Who Won?

Whenever people do a recap on SXSW, they seem to focus on “who won” the event.  Probably a little silly, but there’s nothing wrong with that.  The two companies I was most impressed with were foursquare and American Express.

foursquare

One word that I’m pretty sick of hearing after SXSW is “gamification.”  foursquare was pretty much the epitome of gamified social apps up until about a year ago: check in places, get badges, see if you can rack up more points than your friends, etc.  This gamification stuff works on simple people, on short timeframes.  For a sustainable long-term audience however, you’re going to have to provide value to your user.

foursquare was an incredibly valuable app during SXSW.  We were exploring a new city, and their explore feature is about as good as unbiased information gets on bars, restaurants, and more.  Additionally, we were checking in and paying with an Amex card everywhere we went, so we racked up a bunch of seamless and effortless discounts.

foursquare was also incredibly useful in our recent trip to Vietnam.  Even halfway across the world, almost every bar and restaurant had plenty of tips and suggestions left for us to read.

I am really impressed with the foursquare team’s ability to think beyond the trend.  It seemed like everyone else was trying to build a badged-up, gamified version of visualidiot‘s “Every Social Mobile App Site, Ever:”

Being ahead of the trend rather than riding it is so important in any business.  It’s not luck; sure, there is a lot of variance, but it is a skill game.

American Express

The most hyped up event of SXSW Interactive was the Amex Sync Jay-Z concert.  Anyone with a SXSW Interactive badge and an Amex card could pick up two free tickets to a small-venue Jay-Z concert at Austin City Limits (2,700 capacity).

The show was awesome.

American Express also did a great job of catering to the SXSW Interactive crowd by offering foursquare discounts all across town.  They really made a huge credit card company seem cool, and that’s no easy feat.

Who Lost?

If someone won, someone had to lose right?  The two losers in my eyes were Highlight and uber (as painful as that is to say… I love uber).

Highlight

Highlight is a “social discovery app” that got a ton of buzz in the weeks leading up to SXSW.  The app automatically alerts you when friends, friends of friends, or strangers with similar interests are physically near you.  It didn’t take off for a few reasons:

I think the technology is pretty neat, and could turn into something cool down the road, but I ended up uninstalling it pretty quickly.

Uber

I love, love, love uber, and have used it at least five times in the past week in DC.  Unfortunately uber doesn’t have a presence in Austin, so they brought in pedicabs for the weekend.  It rained the entire time and that was a real bust.  Lots of missed value there.

Other cool stuff

Some other random things I enjoyed from SXSW…

sidetour

Taylor and I booked three sidetour events before SXSW, not really knowing what to expect.  Each one was a five person, thirty minute beer and chat with the founders of pretty well-known start-ups (How About We, yipit, and SecondMarket).

It was really cool to have such close talks with the founders of these successful businesses, and I definitely learned a lot.  Even if the talks had sucked (they certainly didn’t), it was an open bar with a block-long line that we got to skip right in front of; I will definitely use sidetour again.

Panel: The Future of Money

We hit up several interesting panels, but my favorite was on payment processing and included the founders of WePay and Stripe, two start-ups I’ve followed a fair amount that are doing some pretty cool things in the payment processing space.

I always figured payment processing was a pretty good business to be in for the 2-3% you take off of the top as a processor, but it was interesting to hear Rich Aberman’s (WePay founder) take on it.  His view is that processing fees are going to zero very quickly (in the next decade), and the whole “take 2% off of the top” model is unsustainable.

Instead, he focused on the value-adding services payment processors can provide to merchants.  If you go to a coffee shop and order a latte, there is basically zero customer leakage between the order and payment processes.  Online however, I’d say I probably fail to complete my order due to clunky software 20% of the time or so.  If a payment processor can turn that 20% into 10%, that’s way more valuable to a merchant than undercutting a 3% fee to 2%.

An overwhelming theme of the panel was how badly PayPal is failing on both the developer and UX sides.  PayPal was designed when online payments were a process of transferring money between two e-mail addresses.  Fifteen years later, online payment processing is more of a problem of transferring money between two humans; a significantly easier dilemma, and less prone to fraud.

The last part of this panel was dedicated to mobile payments.  Frankly I’m not quite as optimistic about mobile payments being the standard in as quick of a timeframe as most people at SXSW were.  When you’re around a self-selected group of people who all have iPhones and are tech-savvy, sure it seems plausible.  Mainstream though, I don’t think smartphone penetration and trust of the Internet have gone far enough to “eliminate credit cards in ten years” or any of the other wild predictions I hear tossed around.

