Dec
Le Web 2009 Wrap-Up
This year, I’ve finally made it to Le Web, the Cannes of online events, thanks to VentureBeat. 2,334 participants from 46 countries, excellent networking, some interesting startups and presentations. Here are some highlights from this year’s edition:
Presentations
Chris Brogan, author of Trust Agents
- Don’t chase meaningless numbers: number of followers, of fans, of business cards. Build real relationships and connect people, build trust.
Money roundtable
- European VCs have to scout for startups, while US VCs are being stalked by startups everywhere they go.
Tony Hsieh, Zappos
- His first startup was a pizza business
- The second startup was Link exchange – an online advertising network he sold to Microsoft when he realized he no longer likes to go to work there.
- He started a venture fund, he invested in more than 20 startups, including Zappos. Investing wasn’t as exciting as entrepreneurship, so he joined Zappos full time.
- Number one priority in a startup is not customer service, but company culture, core values.
- Inspire your team members, don’t just motivate them.
- Most large companies don’t have great core values because they keep compromising, hiring people who are not a fit with the company’s culture. Having a company culture means hiring and firing based on its core values.
- Chase the vision and the money will follow.
- Whatever your life goals are, they all come down to just one: happiness.
Tim Ferriss, 4-Hour Workweek
- If you’re doing things the way many others are doing them, you’re probably doing it wrong, it’s not the most effective path.
- The original title of “The 4 Hour Workweek” was “Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit”. Publishers didn’t find it funny, so the book got rejected.
- Did a $200 Google Adwords campaign for keywords related to the book content and used 12 prospective titles. The 4 Hour Workweek converted the most.
- The 2 most effective ways of promoting a book are blogs (increasing value over time) and radio (decreasing).
- Test every assumption: what people are most interested in (visitors coming from Europe were interested in Tim’s Favorites, while Americans were interested in all time favorites). He used this information to promote his book in different countries.
- Don’t just target the highest traffic blogs, target blogs read by traffic leaders.
Gary Vaynerchuk, Wine Library TV & author of CrushIT
– Cost is almost zero for doing business today. Everybody has got a shot. Our grandparents didn’t have VCs and users, they built real businesses, not spam sh*t 
- Word of mouth converts 80% of the time
- “I vomit in my mouth when people come to me with 3-year plans”. In today’s world? 3 weeks is more like it.
Startup Competition
I’ve already covered the startups selected for the Le Web Startup Competition, now I can announce the winners.
1st place: Stribe, a service allowing you to create a plug-and-play social network for you website.
2nd place: Tigerlily, a set of apps for customizing Facebook pages and making them more interactive.
3rd place: CloudSplit, a web service for real-time monitoring of cloud costs.
Stribe and CouldSplit seem like promising startups. I also liked Shutl, a real-time delivery service based on aggregation of carriers’ availability, and Hyperwods, an app offering all types of options for selected words on webpages (translate it, convert it, find references to it, shop it, search it), but check out the full list, there are many other interesting ones.
