 Hello, thank you for having me. I just flew in here a couple days ago from San Francisco and it's been wonderful so far, been really enjoying the sites and having a great time so thanks for having me here. I'll give you a little overview about myself and I live in San Francisco. I first got started working in technology in 1990, not working in technology. I'm only 34 years old but I got my first computer in 1990. It came from a kind of a standard middle-class family. We had one computer in the household and for some reason I wasn't very popular as a kid so I got on the computer and that was kind of my my outlet. Then in 1996 I discovered the internet starting using the internet and moved to San Francisco and the reason I moved to San Francisco in 2000 is because the first kind of dot-com boom was going on so a lot of technology companies were just getting off the ground. This was when Amazon dot-com and a handful of other of the big tech giants were just getting started and it kind of seemed like the place to be. I didn't know much about San Francisco but I heard that the Bay Area had a lot of innovation going on and that as a computer science student in school I knew that I had to get up there because everything was happening up in the Bay Area so I actually dropped out of college to pursue working up in San Francisco. So everything fell apart shortly after I got there and the whole crash of the economy around the dot-com space went away and so I eventually landed at Tech TV and so Tech TV was a television network that was dedicated to teaching people about computers and technology. I started off as a very low level employee there so I was doing a lot of the technical kind of behind the scenes work and then eventually started hosting a show there called The Screensavers so I eventually became one of the talent on the network which actually I heard was broadcast out here. We had a couple people came up to me and said that they had watched Tech TV out here which was great so we had syndication all over the world. Then in around 2004 you know I had seen a lot of great people come through Tech TV so I'd interviewed you know Steve Wozniak the co-founder of Apple and just gosh dozens of people come through and I think that I was really inspired by a lot of them so meeting these great technology giants and seeing what they have created and finding out that they were just normal people like me and I got to know you know meet these people and know them and I realized this is something I can try on my own like why not go out there and try my own startup and so in late 2004 I founded a social news website called dig.com and dig was really kind of the first site that allowed users to vote on content and it would surface the best content on the front page of the site and this site this concept was kind of new on the internet at the time this was before there was like liking on Facebook so you know you click the like button and before Twitter and a handful of other things and this was my first startup and it really kind of grew like crazy I had no idea what I was getting into so we grew the company from myself and one other person to somewhere around 70 employees and at our peak we had around 38 million monthly unique visitors visiting the site and so that was a lot of fun basically I stuck with that for about six or seven years started angel investing around 2006 so I was meeting a lot of other entrepreneurs at the time I got very lucky and got to know the Twitter folks and some of the other companies like poor square and in Jimoko and Chomp and all these companies and it was lucky enough to do some investing in the space in the early days and then in 2011 I decided to start a mobile incubator so mobile startup just because I felt as though now is the right time to be getting into that space just because mobile is exploding and so why start something new right now well devices like you know all these mobile handsets that we have like the iPhone and Android devices the prices are continuing to fall so that's going to continue to happen over some time now there are even you know I believe the iPhone 3 or 3 of the other 3 gs is now free in the United States so people can get it with a contract and so everyone is jumping on smartphones you know and so mobile is exploding 180 million iPhone sold 250 million Android devices being activated and if you think about how fast this is growing 50 million new Android devices activated just since November of last year so that obviously this the space is just exploding also why my mobile is very exciting right now is the barrier to entry is still falling so the cost to get started and actually launch something new continues to drop so a single engineer can doubt now do the work of many engineers so for example if you talk about Windows 95 here you know here back when was launched in 95 it required 300 plus engineers working on this project three years of development and they sold a million copies of the software during the first week very impressive numbers but if you take a look at how that compares today Instagram which is one of the most popular iPhone apps right now is now doing required two engineers to launch this just two engineers 600,000 downloads per week now and this is of course a free application so it's not making the revenue that Windows is but there's still another great example is you know camera plus camera plus is another application for the iPhone that has actually paid it was developed by a friend of mine Scott Scott is 23 years old he doesn't live in in the Bay Area or in San Francisco he's actually in Minneapolis Minnesota which doesn't have a tech scene at all it's a very small tech scene but he was able to develop this gets 20,000 paid applications per day at a $1.99 price point and now he has a team of four people so literally you can do this anywhere it doesn't have to be in San Francisco or in a tech hub you know as long as you have an idea and you're willing to coordinate getting engineers and other people to work with you you can start development on an application in any part of the world so how can you build in scale of service with limited resources you know I'm a big fan of kind of bootstrapped startups it is startups that you know don't go out and raise a lot of money but they just do it very scrappy so they use you know their own personal savings or they can borrow money from friends to get things off the ground when I first launched dig I was working out of my own personal savings and I believe the first prototype ran me around two thousand US dollars to get that launched in about a month and a half of time and I was able to self fund that my girlfriend at the time was not too happy because she wanted to use that money as a down payment on a house but that's okay it worked out so how can you scale services with limited resources there now