Tonight at 8:30PM, Nuroa and Highgrowth Partners will sponsor TechCrunch Barcelona Meetup with Mike Butcher. We organized the event on very short notice, but it looks like it will be a success, with more than 100 people signed up to attend. Of course, there’s often some variation between the number of people that sign up and the number that actually attend, but in either case, we’ve pretty happy. And nuroa got mentioned in TechCrunch, which is always cool.

The event will be at a cool new hotel, Granados 83, which came highly recommended by my friend and fellow entrepreneur Santiago Porrero, who also helped put us touch with the public relations and reservations department.

All in all, no complaints. They were able to offer us a really cool option on very short notice and at a very good price - an open bar of wine and cava (Spanish champagne), plus some light snacks for 100 on their rooftop terrace with views of the Eixample.

I’m not sure if it’s the open bar, the views, or the chance to network with other entrepreneurs and with Mike, but in any case, the response has been surprisingly encouraging.

I hope to see you there tonight! And if not, I’ll be sure to post pics from the event in tomorrow’s post.

Happy San Jordi’s Day! I’ve gotten neither a book nor a rose, which kind of sucks, but I’m trying to keep upbeat.

For those you outside of Catalunya, Sant Jordi (”Saint George’s Day” for English speakers) is a special day, similar to Valentine’s Day, but not quite as commercial. All around the streets of Catalunya, there are small vendors with small, folding tables selling roses and books for a few euros so that couples (or friends or even bosses) can express their love for and appreciation of one another. Women walk around town with roses, men show off their books and everyone enjoys the beautiful springtime weather.

Sant Jordi’s Day is the Day of the Book and the Rose in Catalunya, and celebrates a martyred Roman soldier who was decapitated when he refused to kill Christians. There are popular stories of San Jordi and a dragon. Through a random lottery, the king’s daughter was chosen to be given as a sacrifice to a dragon that was terrorizing the village of Montblanc, but San Jordi arrived just in time to kill the dragon and save the beautiful princess.

Giving roses in celebration of San Jordi has been done at least since the Rose Fair began in the 15th century. The book part came into effect around 1930. April 23 was chosen as the official day in Catalonia, because it was the day on which Cervantes and Shakespeare, among others, died. Quite logically, it’s also the accepted date on which San Jordi died in 303 AD.

Speaking of love, Mariah Carey is the queen of the love song, and I’m really loving her new hit, Touch My Body. It explains what happens after you’ve given your partner the rose or book for San Jordi’s day. Touch My Body was the number one song in the US for the last couple of weeks, only recently replaced by Leona Lewis’s Bleeding Love. In addition to the mellow beat and sweet vocals, I like the reference to a web 2.0 start-up. It gives me something to which I can aspire.

First, Mariah tells her lover how she feels about him:

I know that you’ve been waiting for it
I’m waiting too
In my imagination I’d be all up on you
I know you got that fever for me
102
And boy I know I feel the same
My temperature’s through the roof

But then being the paparazzi-stalked star that she is (when she’s not begging for media attention, that is), she warns her lover not to try to embarass her on the Internet:

If there’s a camera up in here
Then it’s gonna leave with me
When I do (I do)
If there’s a camera up in here
Then I’d best not catch this flick
On YouTube (YouTube)

That’s when you know that you’ve hit the bigtime. Not when you get paid $1.65 billion for your not even 2-year old start-up. Not when important bloggers and analysts note that you dominate your category more than Google dominates search. It’s when a superstar like Mariah Carey name-checks you in her number 1 song without even asking to get paid for it or having to explain who you are. That’s when you know you have become an important part of popular culture.

A few months ago, some real estate agencies were still claiming that there is no crisis currently facing the real estate sector in Spain.

But those people are probably either living in The Twilight Zone and/or out of business by now.

Even the New York Times has been running a series of stories about the Spanish real estate market, noting that the Spanish housing market is in even worse danger than the US market! That’s saying quite a bit.

