ENTRIES TAGGED "startups"

Three questions for…Adam Salomone of The Harvard Common Press

Startups offer the key ingredients of partnership and inspiration

1. The Harvard Common Press recently announced plans to open an office in San Francisco to become more closely aligned with the food startup community. The food industry probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when most people think of startups. Can you give us an example of some of the exciting startup activity you’re seeing in this space?

There’s a lot going on in food right now, and it’s a great time to be talking about food + technology. As you say, I don’t think food is the first thing that comes to people’s minds when they think of innovation and startup entrepreneurship, but unsurprisingly it is happening all around us. I bet many of those same people are avid users of Foodspotting (which, coincidentally, was recently acquired by OpenTable for $10M) or GrubHub or any number of other apps and digital platforms that make it easier, more efficient, or fun to discover and try new foods.

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Dangerous ideas from the world of startups

The art of exposing our ideas to the world and listening for their response

Dustin Kurtz, marketing manager at Melville House, wrote a piece last week about the incursion of startup vocabulary in the world of book publishing. He says:

[N]ow the models and the metaphors of the tech industry are, full-throatedly, without embarrassment, being used to talk about not just the methods of publishing books, but the books themselves, and this is a grand and wondrous idiocy, a diminishment of art, a gravity well of stupidity so deep that we cannot even talk about it properly, only study its effects.

As someone who has helped without embarrassment to bring those models and metaphors to the industry, my interest was piqued.

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Collaborating with startups

This research report is a must-read for everyone in publishing

I mentioned in an article yesterday that what’s happening in the startup community is one of the key takeaways from TOC NY 2013. I’d like to drill a bit deeper into that subject and a recent report from Dosdoce helps me do just that.

If you’re not familiar with Dosdoce and their CEO/Founder, Javier Celaya, you need to be. Dosdoce analyzes the use of technology in culture and Javier is one of the smartest people in publishing. Their latest report was released last week during TOC NY and is called How to Collaborate with Startups. You’ll find some background information about the report here and a PDF of the report is here.

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Five key takeaways from TOC NY 2013

It's still early, startups rule, and ecommerce follows community

TOC NY 2013 is a wrap and based on the feedback I’ve received so far I think it was one of our best. When Kat and I closed the event Thursday afternoon we both shared thoughts on the most important points we came away with. If you weren’t able to join us last week, here are my top five lessons learned and discussed at TOC NY 2013:

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It’s time for a publishing incubator

Investors and publishers can benefit from a pool of innovation.

Last June, over beer (generally a good place to start), I had a great conversation with entrepreneur Hugh McGuire about how startups are funded in publishing. There was a lot to discuss, a little to celebrate, a bit to complain about, and one fact that we arrived at beyond everything else. It’s a challenge to raise money for publishing ventures.

Sure, raising funding is always difficult, but publishing presents a particular challenge. Publishing is “old media,” and it’s new to the technology game (especially in terms of startups focused on the consumer web). There isn’t a real precedent of cooperation between technology and publishing. And that makes it a challenge to find money to build new things.

Roadblocks

Some of the issues come straight out of the investor community:

  1. Most investors are unfamiliar with publishing. Books seem traditional. I can’t tell you how many investors put their personal feelings into the equation and say things like, “Well, my spouse is in a book club, but I don’t read much so I’m probably not a good fit.” Ouch. Although personal experience figures in somewhat, their total unfamiliarity with the market stops them cold before we’ve even started.
  2. Concerns about returns on investment. It’s true, we haven’t seen the huge acquisitions like Instagram. Or Yammer. Yet. Publishing is worth billions – it has what everyone wants: content. So maybe the book industry doesn’t seem like a high growth market. One thing is certain, though, as the industry goes digital, those publishing billions are going to be spent on something. Clear exits will materialize.
  3. There’s always the What-If-Google-Does-It argument. To be fair, every startup gets the Google, Amazon, Apple question, which goes something like “What will you do if (all together now), Amazon, Apple, or Google does it?” A few weeks ago I heard Henrik Werdelin of Prehype give a presentation at a TOC event about innovation and he chuckled about this specific question. He pointed out that at this point Google can pretty much build anything anyone can invent. That shouldn’t be your yardstick. The better question is, are the founders smart enough to offer good strategy, a unique experience, or a new market? If so, Google is much more likely to buy the company once the idea proves out, rather than build every single idea in the world. In short, that question is not a question.

