If you are launching a startup or have one that is just one or two people, you should really try to get into a coworking space. It can be more cost effective, but that is not the best reason to do it. You’ll get knowledge sharing, energy, and a lof of camraderie. And you can’t put a price on those things when you are doing a startup. –Fred Wilson, AVC

Fred Wilson made a fairly long post this morning (link above) about coworking locations.  He points out that while he’s not a big fan of incubators overall (I disagree with him there, but we’ll do that in another post).  He specifically calls out about a half dozen NYC based coworking locations and then points to this wiki with a list of 8 current spots, 4 under construction and 15 “alternative locations”.

I know AlphaLab has coworking space (but only for their incubated companies) and I know there was an attempt at a location called Think Tank; but the only coworking location I know for sure is open is Eve‘s We Do Property Cowork downtown.  Is that really the only one?  If so, that’s something we need to work on.

I’ve been hearing a lot lately about building a business plan, pitching investors, etc, etc…  Something to keep in mind when you’re writing a 40 page document is that most people don’t like to read.  In fact of the people who land on this page, I’ll bet 12.5% are still reading and the others are already looking at the charts below.  By the way, if you like those charts below…

…you NEED to be following this tumblr.

When Twitter announced that they would be buying/producing clients for mobile phones and looking to advance their own web platform in attempt to crush other clients, many people started to wonder whether working with the Twitter API was a good idea (I was one of them).  Around that time, Fred Wilson, an investor in Twitter, basically told people to stop whining and build a “killer app.”  His point was that simple extensions of Twitter functionality (clients mostly) were things that Twitter itself needed to get right, the API wasn’t intended for them.  What the API was intended for was people who build novel things “on top” of Twitter, aka “killer apps”.

I’ve been thinking about this development a lot lately.  Mostly, I’ve been considering what that meens for social media as a business.  My conclusion: Social Media companies from now on will be more “market-driven” then “product-driven”.  A market-driven venture is a company that finds an under-served niche (market) and sells something that fulfills that market.  A product-driven venture is a company that develops a new product that no one knows they need yet.  They promote that product and, once people understand what it can do for them, it creates its own market.

Let’s consider two recent successful examples.  Cupidtino is about as purely a market-driven venture as you will ever find.  The website is a dating site for mac owners only.  The entrepreneurs behind Cupidtino didn’t invent dating sites, they didn’t even really advance dating sites.  What they did, was found a market segment (niche) that needed a dating site and brought it to them.  FourSquare on the other hand is a product-driven venture.  Few people were sitting around thinking, “I want to be able to check in to places.”  Instead, FourSquare developed a technology they thought would be novel and then, through promotion, built a market for it.

My theory is that this second type of company (product-driven) will continue to become less and less common in social media as the concept matures.  However, now that the concept is fairly mature there are many many many underserved niches where it can be applied.  Of the next 100 successful startups in social media, 95+% will be market-driven.

Today, I’m going to be talking about Alan Robinson’s AP Article.

As an MBA who’s been working with private companies the last few years, I can tell you, you can make the numbers say whatever you want.  I wouldn’t read too much in to the fact that the Pirates showed a profit.  And so what if they did?  They show a profit of almost $30M over 2007 and 2008.  The Pirates are valued at $289M so that’s about a 5% return, or just barely keeping with inflation on two good (financially speaking) years.

Let’s look at what Robinson’s report really means for baseball in Pittsburgh.  What it appears we know for sure, is that since 2007 the team hasn’t needed outside financing, has very low cash reserves and is in the black.  Nutting haters, what would you prefer?  Would you prefer that the team was losing money and that Nutting was forced to consider selling or moving the team?  Need I remind you how close we were to losing the Penguins?

The finances that Robinson “expose” mean we have a chance of winning here in Pittsburgh (though admittedly, the chances seem bleak).  We’ve been able to make a little money while we built up our farm system, and it appears that if the Pirates became competitive and ticket sales rose (again I point you to the Pittsburgh Penguins) then we could use some of that money to invest in players without running in to the red.  So there’s the good news, we do have a SLIM chance of success.

What are our options for improving those chances?  While a deep pocketed, free spending owner would help, Nutting doesn’t appear interested in selling.  So, why don’t we stop bickering about a guy who is barely keeping up with inflation and start focusing on the real problem, revenue disparity.  In order to keep up with the Yankees, Nutting would have had to lose hundreds of millions of dollars each year.  It’s unreasonable to ask him to do that.  What we need is a system that allows the Pirates and the Yankees a similar resource pool to field a team.

National Politics

• RT @TheOnion: Texas Vows To Reclaim Title Of Most Regressive State From Arizona http://onion.com/aOwjEH