In my last post, I looked at the announcement that Expofinques was seeking bankruptcy protection. Out of curiosity, I searched for headlines related to the other two franchises that I investigated back when I entered real estate in 2005: Don Piso and Tecnocasa.

Here’s what I found:

• La red de venta de pisos Expofincas suspende de pagos: I already examined this story in my last blog post.
• El Grupo Tecnocasa reduce un 39,3% su beneficio en 2007 y cerro 387 oficinas en España: Tecnocasa, another of the major Spanish real estate agencies, earned €8.8 million less in profit than in 2007, which is a 39.3% decrease relative to 2006. The group’s turnover was €51 million in 2007, 10% less than in 2006. In 2007, the group closed one-third of their franchisees (387 of 1052 offices). The franchisees overall earned €215.56 million in 2007, which was 30.9% less than in 2006. Tecnocasa sold 16,760 homes in 2007, which was 27.1% less than in 2006.
• Efectos del frenazo inmobiliario: Don Piso ajusta plantilla y cierra 26 oficinas comerciales: Don Piso, probably the strongest national brand, supported by one of Spain’s most blue-chip companies, Grupo Ferrovial, has 136 internal offices and 227 franchised offices. They note that the franchisees have been the worst hit, given that they have to pay a fixed monthly royalty payment of €1200 to €1500 (in Expofincas, for example, the royalty was variable, dependent on sales). In total, the Company had closed or expected to close 36 offices as of October 2007.

So what can we learn from the current crisis?

• It’s the banks’ (and Alan Greenspan’s) fault: Whether fairly or not, everyone blames the banks, which aren’t being very flexible in terms of lending money either to potential buyers or to agencies in need of refinancing their debts. Everyone’s been burned by the US sub-prime mortgage crisis and the resulting world-wide credit crunch (which some people are blaming on Alan Greenspan), and banks are no longer willing to take risks.
• A buyer’s market: If you are a relatively “risk-free” home buyer (meaning that you have your finances more or less in order — that you’re the kind of low-risk client that banks now like), then now is the time to begin your search. If not now, then in the near future, as both real estate agents and sellers are desperate to sell — in some cases, their very survival might depend on their capacity to get a few sales done. Agents and sellers no longer have the luxury of being chulo (arrogant), as pretty much everyone was a couple of years ago when buyers were fungible. Now the buyer is the queen!
• Internet is the cheapest option for sellers, and the most convenient option for buyers: Despite the crisis, people are still searching for properties, and when they do search, more are searching online. So even if the overall number of real estate purchases decrease, the percentage that is searching online is increasing. In addition, agencies are now more willing to try new, cheaper options that might allow them to reach interested buyers. For that reason, the newspapers will lose big as more agencies go under, because fewer agencies will be able to pay the exorbitant price of placing their ads in even 1 major newspaper. By contrast, Idealista is a lot cheaper, and nuroa.es, our Spanish property search engine, is free for agencies.

There’s an expression in English that “when the going gets tough, the tough get going”, which means basically that the only way to overcome a difficult situation is to work harder and better. The real estate crisis will no doubt shake up the Spanish real estate market, and there will be a few winners and lots of losers. But that’s life, and instead of looking at the glass as half-empty, I prefer to think that current market conditions provide a unique opportunity for disruptive Internet products that can help a troubled real estate sector buy a little bit more time in order to survive the current downturn. And it’s clear, of course, that I think that nuroa is such a product.

It was bittersweet to read that the real estate agency Expofinques has entered into bankruptcy protection. Expofincas is the first major Spanish real estate agency that has sought bankruptcy protection (various developers are already in a similar state of affairs).

I actually know Expofincas quite well. My first business was a franchise of Expofincas in the Eixample Esquerre, and I think I was among the initial group of real estate franchisees in Barcelona. I remember fondly the training sessions, which took place over a couple of weeks, and where I learned about “pisos calentitos” (apartments that will get sold quickly) and “compradores verdes” (first-time buyers who are eager to learn but unlikely to buy in the near future). I became fluent in the language of Spanish real estate speak thanks to Expofincas.