Two hilarious panel titles

I didn’t make it to either of these two panels, but I thoroughly enjoyed their titles and somewhat agree with them:

Good Eats

We had great food the entire time we were in Texas.  The house we rented was right next to Jo’s Coffee, which I would definitely be hitting up every day if it were in DC.  In typical Texas fashion, one restaurant had a 5lb burger:

Our waitress said that it’s probably ordered 3 or 4 times a week, but she’s only seen one person finish it: a skinny 11-year old kid who had dessert afterwards!  Now that is impressive.

We rounded out the trip with some burgers and beers at hopdoddy before waking up at 3:15am to catch our flights home.

Our itinerary included six stops:

Hanoi

We arrived in Hanoi (via Seoul) around midnight after twenty some hours on airplanes, and booked it straight to our hotel.

We stayed at the Hanoi Elegance Ruby, which I’d highly recommend.  Hanoi was our home base for the first three stops of our vacation, and the Elegance Ruby let us store our bags there the entire time as well as shower and grab hot meals in between Hanoi/Sapa, Sapa/Ha Long Bay, and Ha Long Bay/Ha Noi.  I’m sure the other people on our flights really appreciated that, as did we.

Hanoi is a bustling city of motorbikes, pagodas, and markets:

My favorite part about Hanoi was how walkable the city is.  We were only in Hanoi for a day or so, but we managed to walk to and from pretty much all of the major tourist destinations, grabbing delicious food along the way.

One of my girlfriend’s friends from William and Mary has been living in Hanoi for a year or so and took us out to a great dinner at Quan an Ngon.  Very authentic Vietnamese cuisine from all over the country,

The amount of traffic (particularly motorbike) in Hanoi is astounding, but somehow it just all seems to work.  No one really pays any attention to street signs or stoplights, and the cardinal rule is never stop moving; the second you do, you are drawing dead at getting let back into the flow of traffic.  If you want to take a left turn across four lanes of traffic, you just close your eyes and go for it.

Sapa

From Hanoi, we took an overnight sleeper train to Sapa.  Sapa is a small village popular for trekking in Northwest Vietnam.

We were in Sapa for one quick day, which we spent on a long hike through the terraced rice fields with a group called Sapa Sisters:

After hiking all day, we relaxed and grabbed a beer at a Scandinavian deli called The Hill Station that I would definitely hit up if you make it out to Sapa.

I was glad we went to Sapa, but I probably wouldn’t go back and I don’t think it’s a must-make stop if you’re visiting Vietnam.

Ha Long Bay

We took the sleeper train back from Sapa to Hanoi, and then embarked on a four hour bus ride to Ha Long Bay.  Ha Long Bay is full of gorgeous limestone isles and cliffs that reminded me a lot of the Thai islands:

Our boat took off from the harbor around noon, and we spent about 24 hours on the bay.  It was an amazing part of our trip, and if I were to plan it out again I would spend an extra night or two on the bay.

Even though the weather was a little lousy (lots of fog), we had a great time kayaking around the bay and sharing bottles of wine with the other four people on our boat at dinner.

I imagine there is a bit of variance depending on which boat you take out; we took The Red Dragon and had a really enjoyable stay.

Hoi An

After one night in Ha Long Bay, we drove back to Hanoi and hopped on a quick flight to Da Nang.  From Da Nang, Hoi An is about an hour drive south down the coast.

Hoi An is a small beach town that we settled down in for three days to chill out after a whirlwind of travel between Hanoi, Sapa, and Ha Long Bay.  It was the perfect place to relax.  Our hotel was smack in the middle of the markets and the beach, with complimentary bikes to get around.

I spent most of the days getting some sun, shooting pool, and catching up on a little reading.  The downtown area was a really cool place to walk around at night, with some good restaurants and bars.

I was a big fan of Hoi An.  We stayed at the Ha An Hotel, which I’d definitely recommend.

Mui Ne

We got three good beach days in while in Hoi An before jetting to Mui Ne (via Saigon) for… more beach time!  Our resort in Mui Ne (the Mia Resort, formerly the Sailing Club) was right on the water, and felt more Four Seasons-ish than the other places we stayed.

I’d love to come back for a longer stay in Mui Ne to learn how to kiteboard.  It’s one of the top kiteboarding destinations in the world, but you really need a week or so to pick it up.  I’m hopelessly addicted to snowboarding and skateboarding, and kiteboarding looks like a ton of fun.

Mui Ne was much more resort-centric than Hoi An, but we did get out to catch some live music and a meal or tow.

Saigon

Saigon (aka Ho Chi Minh City) is a four hour drive from Mui Ne, and we rounded out our trip with four days in the biggest city in Vietnam.

Saigon was far more metropolitan than anywhere else we visited.  It felt a lot like New York City; very livable for someone who likes city life.

