Fred Wilson once blogged about the term Net Native. He extended the definition of Internet only web services to Internet only people.  It stuck with me because I truly identified with it.  Throughout the years at Citi, legacy resources and managers fought my drive to turn to the Internet for all business communication (it’s still happening).  My initial and final reaction was incredulity that people where so obtuse and incapable of evolution to not see efficiency and profitability in the Internet. I felt this way until I left the company at the beginning of the year.  If you look at the relative number of staff that are decked against Internet only job descriptions it’s still lopsided to the point that Internet is still defined as an “alternate channel”.  Nice.
So now that we’re staffing up at MMV, we’re up to 18 depending on how you count, I find myself coming back to this historical blog entry. MMV is a net native service for sure and we’re looking for Net Natives to be on the team.  However, I’m finding that my early bias (and lack of my own perspective) veered towards an age cutoff for true Net Natives.  Now the immersion factor is more apparent and more impactful than being born with a silver broadband card.

Our CEO is a good example of Gen X and their need for a Net life as their families, business contacts and friends spread out.  Another phenomenon that I’m seeing more and more of is the Gen Y (my generation according to Straus and Howe, but sometimes I’m defined as the end of Gen X) 30 year old who doesn’t have a Facebook/Twitter/Flickr/Blog life.  In fact I keep running into people like this who pay homage to the “Generation pay their bills with…CHECKS, ENVELOPES and STAMPS!  What the fuck man?

So in hiring into our company, we have to quickly weed the “Alternate Channel” managers who are going to know all the right company names, “DoubleClick, Google, Yahoo, Altavista…oh, oops I meant Twitter!”.  We need to make sure these guys are not going around SOMA with their MMV fleeces on, trying to pay with checks.

MMV has just helped Citi launch Citi Mobile for iPhone (a mildly relevant high point given the Citi stock price). This launch however is a good example of one startup partnering with another and both gaining. The application is designed by mFoundry. We made the call to license this app instead of building our own because, well the integration was easier and the user experience is pretty clean.

I’ve often seen startups reticent to partner with other startups, because there’s a pack of wolves mentality. While the competitive vibe and go get ‘em is core to the newco ethos, partnering is a good way to make decisions that short cycle the time to market issue. The partnership has to be relatively low management overhead and provide some tangible value for this to work.

Kudos to Citi, MMV and our partner mFoundry.

Many writers have documented the demise of venture capital dealflow in 2008 and have forecasted a dried up 2009. Startups are in for a world of hurt, similar to 2000 when you couldn’t get anything funded at all and all the developed e-commerce talent (including me) moved to higher paying corporate jobs. During those days, it seemed like the only salable operators sticking it out at earlier stage companies were the highest ranks or the earliest employees and those at companies that rounded in 1999 and had enough for this bad spell.

The giant volume of hires in those dot-coms between rounds B & C, whose 1% went to 30 bps in the matter of months because of step-down rounds or other bad deals were out of there faster than you could say “sign-on bonus”.

This put many young companies at a disadvantage in managing through their first difficult period. Unfortunately as VCs and other investors primarily buy into a management team and key employees, this put many venture backed startups in a bad position even when capital began to flow more easily.

In this version of the bust, startup founders and VCs should have the good sense and forethought to know that the when things go bad, through the layoffs and cost reduction, you have to keep your key resources properly incentivized. Protect your own investment through preferred equity structures and strong board participation. But always position the company to pay everyone in a large exit by retaining and fully aligning the management team and their relationship with key talent that will help the company grow in the hard times and drive it to scale and liquidity when things clear up.

A good startup should be able to grow in a downturn because the market opportunities that are being served are new. In order to give a startup a shot, the employees need to feel fully aligned with the investor. If the VC operates like a big company with heavy preference for itself and low percentage, common equity for the key operators, the newer, riskier opportunities are foresaken for safer returns to maintain survival, rather than growth.  The combination of preference overhangs and lower valuations result in low value common stock and therefore, the company operators will move to a lower risk threshold since the payout is smaller.  In this scenario, the opportunity is better served by a larger company that fully scaled cost structures and the startup is now at risk of competitive threat from more established players.

So founders, investors and board members: Re-up your key men before things get REALLY bad!

At MMV we always say that we have to “solve the distribution problem” for mobile and “build for the hump (of the standard deviation curve)” by building compelling mobile browser-based solutions for our bank clients.  And according to my mother and recent data from NPD Group we’ve been focused on the right thing…for now.  The Motorola Razr V3 remains the top-selling cellphone in the US, a position unchanged since NPD began tracking this in 2005.

Now here’s the twist, the rest of the top 5:

2. Apple iPhone 3G
3. Blackberry Curve
4. LG Chocolate
5. Blackberry Pearl

“The voice, browsing and music features represented on this list speak to the diversity of portfolios the carriers must maintain for a diverse consumer base,” said Ross Rubin, analyst with NPD Group.
So while the hump remains the hump, it’s only the RAZR that carries the “voice-only” crowd. What’s amazing is that there isn’t a single other “built for voice first” phone in the top 5.  Which means two things: a) the US phone user is gettting smarter, b) Moto really was on to something with the RAZR.

Now, I used to own a RAZR back in its heyday and any RAZR owner will tell you the phone has a great design and form-factor.  The crap software is the unfortunate surprise.  I mean this software is really crap from the contact manager to the openwave browser.  So, unsurprisingly I discovered and learned from the online world of Motorola modding.  In a few short days, I was running custom firmware and video capture applications.

So, for all of you representing the #1 phone sold, start here: http://www.themotoguide.com/

Red Herring was THE tech startup industry rag about 10 years ago.  Particularly for East Coast based, telecom or content plays.  In the Gobi days (my first startup experience), it was de riguer for us and our ISP competitors to be mentioned in the Herring, and we loved it. With the Industry Standard and the Herring, we had a good shot of coverage every week. There seemed to be a quota of under-35 CEO cover stories and the writing was a bit more hard hitting than other new entrants such as Business 2.0 or Wired.  Also, it seemed that RH adopted the NYC Silicon Alley startup scene with a bit of needed skepticism.
So as you can imagine, it was my pleasure to speak with senior editor at Red Herring, Cassimir Medford about Mobile Money Ventures.  I hope we can stay on the RH radar in what in undoubtedly be an interesting period for our company and the mobile industry at large.

Citi, SK Telecom Bank on Mobile [redherring.com]

“SK Telecom has a real desire to come into the U.S. with some of the expertise it has developed, and with Citi’s desire to enter the mobile space, we felt it was a perfect match for us,” said Jayastu Bhattacharya, senior vice president, strategy and business development for MMV.