But by 2005, I realized that I wasn’t entirely convinced by their model. They had captured the form of American real estate franchises, but not the spirit. There was a lot of internal tension in the company itself between the franchise department and the internal staff (they have a mixed model between franchised offices that are run by entrepreneurs under a licensing agreement and offices run by full-time employees of Expofincas). In addition, their operational staff consisted of a lot of old-time real estate agents who were anti-Internet(though in later years they’d become one of the biggest spenders in online advertising). They instructed us that agents shouldn’t be given computers, because they’d only surf the web all day — that all of the tasks required for entering new apartments could be done by speaking with porters in apartment buildings, contacts and looking at La Vanguardia. Most of all, I hated that they treated the entrepreneurs and our staffs like dumb children. They didn’t see us as partners in extending their brand, and didn’t really want us speaking with one other franchisees. They made me feel like an idiot who’d paid a lot of money to fund their expansion efforts.

When I told them that I wanted out of my franchise license, they tried to convince me that sticking with them and their brand was the best way to withstand the eventual consolidation of the real estate market that we’d all been expecting but that no one really seemed to believe was around the corner. They highlighted the fact that they had the economic resources to withstand a downturn. And they hinted that if my agency wasn’t working as well as they’d originally projected, it was because of my own defects - not economic factors or failings of Exponfincas — which meant that my best bet would be to stick to them.

I left and eventually started nuroa, a property search engine focused on the German and Spanish markets, based in large part from the experience that I’d gained via Expofincas and then afterwards.

And there’s probably a lot of truth in what they said about my failings. It was my first business, and you really do learn a lot about yourself as a first-time entrepreneur. You learn a lot about yourself, your threshold for pain, your family, friends and loved ones, your strengths and weaknesses, etc. Everyone loves you when things are going well, but when things go badly . . . you really begin to understand the logic of the expression “a friend in need is a friend indeed.” And hopefully, you begin to live by the expression: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!”

So that’s why I feel a bit bittersweet. I chose to collaborate with Expofincas, because they had a great reputation in the real estate sector, and because they had an ad with Jesus Vasquez. And while I feel somewhat vindicated that maybe I wasn’t such an idiot after all, I also feel humbled to see such a prominent brand brought to its knees by the vicious combination of the international credit crunch (which meant that the banks didn’t give them viable options to refinance €10 million in debt) and the real estate crisis in Spain (which meant that they really don’t have any income to make debt payments and pay current expenditures).

I love Barcelona. As the people here say a lot, it has the perfect combination of “mar” (sea) and montaña (mountain). Beaches. Skiing. Great restaurants. Great food. Good-looking people. Great night life. What’s not to love? Carpe diem!

But lately I’ve begun to think that bohemian chic has its limitations. Let me explain. One of the things that I love most about Spain is that people here enjoy life. Too many people in the US have a 5-year plan they work like crazy to realize. On my very first visit to Barcelona, however, I realized that things here were different. I was 25 at the time, fresh out of law school. And I noticed that everyone here seemed so relaxed. Not a care in the world. They were all on the streets and partying. They embodied the Rent ethic that seemed so attractive after 7 years at Yale, busting my ass trying to be Maverick, trying to be the Top Gun. In this context, “La vie boheme! No day but today!” sounded especially appealing. You only have 525, 600 minutes in a year. How do you want to spend them? Forget all the bullshit and enjoy every day. Carpe diem!

That’s cool while you’re young and immortal. But as you get older, and you realize that you have fewer “todays” awaiting you, a long-term vision becomes unavoidable.

So what I loved about Barcelona when I first got here 7 years ago — the bohemian chic — looks more problematic as age gives me a little bit of perspective.