True, there are some people who get investment while working on publishing startups. The list above can be overcome if you’ve worked with those investors before. Or if you’re an Ivy-League ex-Googler that has had a successful exit, you have qualifications that will work in your favor. But that is a frightfully small portion of the people with boots on the ground, developing cool ideas. What about the technically savvy people who don’t meet those criteria (most of the people I know innovating in publishing today)? If they’re starting up in Amercia, those people go out and crash head-first into the arguments listed above, then spend a few years toiling in bootstrapped obscurity.

People have been thinking about this for awhile

Last October Brian O’Leary gave a stirring talk, “The Opportunity in Abundance,” at the Internet Archive’s Books in Browsers conference (transcribed here). He put forth a bold vision of collaboration among publishers, each contributing to support innovation and enjoy in its technical fruits. He talked about goals – that survival for publishing is not a “goal” in itself, for example – and that  innovation is one of the important pillars of publishing health. He used an example from the gas industry to illustrate how it pooled resources to innovate. He said:

I called the prospect of people not engaging with our content the publishing manifestation of a super-threat. I’d argue (pretty strongly) that it represents a super-threat not just to publishing, but to the way we function as a country, an economy and as a part of a world order. We have a responsibility to address this threat, not just so that we can make money, but because we’re the ones with the ability to solve it.

Other industries facing an uncertain future have banded together to form and fund superstructures. The Gas Research Institute, for example, was authorized in 1976, at a time when the natural gas industry was highly fragmented among producers, wholesalers and distributors. The latter often held a local monopoly.

By 1981, GRI was spending $68.5 million on research and a total of $80.5 million on oversight and R&D. This represented about 0.2% of the wellhead price of gas that year, valued at the time at a bit more than $38 billion.

GRI undertook research and development in four areas…Funding, drawn from a surcharge on sales as well as some government grants, accelerated to something north of $100 million in the mid-1980s.

If you look across all of publishing in the United States, it’s about a $40 billion business. Imagine what we could do if we could create and sustain an organization with $80 million a year in funding. It’s also likely that an industry-wide commitment to addressing engagement would garner the external funding that most parties have been understandably reluctant to spend on narrower causes.

A good point. A great plan. If CourseSmart and Bookish show us that publishers can partner, then why not partner in innovation? Brian gives a number of concrete suggestions for areas to focus on. I’ve been mulling this over ever since he gave this presentation. Despite his guidelines and recommendations, it hasn’t happened yet. But there’s a way this idea fits neatly into startupland.

The publishing incubator

A similar solution already exists in the tech world: the incubator. If you’re not familiar with it, technology incubators accept applications from startups in small batches. If accepted, the startup gets between $20,000 – $100,000 (in exchange for around 5% equity), along with three months of office space, mentors, a chance to demo for investors, and a lot of help. Investors get early access to cutting-edge technology. Corporations are encouraged to come in and meet the startups at any point along the way.

Many incubators are industry-specific. For example, there are four healthcare incubators in NYC alone, churning out fresh startups and new technology multiple times a year. Imagine the amount of healthcare innovation going on right now. Education does this too. Incubator ImagineK12 is one of many education-focused incubators from across the country – with a group of startups that has raised $10M post-graduation. And Turner Broadcasting just launched an incubator in NYC called Media Camp. Since the products integrate with broadcast media, there is a major focus on mentorship from executives in the field, and a lot of discussion about how to work with big media conglomerates. Sounds a lot like what we need in publishing. Even publishing expert Craig Mod recently wrote about how he is struggling with how to distribute his TechFellow money to startups.

Granted, there is some remarkable internal R&D: NYTimes Labs and The Washington Post Labs are doing good things. Those are commendable efforts. But those teams are usually small, and since they’re internal they don’t have the massive variation we see in incubators. One company isn’t going to move the needle for an entire industry in that way.

We need an incubator for publishing technology. We need a group of investors and publishers that want to benefit from a pool of innovation, and encourage it grow. With this, publishers would contribute to and sponsor events, perhaps even influence the direction of future partners. Investors would raise the fund, and choose the most viable startups. Innovation and disruption might actually find a common ground, as new technologies could drive reading adoption which drive sales (an argument technology writer Paul Carr has made before). We need to bridge publishing and technology, and this gets us there.

This should exist now. I’ve been working on publishing startups for five years and I have yet to see it. Moreover, with so many publishers on the East Coast, New York City is the place to do it. New York has a healthy startup industry, access to publishers and publishing conferences, mentors and experts. My question is, who’s going to do something about it? Who’s with me?