I am partial to Southeast Asian cities (especially Hong Kong and Singapore) so I’m probably pretty biased here, but I loved Saigon.  The food was great, the bars were fun (although they all close at midnight?!), and there was plenty of cultural stuff to do.

One of my favorite dishes, Banh Xeo:

We also did a market trip/cooking class with Saigon Cooking Class through Hoa Tuc and made Vietnamese spring rolls,

pork-stuffed rice balls,

and rice noodles with pork,

Delicious.

It’s hard to imagine that a few decades ago we were at war with Vietnam.  We checked out all of the war monuments and museums in Hanoi and Saigon, but the most hard-hitting spot was the Cu Chi tunnels,

We were even able to go a few yards underground in one of the tunnels, army crawl for several hundred feet in the dark, and pop out of the ground what felt like an eternity later.  The tunnel we were in was probably two feet wide and three feet tall… and it had been enlarged by 200% to fit tourists.

Since I wasn’t around for the Vietnam War, it’s hard to gauge what the war era was like and the US-Vietnamese dynamic.  I have to say I was extremely impressed with the hospitality and friendliness of the Vietnamese people to everyone regardless of nationality.

On our final night, we hit the town hard and hopped around a bunch of bars and clubs before boarding our flight back to DC.  Amazing country and a great trip.

Ideas are worthless

Execution is everything.  This concept is hammered home in the startup and business world, but I know that coming from a poker background, I underestimated it at first.  It’s cliche, but Google wasn’t the first search engine, Facebook wasn’t the first social network, and the iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player.

The first-mover advantage is overblown.  A great idea can serve as a solid foundation, but the special sauce is in the execution.

I always have a “random ideas” file on my iPhone that I can update on a whim, and I love thinking and talking about business ideas with anyone who will listen.  One thing that really drives me nuts is when people are overly cagey or bring up NDA’s right off the bat.  In addition to starting a potential relationship off on a horrible note, as Silicon Valley legend Guy Kawasaki says,

Openly sharing ideas is a great way to refine them and build valuable connections.  It’s not only enjoyable, it’s definitely +EV.  When in doubt, go with the FriendDA.

There is a great thread in the 2+2 Business forum titled “Your ideas are worthless, and I’m here to prove it,” where posters share and critique tons of business ideas — some serious, and some not.  The point is, if your only competitive advantage is that others won’t be able to copy your business until it’s public, you’re screwed from the start.  Some of the ideas discussed in that thread that I liked are:

One thing I’d really like to learn more about is manufacturing and product design.  As a web-based entrepreneur, creating physical products is so far out of my realm of expertise.

Here are a few web startup ideas of my own that I’d like to see created:

#1: Medium price-level, student-sourced college admissions consulting

This was the first idea I posted in the 2+2 startup thread,

#2: Teach anything online (and possibly charge for it)

Coursekit meets Code Year.  Code Year has been buggy for me, but I like the structured way lessons are organized by various components.  It wouldn’t be too difficult using a CMS to create several different custom post types for training videos, multiple choice quizzes, PDFs, etc., and allow publishers to piece them together into full lessons on anything they’d like to teach.

This could be monetized by allowing publishers to charge for their premium lessons (and taking a cut of course).  Content producers will have the incentive to put out free content to show their expertise and value, and a Yelp-ish feedback system will steer users toward the best teachers and lessons for whatever they’d like to learn.

I’ve used web-based training to learn a variety of skills, but the content has been highly variable and disjointed.  The best stuff is sometimes the hardest to find.  Bringing it all together under one umbrella with a unified, familiar format and a communal rating and feedback system would be great for both content producers and users.

#3: A better parking/monetization service for premium domains

I have always been shocked at how inefficient the premium domain market is.  Could you imagine if commercial real estate developers bought properties not to put businesses in them, but to sell to other developers for higher prices in the future?  Ok, fair enough, sounds a little 2008-ish.

In all seriousness though, the amount of sky-high domain sales that result in a horribly user unfriendly “what you need, when you need it” parking page is crazy.  Take for example, the first million-dollar domain sale of wallstreet.com (now worth much more), or last year’s biggest sale of social.com for $2.6MM:

Even simple 5-page minisites are a win-win-win.  Users don’t get these crappy, unhelpful pages.  Domainers get the benefits of search engine indexing and visitors who have a longer, more enjoyable experience.  Advertisers don’t associate their brand with a spammerific site designed to bounce users as fast as possible.

Inefficiency breeds opportunities, and this is an area with a ton of them.

Join in

Participate in the 2+2 startup ideas thread, post an idea in this blog post’s comments, and good luck!  Check out these links for some more open discussion of startup ideas:

The weather in DC has been amazing lately, and I’ve been using the mild winter as an excuse to pick skateboarding back up.  I hadn’t been on a board in seven or eight years, and man did I miss it.  It’s so much fun to get out there and relearn tricks even though I am super rusty.