A few examples:

• Shitty service: One of my biggest pet peeves. The customer is the enemy, or at best irrelevant, in many Spanish businesses. If you want to come back, great. If not, who cares? Are you a loyal customer? That’s your problem! Just pay for your meal, and go — and I’m going to try as exploit you as much as possible while you’re here. Carpe Diem! For example, I eat at the same restaurant almost every day. For dessert, I usually get the arroz con leche, but one day I asked for the yogurt with honey. The waitress told me that they had honey, but I’d be charged extra for it. For a few drops of honey! Since then, I’ve been a little more reluctant to eat there. I don’t feel valued as a customer, so I’m trying to find my “Cheers” place — where everyone knows my name. And I’m not the only entrepreneur who laments this entrepreneurial short-sightedness in Spanish businesses. Yannick recounts a similar experience where a waitress charged for electricity when he plugged in his laptop! The title of the post says it all: A Catalan Starbucks, Impossible!

• Bye-bye 3GSM: A major international conference held in Catalunya? Impossible! Not quite, but given the oft short-sighted approach to business here, not far from the truth. A lot of blogs this week are lamenting that the organizers of the 3GSM conference want to leave Barcelona. The conference brings a lot of international prestige to Barcelona, but who cares? Let’s gouge the tourists! The petty thieves will rob them on the streets, the local businesspeople will rob them everywhere else, and the local government will remain largely silent because they’ll keep coming back, right? And all the taxi drivers that spend all day complaining in their smelly cabs about how tough life is will chat on their phones and drink coffee instead of attending to the surge of new clients, some of whom might even give tips. But who cares? Carpe diem!

Maybe it’s just a matter of getting old — from hippie to yuppie — or maybe bohemian chic really is an unsustainable way of life. Maybe as all of those long-haired, free love do-gooders of the 60s realized long ago, at some point we all have to grow up or suffer retarded development, both economically and personally.

As I transition back into my day job as the CEO of an Internet start-up, I can’t help but reflect on what I’ve learned from the Hillary-Obama Battle Royale. Both politics and business involve a lot of careful strategic planning by very talented people. But in both areas, few of these well-laid plans ever play out as they were originally intended.

For example, both Hillary and Facebook were media darlings a few months ago, before being deemed profoundly “unlikeable” or “untrustworthy” and entering into the fight of their lives. Both seem to have survived these scares, but it’s unclear what the public’s final decision will be in either case.

On a more general level, I think that there are 5 key truths that apply as much to politics as it does to business:

5. When the going gets tough, a lot of investors get going. As soon as it seemed that she might lose the New Hampshire primary after already having lost the Iowa Caucuses, a lot of Hillary’s investors started to get cold feet, forcing the Clintons to have a lot of reassuring chats with their investors. Even in politics, a lot of investors want sure bets. As CEO of a property search start-up, I’ve often been surprised when some VCs seem annoyed that there’s some risk involved with start-up ventures. My advice is that if you are lucky enough to get various offers from VCs or business angels, go with the one who will be around when you face an unexpected setback (like a loss in the Caucuses) or encounter an unexpectedly tough new market entrant that’s generating a lot of buzz. Go with someone who will stick with you through for better or for worse, within limits.

4. Karma is a bitch: Sometimes its easier to take ethical or legal shortcuts, but the truth will eventually come out. And it will take a big bite out of your ass when it does. There are lots of business examples here:

• Enron and their “creative” accounting theories;
• Martha Stewart, who thought she’d save a few dollars thanks to insider trading, but ended up paying a lot more in fines and jail time;
• Marion Jones, who disgraced herself and her fans when she admitted to using steroids. She too will see the inside of a jail cell; and
• Facebook, whose founder Mark Zuckerberg arguably lied and stole from former friends and colleagues to develop his mini-Empire. Some of the negative publicity about Facebook’s advertising platform (Beacon) arguably stems from the fact that Mark Zuckerberg seems a bit slimy.

Note that I didn’t say “Good guys finish last”, because I’m not quite sure I believe that. But the truth has a nasty and persistent habit of being discovered no matter how clever or careful you think you are. Just ask Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.