companies like Heroku and Amazon web services these allow you to actually build and deploy applications rapidly so Heroku you know in the past you would have to have a team of system engineers that would help you set up the servers that would help you scale the servers Heroku outsources all of this so all you have to do is get a software engineer to hook into their APIs and they will handle the rest of the back-end scaling and system administration software patches things of this nature so these are ways that you really don't have to employ additional people at your own company you can just pass this off to third parties also Amazon EC2 and S3 these are examples of of great services that we use at milk that allows you to instantly deploy new servers so you know at dig we had several hundred computer servers and we would actually have to go out purchase these machines you know get them in the warehouse install the software rack them and put them in the server racks ourselves it was just a very labor intensive process and so for us to have to to be able to get around that now and instantly deploy on-demand scaling is is actually very helpful it allows you to also you know if you receive a huge new influx of traffic so if a lot of people start coming and using your service it's just a matter of minutes to launch new servers and instances so it's been very very very helpful for us also hiring freelance developers when I was first getting dig off the ground you know I had studied computer science in school but it had been a few years since I actually coded so I decided to hire a developer to help code the site for me it was just faster I could have gone back and gone back to school or most likely would have just rushed up on my coding experience and gone down and picked up some books on on PHP or Python or something but that would have taken me too long and so I actually went online in source to developer found a software engineer that was willing to work as a contractor and then you know paid them an hourly rate and had them code the initial version of dig so that actually saved me a lot of time so fast forward to today talk briefly about milk milk is our software development company in San Francisco that we launched here just about eight months ago and the idea was to build a small team so I now have a team of seven people working on this project and build two to three ideas per year so go after big ideas try big bold new things and see what sticks our first idea an application is called oink and oink is a iphone app and the reason we built oink is that we want to build a platform that would allow you to rank compare and share the things that you discover throughout the day and not the places so in the past there's been a lot of applications out there here's an example of of Google using their places data and this is a place that I like to visit in San Francisco called Samovar tea lounge it's a great place if you ever make it to the city they have great tea but Samovar Google is very good at saying this is Samovar this is the number of ratings that it has on it but it doesn't really tell you anything about what's on the inside so I feel like that's a whole other level of data data that isn't yet exposed to the consumer you have no idea what you're about to experience once you go inside of that place sometimes there are review sites out there that talk about you know they give reviews of what the different types of courses or meals or things like that are inside but you have to read very long lengthy reviews to actually get at what's good so we want to focus here's example of Yelp and they have very long reviews so we want to focus on answering a few questions excuse me what is the best thing here what is the best thing at that location what have my friends tried here and what are they liked or disliked so if I walk into a place and even if I'm not with a friend I'll be able to know if I have other tea friends if they've enjoyed something there and it might help encourage me to try something that I may not have already tried and where can I find the best and then just kind of fill in the blank so where can I find the best coffee the best tea the best pizza you name it and so this is a screenshot of our application and here you see this is how we like to view Samovar tea lounge so it shows you very clearly what the most popular item is there so that's the first placed item is the sentia tea there then the egg bowls number two the chai tea is number three and you can instantly see when you walk into that place what you should be trying also we give you a way to rate the things once you're there so you can say that you love something by giving it a heart you can say that you like it by giving it a thumbs up a kind of a sideways thumb is you're not so sure whether you like it or not and then you can give it a thumb down if you don't like it at all so giving you the power to rate and rank and say that this is how I feel about this object also we show you which what your friends have thought of that whether they've liked it or loved it or what they think of that particular item and then we give you the ability to see how that ranks inside of a place so that is number 17 at Samovar or it's also ranked number 10 in tea so that's not just inside of Samovar but that's in all of San Francisco so it allows you to see what is the best tea in San Francisco just that one item and how does it compare against all other teas in San Francisco so that's something that we think is pretty unique so here you can see is an example of the tea tag it's sorted it's kind of hard to see on the display there but that little dot that you see is that it's sorted within five miles so those are the best teas within five miles those are the best chocolate within five miles and that allows you to make buying decisions so when you use the application you could say well should I go over here and try this chai latte which is ranked number 50 and 50 is kind of pretty far down the list or should I go down the other street and have this chai latte which is ranked number 15 and most likely you'll walk the other direction to try this one because it's more people have said that this is something of quality that you should be trying out people are ranking all different types of things with the application so right now you know this is an example of roller coasters of all things so at amusement parks people go in and say what are my favorite things at Disneyland or you name it and it allows you to quickly see what they should be trying out they're ranking where they like to sit so balcony seating this is an example of something that's ranked really bad someone said I don't like the flies in this restaurant so they took a picture of a fly on the wall it's pretty funny I had no idea this was actually going to happen but it's it's cool to see the original