A poker buddy that lives down the street is in the same boat, and we’ve been checking out all of the DC skateparks over the past month.  Surprisingly we have four (!) skateparks on a five mile stretch of Rhode Island Ave.  Here are a couple of clips from Shaw and Rainier parks:

JFDI

On a flight home from California a week or two ago, I was reading an Inc. magazine interview with several entrepreneurs, each of whom dished out one line of wisdom. Almost all of the advice was some version of JFDI: Just F***ing Do It. Unfortunately JFDIing is tough when you have no technical skills.

I love this quote from a Startups Open Sourced (an awesome collection of interviews that is definitely worth picking up) interview with Alexis Ohanian, one of reddit‘s two co-founders, on partnering with his technical co-founder Steve:

No matter how good your ideas are, you are at a massive disadvantage if you are technically clueless.

I’m not recommending going out an buying a bunch of programming textbooks and learning several languages from the ground up (although it’s certainly not a terrible idea), but learning the basics of a CMS (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, whatever) or a language like PHP will at least allow you to hack together a “crappy version” prototype for most projects. The nice thing is, a “crappy version” goes a long way. It will help you:

By NO means am I proficient in any technical aspect, from programming to graphic design. What I did pick up in 2011 was enough basic skills in WordPress/PHP/Photoshop to create crappy-but-passable prototypes of some reasonably advanced projects.  This was incredibly helpful, and (maybe surprisingly?) a lot of fun too.

Getting Technical

If your technical skills are lacking, I’d highly recommend working on them in 2012.  One cool initiative that’s worth checking out is Code Year from Codecademy:

It’s completely free, and I’ve completed the first couple of lessons.  Their goal is to teach you to code over the course of a year by doing one interactive tutorial per week.  The initial lessons focus on JavaScript, and they’ve got a Q&A forum if you get stumped.  Some of the guys in 2+2′s BFI forum are going through the lessons in this thread.  I tend to agree with Paul Graham (Y Combinator‘s founder) when he said,

Most importantly, stop procrastinating and start tinkering around.  JFDI!  Good luck, and have a great 2012.

Now, time to brag — I absolutely crushed it last week on DraftDay!  I’m a pretty big fantasy fish, so I’m going to milk this one for all it’s worth.

I entered the same team into all of my games (hedging is for wimps) and won the Quarter ($25 buy-in, 197 players) for $878, got third in the Frenzy ($5 buy-in, 878 players) for $351, and beat up on ol’ Hastings in a heads up match that he jinxed himself by naming “REDSKINSSUCK.”  Here was my line-up:

This week I’m throwing a $250 freeroll to celebrate — it’s not visible in the lobby but you can enter it here.  Good luck!

Food & Friends

I won this adventure at The Inn through Food & Friends, my favorite DC charity, and any trip report would be incomplete without a proper plug of their awesome organization.

Food & Friends provides specialized, nutritious meals to people in the DC area living with HIV/AIDS, cancer, and other life-challenging illnesses.  In 2010 alone, Food & Friends served more than 975,000 meals to DC residents in need.

Many of the most popular chefs from the DC area are supporters of Food & Friends including Patrick O’Connell (The Inn), Jamie Leed’s (Hank’s Oyster Bar), and Eric Ziebold (CityZen).  Their events are always a ton of fun and of course stocked with delicious food.  This Inn package was part of the charity auction at Chef’s Best, Food & Friend’s flagship event that raises almost $1,000,000 annually.

I’ve spent time volunteering in the Food & Friends kitchen, have attended many of their famous DC events, and I couldn’t think of a better-ran charitable organization.  Ok, I’ll stop there — but seriously, they are a great, worthy group.

The Inn at Little Washington

The Inn at Little Washington is a world-famous inn and restaurant located in Washington, VA about two hours southwest from Washington, DC.

The Inn’s restaurant serves up a tasting menu of Contemporary American food each night and has won pretty much every restaurant award in existence.  Their accommodations are awesome as well; my girlfriend and I stayed there for her birthday a year or two ago and had an amazing time.

Patrick O’Connell

Patrick O’Connell is the Inn’s quirky, awesome chef.  He is famous for delicious food and oddball stunts like serving oyster-and-caviar communion dressed as the Pope at Chef’s Best.

I have no idea how he stays in reasonable shape with all of the amazing food he is around day-in and day-out.

Our Day at the Inn

The six of us (three couples) took a Wednesday off of work and hopped in a party bus for the two hour drive down to Washington, Virginia.