3. Keep it simple, stupid! One of Obama’s great gifts is that he’s able to communicate controversial and complicated topics — race and poverty — via visual cues and oratorical flourishes. He doesn’t really ever delve into a 100-point plan. There’s no need to. His aim is to sell his vision of America. Great Internet companies like Google use a similar strategy. Both Obama and Google could obviously explain their core concepts in painful detail, but do you really care how Google generates so many relevant results in so little time? Or do you agree that Google’s minimalist home page conveys a simplicity that enhances its user experience. Great communicators — and great products - hide a lot of the complicated stuff , because they know that most consumers/voters suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder.

2. It’s great to be strong and visionary. But sometimes it’s okay to admit that you have weaknesses and doubts. It’s okay to be human. This is one that’s particularly easier said than done for me. A lot of people expect leaders to be emotionless robots. Winners execute exceptionally well no matter what the personal circumstance or obstacle. Displays of emotion are for the weak. But I think that the Hillary crying episode showed that the public resists leaders that appear inhuman and inflexible. In reviewing why people tend to be railing against Facebook all of a sudden, for example, Duncan Riley of TechCrunch explained that Mark Zuckerberg would “be better off relaxing a little more and being more open and honest; Facebook must reach a tipping point this year in growth and people will feel a lot better about supporting him if he was little less robotic, and more importantly more open.” Closed and robotic is out. Open and honest is in.

1. Charisma and “likability” matter, particularly when you want to be the top dog. Hillary is probably very annoyed that, although she has paid her dues, a much more charismatic male candidate is threatening her for the top spot. Although Obama is a lot less experienced than Hillary, voters are willing to focus more on his likability factor. All other things being equal, people like to see nice guys or women do well. In his Digg case study, for example, Nisan Gabbay argues that the Kevin Rose persona has a lot to do with Digg’s success. He explains: “I believe that Kevin Rose’s personality and public persona played a big part in Digg’s success. Initial users wanted to see Digg succeed because they wanted to see Kevin succeed. When Digg was raising its first VC round, some well-respected Internet investors felt that better products were about to be launched that would unseat Digg. However, we have learned that having a superior technical product is not necessarily the determining factor for success. Consumer Internet services are both an art and a science. The Kevin Rose persona was a big contributor to the “art” side of Digg that is impossible to replicate by competitors.”

To paraphrase Hillary’s evaluation of Obama, successful leadership is as much about poetry as it is about prose.

Le Web 3 is now over. It was an awesome conference, about which I’ll write later.

The one comment that you get a lot at these conferences, however, is: “Wow! There certainly seems to be a lot going on in Barcelona these days.” I hung out a bit with Nicole Simon, formerly of Blognation Germany, and she told me that she thought it’d be cool to do a conference in Barcelona, given that Germans and French bloggers want to know more about what’s going on in the Spanish tech scene (and I suppose, in Spain more generally).

Well, now that should be a lot easier. Javier of Loogic has just launched Loogic in English. Loogic is kind of like Spain’s TechCrunch. I try to read it every day to see what’s going on in the Spanish tech scence. Javier is also a really nice guy and often willing to give you useful product feedback. His advice definitely helped make nuroa into a better product.

And Loogic is one of the most read Spanish tech blogs, so if you have a product that you’d like to launch, there’s no better place to do it.

Congrats, Javier! I think this is a great iniative and sign that the Spanish tech scene is going global!

I was surprised to read Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch post on Friday that Edgeio was going to be shut down. On the one hand, it’s kind of scary, my being in the vertical search space and all.

There’s always that moment of initial fear when you read something like that. Maybe nuroa really isn’t going to work? WTF have I gotten myself into? And HTF did they burn through $5 million in less than a year without being able to generate any revenue or relevant traffic or enter into any significant strategic alliances? This is perhaps the biggest question in most people’s minds. (It still amazes me that a start-up that launched in Feb. 2006 could receive a cheque for $ 5 million from a VC only 7 months later! I’m assuming the valuation at that point must have been somewhere between $15 and $20 million?)

But upon closer analysis, it’s clear that Edgeio’s problems had less to do with being a vertical search engine and more to do with being more of a concept than a business. To me, Edgeio’s failure reflects the danger of creating a tech-geek project with very little appeal or applicability in the real world.

Following are the four main lessons that I think can be learned from Edgeio’s demise.