Startups and Publishers: It Ain’t Easy

Why startups and publishers have a hard time working together

Any startup company trying to work with book publishers will tell you tales of woe and frustration. Big publishers and small publishers (I’ve worked with both) pose different sets of problems for startups, but the end result is a disconnect.

If you sell a product publishers don’t want, who is to “blame”?

Start-ups tend to blame “slow-moving legacy publishers” … but blame lies as much on startups misunderstanding of publisher needs as on publishers being slow. This is a classic “customer development” problem for startups. The reason things don’t work is not that “publishers are too dumb to see how they should change, and choose me to help them,” but rather that the pains publishers are suffering, and solutions startups are offering, are probably not well matched, for a few kinds of reasons:

a) the pain startups are trying to solve is not acute enough for the publishers (yet?)
b) the cost (in time or dollars) to adopt startup solutions is too high (for now?)
c) startups are trying to solve the wrong pain (for today?)
-or-
d) startups are addressing their products at the wrong customers

Solutions to solve future problems

In my particular case, I’ve recognized that the PressBooks pitch ends up being something like:

“Eventually you’ll need to embrace solutions like PressBooks because solutions like PressBooks will radically transform this market flooding the publishing market with more books than you ever imagined” …

That is … we (and others like us) are trying to solve for publishers problems that we are helping create, and which aren’t quite here yet on a scale that is visible to the day-to-day operations of a publishing company. (Certainly these big/catastrophic problems are coming, and soon… but still, it’s a future problem, not a present problem).

Where to next?

So, as a startup, you have to choose what direction to go in:

a) try to solve the pain that traditional publishers have right now, which is felt acutely enough

-or-

b) (in our case) try to expand the market by helping millions of new publishers exist…thereby helping create the problems traditional publishers will have to face in the coming years

I like b) as a direction, but in the end it’s not so surprising that existing publishers aren’t falling all over themselves to embrace solutions for problems that aren’t quite here yet.

The risk of ceding the future to other players

Still, there is a case to be made that a publisher with a vision of the future you should be out-front of the changing market. As a fellow-traveller in startup frustration, Andrew Rhomberg at Jellybooks says:

Publishing has been – technically speaking – an amazingly stable industry for a very long time. In defense of publishers: it is going through a transition from analogue to digital AND online faster than any other media industry before it. But by not partnering, publishers are ceding influence over how this industry will be shaped.

And that’s the problem for both startups and publishers … most publishing startups are trying to solve problems that will come because of innovations in the future; most publishers are worried about solving the problems of a radically transforming industry right now.

Brian O’Leary once suggested creating a kind of Manhattan Project funded by publishers that would invest in new technologies, models and thinking. It’s an admirable idea, though evidence from some such initiatives in publishing hasn’t been promising.

In the end, readers will drive the change

Change is coming though, there is no doubt, and we will know it is here when big numbers of readers start to choose new solutions over existing solutions (see: ebooks). These solutions will come from a mix of startups, of old publishers and new publishers, and crucially, from the big four tech giants: Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook (and possibly others).

In the end, it’s readers who will choose the future, which will follow their eyes, minds and wallets. And for all of us — new players and old — our task now is to present readers with different kinds of futures, and see which ones stick.

Three reasons why we're in a golden age of publishing entrepreneurship

Three reasons why we're in a golden age of publishing entrepreneurship

Digital is creating fertile ground for startups.

Books, publishing processes and readers have all made the jump to digital, and that's creating considerable opportunities for publishing startups.

Publishing News: Publishing startups bet on curation and apps

Publishing News: Publishing startups bet on curation and apps

A look at three publishing startups, Romenesko retires, and Jer Thorp discusses data at the NYT.

The TOC Sneak Peek webcasts continue, Poynter gets a part-time employee while Romenesko plans a new blog, and Jer Thorp talks about being a data artist at the New York Times.

Announcing the TOC Sneak Peek webcast series

Announcing the TOC Sneak Peek webcast series

Are you a pre-release publishing startup? We'd like to showcase your work.

We're about to launch a new TOC webcast series that will feature some of the most interesting startups in the publishing tools, platforms and technologies space.

What investors are looking for in publishing companies

Catalyst Investors' Ryan McNally on the business opportunities born from publishing's disruption.

Ryan McNally, co-founder of Catalyst Investors, discusses the opportunities for publishing startups and investors (here's a tip: you're in good shape if tablets and multimedia are priorities).