After warming up with a cocktail in the garden, Chef O’Connell took us back into the kitchen where we cooked the evening’s menu dish by dish.  The kitchen at the Inn is really an amazing sight; it’s full of artwork, plays hymnal music constantly, and everyone is always wearing a smile.

Chef O’Connell’s insistence on using the best possible ingredients no matter what (they have employees at fish auctions in Hawaii for example) reminded me a bit of Steve Jobs’ insistence on perfection in design.  It sure made for some great courses too.  I know we’ve got the courses and recipes we made somewhere around our apartment, I’ll see what I can do to get them up here soon.

Dinner

Once we prepared each dish, we settled in at the Chef’s Table where Chef O’Connell and his staff served us the night’s tasting menu.  Memorable courses include the fois gras duo and the “pepper crusted tuna pretending to be a filet mignon:

We wrapped up our meal with the Inn’s famous cheese course.  They are really nuts about cheese (thankfully we were too).

While the Inn is a very fancy, classy place, they keep the mood light and fun with little touches like Faira the cheese cow.  Each diner’s cheese selection comes out on this hilarious cow constantly being rolled through the restaurant that moo’s and rings a bell.

Finally, we capped off the night with an improvised scotch tasting we created on the spot.

Going to the Inn

If you’re ever in the DC area, definitely make a special trip to the Inn (you’ll need reservations pretty far in advance).  I would highly, highly recommend sitting at one of the two Chef’s Tables in the kitchen.  You can find them online at:

The Inn at Little Washington
Facebook: The Inn at Little Washington
Reservations

or give them a call at (540) 675-3800.

Have fun and enjoy the meal!

That said, buying an eye-popping, expensive domain name is far from necessary to start a successful business, and in many cases can be a poor use of capital.

Keyword Domains

A keyword domain is a domain name that includes a keyword that your website will be targeting.  For example, if you are starting a web business that will be selling blue widgets, some keyword domain names would include:

Getting Technical

Google used to heavily reward “exact match domains,” or “EMD’s” in their search algorithms. Getting a top ranking for “blue widgets” was much easier if you were building your business on BlueWidgets.com.

This effect has been dampened with various tweaks to Google’s algorithms, but it is still present.  Let’s take a look at the SERPs (search engine results pages) for “credit cards” and “online universities,” two of the most competitive sectors in internet marketing.

As you can see, CreditCards.com and OnlineUniversities.com dominate the results for their respective searches.  A stellar keyword domain name doesn’t guarantee amazing search results, but it does help.

Terran Marketing

This past summer I became involved in the creation of a boutique internet marketing firm, Terran Marketing, alongside Taylor Caby, Mike Jackness, and Jim Varnon.  We’ve focused on picking up keyword domain names and creating content-rich affiliate sites in industries we believe we have a solid edge in.  We’ve picked up some great properties including IRA.com, OnlineStorage.com, and GraphicDesign.com.  I’ve enjoyed learning a ton about internet marketing while working with a star in the business (Mike).

Domain names to avoid

While keywords in your domain name can help your chances of getting ranked, there are also several things to avoid when choosing a domain name:

Category Killers

A category killer is a keyword domain name that is an EMD for a short, highly competitive keyword.

Toys.com for example is a category-killing domain that was involved in a high-profile $5MM sale to Toys ‘R Us. Category killers are highly valuable domain names because they rank more easily, provide instant credibility to the owner or business, and even receive a fair amount of type-in traffic from users who randomly go to “toys.com.”

Drawbacks of Keyword Domains

Keyword domain names are not without their limitations. Most obviously, they aren’t particularly creative. Ira.com and OnlineDegree.com are category crushing domains that are going to take less work to rank well in Google with and pull in some serious affiliate traffic, but do you really want to start an investing business named ‘IRA’ or an education business named ‘OnlineDegree’?  Probably not.

Tony Hsieh makes a great point about keyword domain names in Delivering Happiness: they can box you in and place limitations on your business plan. Before Tony became involved with Zappos, the company’s name was ShoeSite.com. Tony had the foresight to realize that if the business hit a home run, they would want to sell more than just shoes. They started playing around with the word ‘zapatos’ and settled on Zappos: a fun, catchy, brandable domain that a decade later sells a variety of non-footwear products.

Brandable Domains

In 1997, Larry Paige and Sergey Brin decided they needed a new name for their search engine project dubbed BackRub.  A graduate student friend of theirs suggested the word “googolplex” since their project related to an immense amount of data, and a misspelling during their domain registration led them to decide on the name Google.com, the classic example of a brandable domain.

Brandable names are not unique to web businesses. For a brief time earlier this year, Apple (started well before the Internet’s existence) was the world’s largest publicly traded company. Of course, their business has nothing to do with selling apples.  The advantage of brandable names is that they are catchy, fun, and prone to viral marketing. The downside is that they probably don’t tell your users much about what your business actually does.