Not All Vertical Search Engines Are Created Equal: Whereas the majority of vertical search engines crawl classifieds portals like Idealista and ImmobilienScout 24, or have a direct relationship with real estate agencies like Sasi or Engel & Völkers, Edgeio’s model was to operate — as the name suggests — on the “edge”. Cutting through the PR jargon, this means that they only looked for classifieds listings on blogs or other RSS-enabled sources — this explains Michael Arrington’s involvement and value-added to the project. TechCrunch was the ideal platform from which to launch a blog-focused vertical search engine. As TechCrunch explained when Edgeio launched: “The Edgeio ethos is that content belongs on the edges, and that is where the name originates from (Edge input/output). Content on the edges means the content on the millions of blogs and other sites out there which Edgeio does a good job of aggregating and organizing.” So whereas property search engines like nuroa aim to disrupt the traditional classifieds space by crawling mainstream classifieds sites, Edgeio chose instead to bet that sellers would be willing to create blogs on which they listed their properties or other classifieds, and Edgeio would then aggregate those blogged classified listings. The basic problem is that a business focused only on classifieds in blogs is not currently very scalable, as the majority of people still use more traditional offline and online options (e.g., classifieds portals and newspapers) to advertise classifieds goods.

Classifieds Are Local: Given that their main market is the blogosphere, Edgeio was never focused on any one geographical market. If you take a look at their website (which is very well-designed by the way), the tagline is “search the world’s listings”. Their value proposition was that they granted you access to over 100 million listings in 1,484,953 cities and 166 countries What does this mean in practice? If I’m looking for an apartment in Barcelona, why would I care that there are lots of listings in 1,484,952 other cities? Also, I don’t really see why local advertisers would choose to advertise on an “international” website, particularly if this international website isn’t one of the leaders in its local classifieds space. In other words, if I am Expofinques and I want to strengthen my market position in Madrid where I’m not as strong as I am in Barcelona, why would I advertise on Edgeio as opposed to the other sites that are more focused on Madrid? And if I’m a property buyer in Barcelona why would I be more interested in searching “the world’s listings” than in searching “the most complete set of listings in Barcelona”? Start-ups have to focus on a market, or a product, or on something in particular. Being focused on “the world’s listings” is largely meaningless, other than as a concept.

Keep Your Burn Rate Down Until You Have Some Indice of Possible Success: Edgeio’s hype always had more to do with the connection to Michael Arrington and TechCrunch than anything else. Whereas companies like Trulia, Simply Hired and Indeed have generated significant traffic, marquee-name investors (Sequioa, News Corp. and The New York Times) and are growing nicely (e.g., Trulia’s U.S. traffic is up 130 percent in 2007, to 1.2 million unique visitors per month, according to Comscore), Oodle’s vanguardist and diffuse approach never seemed to catch on. Nonetheless, it seems that they were determined to buy their success and hoped to convince investors to continue investing in them, even though they had no material revenues, traffic or partnerships. Michael Arrington is pretty direct in explaining why Edgeio had to close down: “The company burned through [$5 million] according to plan, meaning they ran out this month. The product roadmap was fulfilled, meaning development lags didn’t hurt the company. But the revenues didn’t come in and user/partner milestones weren’t met. And that meant no one else was going to put more money into the company.” In the comments section, he’s even more reflective and frank: “In general I’ll say this - it is unwise for a company to spend a lot of money building out infrastructure before a product proves itself.”

This is just further proof of what Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures noted in a recent post entitled “Why Early Stage Venture Investments Fail“: “[I]t’s pretty clear to me that most venture backed investments don’t fail because the business plan was flawed. In my experience at least 2/3 of all business plans we back are flawed. Most venture backed investments fail because the venture capital is used to scale the business before the correct business plan is discovered. That scale/burn rate becomes the cancer that kills the business.”

