richtaur

I have to admit, for a long time now I thought startups were kind of stupid. The concept is sometimes ludicrous: throw millions of dollars developing X (modifier Y) with the small hope of a giant payoff. An example: Twitter (but for companies) (this one’s particularly awful, by which I mean painfully unoriginal).

For starters, I see very little innovation there. Sure, there are innovative startups as well, but there are hundreds of new ones every week or so, and a majority of them seem to be, “something only something else” or “that thing only it’s web-based.” It’s a noisy, crowded industry with a very low quality ratio.

Business models are very important to me as well, something many startups severely lack. A business model must be sensible, robust, realistic, valuable and of course profitable to earn my respect. Most business models seem to be of the newspaper or magazine variety, in that they just show (related or not) advertising to its audience (see: Yahoo! and every other popular website on the planet that displays Google Ads or similar). To me, this is a garbage business model. Users don’t want ads. Users ignore or block ads. It’s probably a necessary evil, but mostly a nuisance that everyone involved wishes they could do without.

I realize I’m generalizing here; I’m sure your startup has a strong business model that doesn’t depend on heavy traffic backed by ads…

There are of course some companies with obvious business models like retail sites. They have products to sell. People show up and buy things that they want. It’s win/win for everyone involved. There’s no trickery, nobody wants to hide anything on the page, and the money has a clear, respectable source. Absolute win.

Other models are equally as respectable but perhaps unintended from inception. The good folks over at Homestarrunner and XKCD seem to also sell products. Their first and most famous products would be their terrific entertainment products. People love them so much, they end up buying apparel and toys in large enough numbers to support their makers. Excellent! The model is clear, profitable, and everyone involved is perfectly content.

Enter startups. I’ve seen many with no model at all. They make an online product and there it sits, waiting for hopefully millions and millions of people. Then that becomes the product. I’ve heard of many startups whose entire plan is to make something cool then get acquired, which to me is like having winning the lottery as a retirement plan…

Then again, I’m an engineer, not a businessman.

Given that, I’m also an engineer that’s been lucky enough to be kind of choosy about what I’m working on. Out of ads platform, front page, real estate, search and Widgets, I went with Yahoo! Widgets simply because it sounded like the most fun to work on. And I believe that it was.

After the layoffs in February, I was moved to the Yahoo! Application Platform, which is very cool, but just not my thing. I’m not a big social networking guy (with some exceptions), though I do see how important it is in Today’s Internet… and to my new company, Raptr (a social network for gamers, no less).

I certainly don’t have to work on a product that is “my thing” but I do think it helps. I’ve noticed the difference, as I’ve got four pages of notes that I want to work on at my new job.

If you know me at all it should come as no surprise that I left for a video game startup. That’s what it came down to, really: “Which product would you rather work on?” I wasn’t unhappy at Yahoo!. I wasn’t even looking, really. And indeed, I will deeply miss many aspects of the job, including free custom-mode coffee, the terrific connections, the foosball!! and the ability to impress people with where I work.

But it came down to what I wanted to be working on every day. And while I was fine working on YAP, working on Raptr sounded like more fun. And that’s when I saw the light: startups are all about enabling developers to work on stuff they love. I’m surprised I didn’t notice this many months ago when my friend Michael Galloway quit Yahoo! to work on his passion.

I think about stuff like meetings and ideas and what I’ll be working on now, and I’m excited about it. Working in the video game industry has been a lifetime goal of mine, and I’m happy to fulfill that goal in 2009. Raptr enabled this for me, but Yahoo! certainly made me legit in this industry, for which I will be forever grateful.