Another problem with brandable domain names is that they can be hard to spell or pronounce. This can be a real issue in your business’ infancy and can make brick-and-mortar advertising campaigns difficult. How many D’s and T’s are in Reddit? Or is it Reditt? Redditt? You get the picture. There are plenty far worse examples; nginx, a very solid server company, for example just raised a serious amount of venture capital funding. Nwhat?  It’s supposed to be pronounced “engine-x.”

If you browse around any of the most popular domain name marketplaces, you might be surprised at how expensive brandable domain names. You’re going to have to shell out some serious dough for a short and catchy domain. Some public brandable domains that have sold this year include:

A few weeks ago, I came across a new start-up called Stylate.com. Stylate has a solid portfolio of fresh, brandable .com domains paired with logos that are all for sale for $250. They’ve had some serious steals, and if you compare their names with equivalent ones priced on Sedo, you’ll fall out of your chair.

I have no affiliation with them whatsoever, but I’ve bought a few domains from them and have been very happy with their product and service. For $250 you’ll be hard-pressed to do better.  Be very careful using domain name brokers, even the big players in the market.  It’s a seedy industry and there are horror stories and ripoffs all over the Internet.

If you’re going to go the brandable route, keep it short and as pronounceable as possible. I’ve got a few brandable domain names; dartr.com, pirly.com, yilr.com, but only a small amount of very short ones I picked up cheaply.

Keyword-Brandable Hybrid Domains

One of the most cost-effective ways to choose a domain is to incorporate the strengths of both keyword and brandable domains.

BobsBlueWidgets.com is catchy, easy to spell, not excessively long, and contains your most important keyword. Sure, it won’t rank in search results as “BlueWidgets.com,” but it’s more personal and fun. It’s not as short or cool as “Bobbo.com” but it contains your keyword and tells your users what your business is about.

Best of all, it’s available to register for under $12. Can’t beat that.

The Domain Name Market

Millions of shares of Google, Apple, and Microsoft exchange hands every day in the world’s largest financial markets. This liquidity allows market participants to relatively accurately gauge the value of these companies. Domain names on the other hand are turned over infrequently in an illiquid, non-transparent, and sometimes corrupt market.

Many aspects of today’s domain marketplace feel like real estate in 2007; notably, leverage is lacking. “Domainers” today buy domains with no interest in developing them, purely in the hopes of selling them at a greater price down the road.  Many of the most expensive, high-profile domain name sales are simply parking pages waiting to be acquired by another buyer.

There is a huge amount of inefficiency in the domain market and this is pretty much the definition of “greater fool” theory. Last week, one very popular domain blogger posted a list of a few of his domains for sale:

[paragraph removed -- I was unfairly harsh here. Although I found these domains overvalued, Elliot received an offer close to the asking price -- I was wrong.  He has a lot more experience than I do in this industry.]

If you look hard enough, there are always bargains

I hope I’m not coming off as too cynical.  There are bargains to be had in any market.  A major part of our strategy with Terran Marketing is to be very selective with the domains we do purchase, and focus heavily on the price we pay for each property.  Ensuring we have a large margin of safety is critical.

Domain name index

One pretty cool project I’ve come across is IDNX, the attempt to create a market index for domain name prices. They’ve factored in tons of sales and found that a domain index has closely tracked the NASDAQ index over the last decade. This isn’t terribly relevant, and I haven’t inspected the accuracy of their methods or results, but I thought it was neat.

If you are super paranoid about market risk to your domain portfolio, you could buy some long-dated far-out-of-the-money QQQ puts to hedge.

Closing Remarks

I’ll wrap up this blog post with a little bit of advice that will probably sound contradictory: don’t spend too much time or money on your domain name.

It’s so easy to get bogged down and spend weeks debating over the perfect name for your new business, when in reality you will have many more important tasks to stay on top of.  Be decisive.  Twitter was named by pulling each employee’s favorite name out of a hat. I hope I’ve given you some things to think about when selecting a domain name for your business, but don’t over-spend your time or money: you’ve got much more fun and important things to worry about.

Good luck!

This was a big mistake; Tony’s book is one of the best I have read in a long time (and I read a ton).  It’s a book that straddles life, passion, entrepreneurship, and even poker!

I picked up Delivering Happiness this week because a random business deal I got into this summer landed me in the position of potentially launching an e-commerce store in a very traditional (non-gambling related whatsoever) industry; I’ll talk about this more down the road.

Do what makes you happy

Tony focuses a lot of the book on being analytical to determine what truly makes you happy.  He emphasizes how important it was for him not to fall into societal, and more specifically Asian American, norms and to take his own path to fulfillment.