content that people are putting in there so oink here's where it stands today we've been out for about four and a half months or so now we have 200,000 downloads we're very happy and honored that Apple gave us the best in travel award for 2011 but the funny thing about this is that we might fail with this application it's still too early to tell and that's something that I think that we really embrace we're okay with that we're okay with failing because we want to try big new things and we want to see what will happen so some of the things that that we believe in from a philosophy level at the company is that we want to learn from our mistakes and we want to share those mistakes so if we if we figure out that our new user registration process is not working correctly it's something that we want to be very transparent with and tell our users that we're going to fix it and be up front with them and also share that with the rest of the community I would say that's one thing that I really enjoy about the Bay Area about being around San Francisco is that because there are so many startups and as a kind of a startup culture people are very very willing to share with each other even though you might be competitors you talk about the challenges that you're facing with each other which I think is pretty unique and the other thing that we want to do is we want to build ideas that could potentially change the world so we're going after big bold new ideas not just kind of rehashing old ideas so we won't tackle it or we won't develop it unless we think it's something new and in a different direction than we've seen done before some of the common mistakes that I see a lot I meet with a lot of startups and I and I talked to new entrepreneurs and people that are getting off the ground for the first time and one of the things that I hear a lot of is people say I'm going to build the next Facebook and I think this is the wrong approach because I feel as though the entrepreneur that starts the the project for the first time like the person that actually invented the technology they're the one that's going to be most passionate about that technology and so I you know oftentimes I will see a lot of clone like sites and they just keep following the leader and I feel as though that may work sometimes but it's not necessarily there's not a lot of innovation going on there because it's just copying what someone else is doing and I think that the most interesting projects at least for me personally are the ones that are trying something new and something distinct I also hear things like we're going to build Twitter for cats which is just weird things like that where people say it's a slight different variation of that or I think this will make me rich that's another one that I hear a lot of like people think that well if I build this idea I'm going to make a lot of money doing it and one of the things that I will say is the projects that we like to take on and especially with dig when I launched dig a few years ago I remember thinking well eventually if this will pay for my rent to live in in my room and I can work out of my house and work on this project I'll be happy because it was something I was really truly personally passionate about so it really didn't matter how big it grew and I was really shocked to see it take off the way it did but you know it never felt like work yeah it wasn't like I ever woke up in the morning and said like oh I have to go back to work at this and it was just something I really truly loved and so it just came naturally to want to pursue that and so for us also I feel as though we're working on projects that that really were excited and passionate to be working on so I've done a bunch of mobile investments over the last few years here's a handful of the companies that I've invested in that that do mobile and I feel as though one of the things that I look for as an investor is I'm looking for new distinct ideas that I spoke about earlier and so I'll give you a few of those examples so chomp is a service that they were launched around the premise of search for the app store so Apple if you played around with their search engine they're not naturally a search company and so they had a problem with search relevance and returning the right types of applications when you type in certain queries and so they said well you know no one's really doing this well even Google's having problem with their Android search we're going to go out there and solve search for mobile applications because it's different than web based websites where you can actually crawl that content and they built a mobile experience around that batch was an example of a company saying you have all these pictures that you take on your iPhone and oftentimes you'll be out taking multiple photos of different things but you never share them they just sit on your phone and they're never shared anywhere how can we create a private area for you to be able to take that collection of photos and share those with close personal friends you know four square was an example of people wanting to say where are my friends I don't know where they are I'd like to potentially meet up with them you know how can I check in to these places and tell someone I'm here at this conference and maybe they'll see that they're only a couple blocks away and come meet up with me so these are a bunch of different examples of just people doing things differently in the mobile space and why they were interesting in investments a couple of the ones that I like square Jack Dorsey is of course a brilliant guy he was one of the co-founders of Twitter his new project square really enabled a whole nother level of mobile payments to occur at a variety of different places square the reason I really like square is it was such out of the box thinking it was so different to say I'm going to take a component of the iPhone a piece of the hardware that is the audio input into the iPhone and make it so that when you swipe the card it converts that to audio and then listens to it through the microphone Jack and then turns that into the actual number on the on the phone so it was figuring out how to take an actual hardware piece of the phone and use use that device to translate credit cards it was just a brilliant idea at the time and has taken off like crazy for for mobile payments this is an industry that I think is really going to explode in the next few years that is just starting to take off now this is the Nike fuel band and this is this idea of being able to the quantified self like the idea of being able to track your personal activity and how much exercise that you perform and have that sink back to a mobile device is just getting off the ground job on has a similar device out there called the up I also have another device that that I wear on me called the fit bits and it tracks