This is an excerpt from TechCrunch ( March 5th)
Seven week old Geni raised a $10 million second round of financing last week, led by Charles River Ventures (see our coverage of CRV here), with a post-money valuation of $100 million. George Zachary from CRV is joining the Geni board of directors. This was originally passed to us as a rumor, and Geni founder and CEO David Sacks has confirmed the story.
End Excerpt
David Sacks was a key person at PayPal and I am glad to see he has been able to in seven weeks get $10 million at $100 million. You may like to play around with Geni. Do you think CRV is out of their mind or do you think Geni is the next $1 billion company.
Another intriguing question is could something like Geni have been built in India. By the way Geni which is based in Los Angeles had around 18 people only when it launched.
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Hello,
I have gone through Geni, its a nice site.
I found a similar site, that is kincafe, looks to be good.
Kincafe is a web 2.0 family social network– latest updates from one’s family & friends, build and linking family trees together, birthdays and anniversaries, share photo albums, blogs and other family treasures such as scrapbooks, interests and family news.
Core of Kincafe is “Family tree based navigation technology” which allows one to easily reach anyone within core and extended families. One no longer need to remember different website, home page URLs and email id’s just to reach family.
Kincafe is highly secure- one has complete control over who can see family’s content and gets to decide who to allow viewing family’s content.
Keywords: family network connect social together group web2.0 ajax album photos kincafe kin ancestry heritage genealogy
For any any further information, please get in touch with andy@kincafe.com
Sanjay (my namesake):
1. Geni sounds interesting especially considering the background of the people behind it.
2. Of course, its not the first family tree idea. I am not sure what happened to the others that seemed equally hot back in 1999?
3. I presume that this is an idea which is very ‘American’, or perhaps ‘western’, if you will. The level of curiosity about many things in general, and about one’s family and ancestors in particular, is certainly more, in those parts of the world. I can see many of them spending a lot of time to gather data and figure things out, with regards to their relatives.
4. I am not sure if Indians, in general, are that curious. We have heard of places in North India, which claim to unravel your ancestral data and even your earlier births, through patrikas and stuff. Whatever level of belief one may have about this, there is a certain population that does go to such places and make the necessary enquiries. But is there a scramble to get there? I guess not.
5. So, okay, the educated and literate will not go to those pundits. But if they find a veritable and scientific way to get the family tree, perhaps they are more likely to attempt. If that be so, are there many people I know who have been attempting to trace their relatives and family tree, manually, all these years? When I strain my memory hard, I can only remember one person in my lifetime, who had taken the serious pain of getting his family tree made out, manually. No one else that I know of, has made any serious attempts. So now, with an easier tool, will a lot of people like to do so? When very very few did it manually, I do not see again, a scramble happening now, just because a tool exists. I feel that people are not too interested anyway. Perhaps (as many have expressed in earlier comments) because a lot of the family is already within reach and accessible, and also in touch at weddings and the like. So the need to find the few lost cousins is far lesser, I believe.
I can’t see myself spending too much time on such an application, anyway!
So my call is:
Geni could work in the US. And not knowing how big it can become there, I can’t comment on its valuation there.
But I would not think an Indian Geni can be so hot.
And yet, I will not be surprised if a venture gets funded. Too many model arbitrages are getting funded. What happens of them is for all of us to wait and watch.
I do agree with Pat on several of the questions raised. Especially about the DVD rental investments. Beats me, really! When very very few Indians are renting DVDs today (unlike when Netflix happened, and Blockbuster was already a successful business by then), you are talking of first getting people to tune into a new activity, then make a habit of it, then add numbers and hope to make money. In the meantime, invest in marketing, warehousing, inventory of DVDs, extremely tight logistics costs. And on top of it, the disruptive Moser Baer factor that can easily take DVDs to the cassette business level. Where people used to spend so much time and money, making copies of cassettes, till they became so cheap that no one wanted to copy. They just bought them and threw them away when they did not want them anymore. In case of DVDs too, with the media cost approaching towards zero, the risk (whether via Moser Baer or others) of this happening is always there! But model arbitrage has meant many investing to make India’s Netflix. And likewise, I will not be surprised to see some investing to create India’s Geni as well.
Pat,
Blunt is good and no offence taken.
In the case of DVD rentals investors believe that a company could have a large number of users ( million plus) will rent say 2 DVD’s a month at say $1. This company will then be a $24 million plus company. The fact that many are trying does not deter people as each believe that they will win. Gradually fatigue sets in and the space loses is buzz as people tackle the grim realities of getting a million users and managing costs.
It is very hard changing mental models so you need to see if your prospective investor gets it. If he/she does not then move on and if nobody does either bootstrap more and then approach investors or build out on your own without investors. You could also change the idea.
How will you build sustainable advantage is a tough question and while there will be no complete answer I think investors look to see the approaches that entrepreneurs will take.
As for mentoring, entrepreneurs should take on advisors or team members who can add value and give them equity. I think you will soon see models emerge where there is a range of options available for entrepreneurs. There are atleast five seed options for investors and I am working on one more. By the end of the year I would not be surprised if there are 10-15 seed options available.