It’s Easier to Criticize than to Do It Yourself: I can’t help but note a certain irony in noting that one of tech’s most noted and sometimes more hyper-critical bloggers — he created the Dead Pool with a certain glee — is the co-founder of the most prominent vertical search engine to enter the Dead Pool, despite all of the natural advantages that he has given his access to financing and marketing. Most of us would give our left arm to appear prominently in TechCrunch, but Edgeio is proof that expensive marketing can’t make up for an ill-conceived product.

And it also shows that like the old saying goes: “Opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one.” It’s a lot easier to criticize others than to create a successful product yourself.

The best we can do is hope to learn from Edgeio’s mistakes so as not to end up like they did.

In keeping with my lessons learned from Loïc Le Meur, I’m now going to promote nuroa a bit and ask for your help.

We are trying to get 1 month’s free publicity on a new website for start-ups. As a start-up with limited resources, you can’t imagine how important that word is — “free!”

All you need to do is go to this link — http://www.europeanstartups.com/company-index-european-startups — and click on the “vote” button next to our name “Nuroa.” It should take less than 5 seconds of your time, but you can’t imagine how important it would be for us.

Please remember that you can vote once per day.

Sorry in advance for this shameless plug!

Next week, Sophie and I will be heading to Paris for Le Web3 and a couple of business meetings. I will be taking my trusty video camera, with the hopes of posting some of the highlights. According to the folks at Le Web3, 1300 people from 40 countries will show up. I can’t wait to see what the party will be like!

Anyway, Loïc Le Meur, France’s best known blogger, video-blogging entrepreneur and organizer of Le Web 3 is now on a major marketing campaign to promote Le Web 3 (and his new project seesmic.com, which is still in alpha). I get daily video updates from him on Facebook about what’s going on at Seesmic, all of the major tech blogs are offering free tickets or discounted tickets to Le Web 3 to spur attendance, and major newspapers like the Financial Times are writing articles about Loïc and Le Web 3.

Watching his commitment to self-promotion is cool, because I’ve gotten some interesting lessons about what we can do to promote nuroa.

Highlights from the FT article:

• Seesmic.com, a video-blogging platform, is Loïc’s fifth start-up, and he moved from Paris to San Francisco, because he thinks that Silicon Valley is the only real destination for entrepreneurs that want to launch global Internet brands. It’s a bit ironic that the person responsible for organising one of Europe’s biggest Internet events firmly believes that the US is the only place to be if you really want to be relevant in the Internet space. But Loïc justifies it by saying that Europe’s 22 languages and geography complicates deal-making, while San Francisco is at the epicentre of deals. In his words: “The way you do partnerships here, everyone’s a block away or 20 minutes away in Palo Alto. If I need to set up a partnership with [micro-blogging service] Twitter, I call them, we have coffee, and two hours later the deal is done. If I were in France, there’s a nine-hour time difference and it’s like you don’t matter.” If even marquee-level European entrepreneurs with direct access to world leaders feel irrelevant if they are not in Silicon Valley, what does that mean for the rest of us?

• On a more optimistic note, Loïc provides his top 10 tips for entrepreneurs. I’ll re-post them here and comment on them in more detail in the future. In general, I’d just say that they are very insightful, but as with most things, much of it is easier said than done.
  1. Don’t wait for a revolutionary idea. It will never happen. Just focus on a simple, exciting, empty space and execute as fast as possible
  2. Share your idea. The more you share, the more you get advice and the more you learn. Meet and talk to your competitors.
  3. Build a community. Use blogging and social software to make sure people hear about you.
  4. Listen to your community. Answer questions and build your product with their feedback.
  5. Gather a great team. Select those with very different skills from you. Look for people who are better than you.
  6. Be the first to recognise a problem. Everyone makes mistakes. Address the issue in public, learn about and correct it.
  7. Don’t spend time on market research. Launch test versions as early as possible. Keep improving the product in the open.
  8. Don’t obsess over spreadsheet business plans. They are not going to turn out as you predict, in any case.
  9. Don’t plan a big marketing effort. It’s much more important and powerful that your community loves the product.
  10. Don’t focus on getting rich. Focus on your users. Money is a consequence of success, not a goal.