Five months into his first job out of college, Tony resigned from Oracle to start a web design business with his roommate.  They weren’t having fun so they started LinkShare and loved building the business.  18 months later, he wasn’t enjoying running LinkShare and sold it to Microsoft, leaving $8 million of his vesting package out to dry because he was sick of the business.  He then launched a venture capital fund so he could focus one what he really wanted to do: build and grow businesses.

I admire the tough, risky decisions he made to follow what he thought would make him happy.

Tony Hsieh on poker and business

After Tony sold LinkShare to Microsoft for $265 million, he became hooked on the challenge of poker!  He played in California cardrooms as well as Vegas casinos and talks about reading Hold’em Poker for Advanced Players and absorbing strategy from online poker strategy websites.

How cool is it that this guy is probably a 2+2er in addition to being a trailblazing entrepreneur, not to mention nearing billionaire status!

In Delivering Happiness, Tony talks about the bridges he drew from poker to business, most importantly the principle of strong table selection.  You might not be able to compete with Wal-Mart on price, but that’s not stopping you from playing a different game against them entirely.

Tony Hsieh and Steve Jobs

Tony isn’t the only entrepreneur who placed a large emphasis on “table and game selection.”  While reading Delivering Happiness, I kept being reminded of parallels between Tony Hsieh and Steve Jobs.  Steve Jobs recognized the importance of choosing the game Apple was playing to fit the company’s strengths rather than taking on a monster competitor in Microsoft:

We lost a real icon with the passing of Steve Jobs yesterday.  Two of my favorite Jobs’ speeches are:

It’s crazy how much Steve Jobs has affected our world.  I just got home from the gym where I listened to Tony Hsieh’s audiobook, purchased on iTunes (by the way Tony narrates it himself and I’d highly recommend it if you like audiobooks), on my iPod.  I’m writing this blog post on my iMac while playing the occasional Words With Friends game on my iPhone.

When my girlfriend and I moved to DC a little over three years ago we pulled out the Washingtonian Top 100 Restaurants issue and have crossed off pretty much all of them.  I’ve been very fortunate to be able to explore most of the DC food scene, and these are my top picks.

My Top 10 DC Restaurants

1. Rasika

I love Indian food, but even if you don’t it will be hard not to be crazy about Rasika.  They do an awesome job of mixing traditional Indian dishes with a modern flare.  The service is always top-notch and they have a great cocktail list too.

My two favorite Rasika dishes are the lamb vindaloo and their famous crispy spinach dish, Palak Chaat:

2. Blue Duck Tavern

Nothing says fresh, local, seasonal ingredients like Blue Duck Tavern.  I really like the constantly updated menu and their homemade ice creams.  They do an awesome brunch as well.

Phil Galfond was in town last fall and we had a great meal at Blue Duck.  You really can’t go wrong with anything on the menu, but if I had to pick a favorite dish it would be the short ribs.  They just melt right off of your fork:

3. BLT Steak

Holy popover.

These things are amazing.  Beyond the popovers though, BLT just flat-out has the best steak in town (J&G’s pepper crusted NY strip).

BLT does some great special events too.  My girlfriend got me a grilling class there once where they shut down the restaurant on a Saturday for 20 or so people to grill out front with the head chef, drink wine, and talk food.  It was a ton of fun — definitely keep your eye out for other events they do.  I threw her last birthday party in their private room as well, which holds about 30 people, and it was the perfect venue.

4.  Sushi Taro

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Sushi Taro, but for the past year or so it’s been on my good side.

When we first moved to DC, Sushi Taro was a pretty low-key resaturant with the most amazing fish flown in from Japan.  It was tremendously popular but their management decided to do a six-month long renovation and re-open as a much more upscale Japanese restaurant.  The new place felt pretentious, the menu was really limited (mostly hot dishes and set menus rather than sashimi and nigiri), and it didn’t seem to be doing well.

About a year or so ago they loosened up a bit and it now feels like a hybrid of the two styles they were going for.  They do a great authentic Kaiseki tasting menu if that’s your thing too:

5.  Makoto

Most poker friends would probably be surprised a sushi place didn’t make my top 3, but I’ll make up for it with Japanese restaurants in spots 4 and 5.

Makoto is a really tiny place far out in northwest DC that is definitely the most authentic Japanese food you can find in town.  It’s the type of Japanese restaurant where you take your shoes off and wear slippers, if your cell phone goes off they are likely to kick you out, and you better dress up a little bit.

They strictly do a ten-course-or-so tasting menu, and it is friggin awesome.  It’s usually several hot Japanese dishes, Kobe beef on a hot rock, finished up with a couple of sushi courses.

