Girls in tech event: Sarah Lacy's thoughts on personal branding and technology growth opportunities| Tech happenings

Girls in tech event: Sarah Lacy’s thoughts on personal branding and tech growth opportunities

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

At the SF Girls in Tech last week Sarah Lacy–blogger, Businessweek reporter and book author currently blogging in place of Michael Arlington at Techcrunch, shared some thoughts on Silicon Valley technology and what it takes to succeed. My favorites were those on building a personal brand and growth opportunities. Here they are with analysis.

Building a personal brand

Work hard and develop a strong body of work. Focus on the impact your work has on your inner circle–you editor first, then your mentors, and then onwards from there. The general public will love you, hate you, love you, hate you and then love you again. As long as people in your industry base love you, you will be fine. The general public will move around.

Mobile and Global growth opportunities

So far in mobile we have seen a lot of frivolous apps, for example the average shelf life of an iPhone app is 30 days. It is great for developers to develop their skills in but it is not something you can build a big company around. The mobile opportunity is overseas and in the US where mobile has an ethnic and financial divide. Most of those people have non-smart phones and so the real code challenge is devising apps for the shittest phones not for iPhones.

VC homerun areas are all mature now. The easy answer pointed to has been clean tech. But clean tech is reliant on a public market where small companies can get funding, and this does not exist anymore. Plus in a recession it will be hard for individuals and homeowners to make those investments.

The best VC opportunites are outside the US where there are infrastructure needs, but leveraging them requires a cultural change among VCs.

My thoughts

Sarah Lacy raised some great points about mobile. But there are a lot of issues that must be resolved before global mobile expansion and development into a keyVC growth area. Here are a few:

Negotiating payment transfers from mobile carriers. In most countries there are multiple mobile carriers. Developing a large global mobile growth company involves negotiating effective deals with small players in fragmented markets. This means thousands of customized incentive plans for individual carriers.
Negotiating with governments to allow transfer of money from mobile transactions across national boundaries. Kiva, considered this in Africa where mobile is an effective payment mechanism in certain countries. Governments, however did not look kindly to money transfer across national boundaries

I mentioned these to Sarah after her talk and she said that these reasons do make mobile tough and that’s why no one has broken into the space yet. Personally I think for mobile as well as clean tech success depends on developing infrastructure. And for mobile, I see that coming but may be not through a VC model. Stay tuned for further analysis on this.