Remo’s Blog

Felix Petersen is a founder of Plazes, a Zurich/Berlin based company which provides geo-location services. Felix agreed that I record his presentation at Red Herring 100 in Cannes:

Link: sevenload.com

Plazes has raised €2.7 mio early this year and is growing very fast. A cool thing about Plazes is that they want to digitize walk-in customers in offline settings and create what Felix calls the "PageRank of the real world". E.g. you can see how many people went to a certain restaurant or checked-in in a certain hotel. This opens cool opportunities for behaviorial targeting or related stuff.

More links:
Techcrunch coverage
Alarm Clock coverage
Peter Schüpbach’s coverage (he’s an investor)

Prof. Dr. Sugih Jamin is co-founder and CTO of the Swiss/American startup Zattoo, which offers free live-television via Internet. He agreed that I record his Red Herring 100 presentation in Cannes:

Link: sevenload.com

I had lunch with Sugih and learned several things:
- Zattoo launched in Switzerland because of the cheap licencing costs and the good coverage of the major Swiss TV-stations
- Zattoo has over 250′000 users only in Switzerland
- Zattoo started as a students-project of one of Jamin’s students
- Development is based in the US; business/marketing is based in Zurich
- The synchronization issues should be fixed soon (the cause of the problem was that Zattoo stopped using QuickTime for synchronization due to realiability issues)
- Zattoo will generate revenue with advertising that is displayed when a new channel is buffering (that takes about 5 seconds)

More Links:
Alarm Clock Euro June 2006
Alarm Clock Euro March 2007

(via Loïc Le Meur)

More to come… (I’ve shot some, too)

(Sleeping concierge at the hotel late last night. I hope he won’t get fired because of this posting ;-) [PS: It WASN'T at the Carlton Hotel, of course]

(What a wonderful morning –> Remo is really happy :-)

(This beach is AWESOME, and its RIGHT in the city!)

Good thing I have another 6 hours so spend at the beach before I leave to cold Switzerland.

At lunch I sat next to Giles McNamee, co-founder of McNamee Lawrence & Co, an investment banking firm based in Boston, London and San Francisco.

His tips included:
#1: Only work with people you like and trust. NEVER do a deal with people you don’t like or don’t trust.
#2: When you doing a VC-round, be prepared to give up 20-40% of the company. Given that, maximize the money you get. It’s always better to get $10 mio for 30% of your company than $1 mio.
#3: Hire a good lawyer for the paper work. Make sure the lawyer has done this before.
#4: There are at least 10 parameters to consider. The amount of money is only one parameter. Make sure you also think about all the other parameters. Be prepared for a complex negotiation.
#5: Angel/friends/fools money is a lot easier to raise than VC-money. If you need money quickly, do an angel round.
#6: Do your due diligence on your investors. Call the CEOs of their portfolio companies, call other references, find out how they work.