with a database and obtain a 15-digit identification number and GPS coordinate. Beginning in 2008, animals under the proposal would carry a radio frequency identity, or RFID, tag.

It will be interesting to watch how this influence the Alien Technology on-going IPO filling.

Telecom Conference in Geneva

I'm putting the final touch on my panel presentation at the  Telecom World  Congres next Thrusday in Geneva. Let me know if you are in Geneva that day, as I will have some time after my panel.

14.50 Panel: Funding new, new telecommunications businesses

Funding innovation
New business models / new service providers
Technology and equipment start-ups
Venture capital and Private Equity appetites
Risk / return profiles
Incubators and spin-off businesses
Key success factors
Case studies

Peter Gardner, Global Sector Head, Communications, 3i
Duncan Lewis, Senior Advisor, Telco & Media, The Carlyle Group
Marc Goldberg, Managing Partner, Occam Capital

Market heat wave

The current increase in transaction price, and entrepreneur value expectation can be observed in today's VentureOne private equity market metrics. According to VentureOne, Valuations of venture-backed companies for 2005 reached their highest point in four years as sizable acquisitions fueled an increase in the price of later-stage companies.

The median premoney valuation of U.S. start-ups reached $15.2 million, up from $12.5 million a year ago, according to a report released today from VentureOne, a unit of Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group. In 2001 overall annual median premoney valuations hit $16 million. Later-stage information-technology company valuations rose the most, by almost $8 million over 2004, to $30.3 million.

Within IT, the median largest valuations were $42.8 million for later-stage electronics and $44 million for later-stage semiconductor companies. Among round classes, U.S.premoney valuations increased for all but first rounds, which were relatively flat at $5.4 million, down from $5.6 million a year ago.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the median premoney valuation increased to $4.1 million, the highest since $4.8 million in 2002. The median value of European IT companies increased to EUR3.9 million from EUR3.2 million a year ago.

Are we going to all get burn again ?