Check out their sister restaurant upstairs, Kotobuki, if you want something a little more casual.  We do take-out from Kotobuki occasionally, and their stuff is great as well.

6. Citronelle

For really upscale, high end, French food you can’t do better than Citronelle.  This restaurant seems to have lost some popularity in the past year or two, but I’m not sure why — it’s amazing as ever.

Citronelle is a great place for a fancy date or for when you feel like suiting up.  If you’re going to go, might as well go all the way and get their caviar course, which comes served in a silver dolphin.

Chef Michel Richard is an awesome guy and keeps the restaurant from feeling too stuffy by serving a very playful menu.  Staple dishes include the lobster burger and a dessert which is pretty much a giant KitKat bar.

7. Obelisk

This place is tucked away in a tiny space right outside Dupont Circle, in basically a part of town where I avoid eating or going to because of excessive touristiness.  I was a little skeptical needless to say, but it blew my mind.

Obelisk serves a different handwritten tasting menu each day, and go hungry — it’s a lot of courses.  They bring out appetizer after appetizer and have some especially delicious charcuterie:

8. Komi

Komi seems to always fall on the #1 spot for DC fine dining.  It’s awesome and I would highly recommend it.  That said, it’s impossible to get into so make a reservation very far in advance.

I really like how Komi serves elegant food but keeps the atmosphere loose.  It’s the type of place where the sommolier is likely to steer you towards a $35 bottle of Hungarian wine rather than the $2,000 bottle of Screaming Eagle (ahem, Citronelle).

9. Corduroy

How does this place not get more press than it does!?  It’s consistently been one of the best restaurants in DC since we moved here, but I never hear anyone in the food scene talking about it.  Still, it’s always packed so they are clearly doing something right!

Corduroy is one of those places where every dish on the menu is super solid.  Their most famous dish is probably the rare sesame crusted tuna, but I am a real sucker for their desserts.

10. Graffiato

Graffiato is a brand new creation from Mike Isabella of Top Chef fame.  I’ve had two amazing dinners here in the restaurant’s short time in DC.  They make a point to serve up “Italian-inspired” cuisine, basically Italian recipes prepared with strictly local ingredients.

You absolutely have to get the tasting menu.  I like tasting menus anywhere, but Graffiato’s is really unique.  Instead of giving your entire party the same line of courses, each time a course comes out everyone gets a different dish!  By the end of the meal you have literally tried the entire menu.

Every course comes with different drinks for each person as well, which makes for a really fun dinner where everyone is sharing and trying all of the food and drinks.

Honorable Mentions

DC has a ton of other amazing restaurants that couldn’t make this list.  Some of my other favorites are:

Places I haven’t been to and am itching to try

There are two places in particular I haven’t been to that I would be remiss if I didn’t mention:

Thai Crossing is a real hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant that typically serves a tasting menus.

I love Thai food and have been meaning to check this place out for a while.  I’ve heard only amazing things about it.

This made me really hungry to write…  If you’re interested in reading more about DC restaurants, I highly recommend Metrocurean’s DC-blog-turned-foodie-website.  DC has an amazing food scene, come check it out!

DraftDay allows players to compete in daily fantasy sports contests across various sports and game-types.  You can play public heads up games, 100-man tournaments, private games with your friends, for a variety of stakes.

During our test run last weekend we had a 100-man guaranteed tournament, a ton of heads up games go off, and several 5 and 10 man tournaments in both football and baseball.

I love the idea of daily fantasy sports because:

Perfect Line-up Challenge

In addition to real money games, DraftDay allows anyone (no deposit or play required) to enter the weekly Perfect Lineup challenge.

Pick the week’s optimal fantasy line-up and you’ll win a cool million bucks.  Check out this YouTube video for more information on the Perfect Lineup:

I’m really proud of how well put-together and navigable the site is, especially for people who don’t have an account.  Even if you’re not interested in fantasy sports, I’d really encourage you to go check out the lobby and even draft a team, it’s pretty slick.  Here are a couple of screen shots of the lobby and drafting process:

DraftDay is ran by a group of guys who love to play fantasy sports, for fantasy players.  We’re always open to hearing your feedback and the site will reflect what our users want.  Three questions I anticipate people might have are:

How is this legal?

In 2006, the UIGEA made it illegal for gambling organizations to accept payments that were knowingly connected to wagers on the internet. The act specifically excluded Fantasy Sports contests, as long as:

Are player funds safe?

All player funds are kept in strictly segregated accounts that will never be used for operational purposes.

How can I take your money?

While I love fantasy sports, I am a pretty big fish and you can find me playing on DraftDay under the screen name Cole.  Good luck drafting!