your steps attracts how many stairs that you climb attracts how many miles that you've walked how many calories you've burned and I think that the idea that you could quickly glance down at your wrist and know how active you are for the day or it also tracks your sleep activity and then being able to translate that into charts and graphs on the mobile device and share it with your friends when you hit certain milestones I think is really unique being able to say that you know set goals for you and your friends and say okay we're going to walk ten thousand steps a day and then have that spread and have it be a competition I think is a lot of fun so this device is going to be shipping later this month and I think this is a really interesting space to watch also you know looking forward to other things like the Apple television coming out later this year you know and how a mobile device can communicate with that television over Bluetooth over Wi-Fi and can then act as a separate control controller to control games on the Apple TV I mean there's just going to be a lot of new ideas and new innovations coming out of mobile devices talking to other devices we're already starting to see that work on on the on the iPad with using your your phone as controllers to control the iPad so one of the things that I really enjoyed doing with entrepreneurs is brainstorming new ideas and so we get together for for on fine thank you as we get together for tea and we'll sit down and we'll talk about how can we come up with new ideas what are what are new things that are exciting and cool and so this is how we spend a lot of our time these are my kind of three favorite favorite ways to brainstorm new ideas one of the things I like to do is I like to catalog my day and what I mean by that is I take down you know you can take down on a sheet of paper and you can write down every single thing that you do throughout the day and what potential pain points there are and where you can potentially build a new product or service to to help with those pain points so an example of that is that you know I'll say okay I woke up in the morning how do I feel am I warm am I cold okay I sit up I brush my teeth the toothbrush do I have a toothbrush I have a lecture toothbrush and I think about every little step of the day and you think about is there any personal struggles that you're experiencing throughout your day that can be solved with technology and so it's just like thinking and cataloging hundreds of things that you do throughout the day can help to help you potentially brainstorm new ideas and new products also looking to disrupt old industries I'll give you an example of a new service that's launched about a year and a half ago in San Francisco that is really taking off one of the things that's really difficult in San Francisco right now is ordering a cab to come and pick you up and drive you around they have a limited number of cabs that they give licenses to in San Francisco and so it's really hard to flag down a cab and sometimes you'll call them on the phone and say you know I need to take a taxi across town and they the taxi just won't show up they just the service is not the best what happened is a this guy Travis he came up with an idea of they have all these these rented cars is like nicer luxury cars like the black cars that you can pay and they're only available they were currently only available to rent them out by the day but the nice thing about taxis is you get into a taxi you know you pay them a fare and they drop you off and you're done you don't have to keep in a car for the entire day so he was able to go out and say I'm going to give all of these nicer black cars an iPhone and in the iPhone they will have the ability to say I'm available for some to pick up someone and then I can take my iPhone out at any time in San Francisco and I could say I need a taxi right now I can push a button it will know where my GPS is and know where my coordinates are and it will send a black car service will pull up in front of in front of the house in just a couple minutes I can then get in the car and get dropped off well this really upset the taxi industry because they had a complete they had the they had the exclusive rights to have all the taxis in in the Bay Area and they weren't issuing any new taxis and so they were kind of getting disrupted in a way by a different car service but they weren't taxis they were different so it was really a way of saying how can I use technology to solve a problem and and provide a better service a service that is on demand so I push a button and it instantly happens you don't have to pay the the the fee is already calculated into your phone and so you don't have to pull out any currency of any type it just automatically happens you get in the car and you get out and it just it really exploded and now you know they have dozens of cars they've launched all in several cities in the world now and it's really starting to take off so that was an example of someone saying well I have a problem I can't get a taxi how many other people are having this problem and how can we solve this problem with technology it was a great example of that and the last thing I do is I like to look towards the future and think about devices and where they're going and and where we'll be you know five and ten years from now and one of the things that is I've noticed in the last few years is I have a niece and she is seven years old now and she was lucky and got an iPad for the holidays here about a year ago and one of the things that I noticed is that she doesn't use the computer she only uses the iPad and she is so fast on the iPad much faster than I am it's kind of scary and one of the things that I started thinking about was this is her main device to input data and to surf the web and to launch applications and she doesn't want to ever use a laptop she doesn't like the keyboard on the laptop she doesn't like these things and it's it's kind of I thought to myself it worries me that maybe in five ten years from now I'm going to be that old guy that uses the laptop and all the young kids will just be using the iPads and all these touch devices and so you know what type of technologies and how does that change what we develop for the future how did the data input obviously changes the front facing camera all the accelerometer another hardware that's in the device changes you know how will application change and get smarter on that device versus the iPad and and maybe we should consider focusing our development efforts on these future devices so those are some of the things that that I like to brainstorm ideas around with with other entrepreneurs one of the things I want to do is leave some time for some questions do some Q&A so if you have any questions at all I'd love to take them and chat with you and hopefully answer them