I just read the rest of the article. I stumbled across this little gem:

Soon came VidCaster, a service for Web sites to add video; it was started by Kieran Farr, a taxi driver turned chief executive. He said his service had absolute stickiness — meaning that it lures Internet users to stick around for a long time.

“What’s the gross margin of the business look like?” asked George Zachary of Charles River Ventures.

“What does that mean?” Mr. Farr said.

“That’s a problem.”

Average score: 2.8.

I happen to know Kieran Farr quite well. http://www.vidcaster.com/ was one of the first companies in our Co-op incubator. And, I have no doubt, that Kieran is going to be far richer than some reporter who still makes his living writing for a company that think that selling yesterday's news written on pieces of dead tree is a viable business model.

Kieran, and his co founders moved to Silicon Valley 2 years ago and the bottom of the economic bust. They've been doing corporate video for years together, and saw a huge problem in the market. They would get paid thousands of dollars to shoot corporate videos, and then have to upload it to YouTube for streaming, rather than on a company branded web site. So, they created a product around a big problem they found companies having.

Kieran is a self taught hacker, and he chose to drive cab for a living while boot strapping his company because it paid fairly well, and allowed him the flexibility to boot strap and take a few hours off in the afternoon for investor / client meetings when he needed to.

Kieran was the chief back end engineer, and shortly after they joined the our boot strapped incubator ( we didn't have any money to invest), and we were trying to figure out how to convince investors to fund VicCaster.

Hackers & Founders hosted a presentation by Naval entitled, Hacking your funding process: http://hackersandfounders.tv/T7F/naval-ravikant-hack-your-fu...

And, we decided to set up a VidCaster site called http://Hackersandfounders.tv, push the Naval presentation onto that site, try to get as many views as possible, and use that to showcase what VidCaster does.

VidCaster (while broke, driving cab and eating ramen noodles) handled 1TB of bandwidth in the 7 days after we put Naval's presentation online. They arranged for a sponsorship contract with Microsoft BizSpark, and handled everything from picking up the video from the AV guy at the presentation, to the uploading to the encoding. And, they did an amazing job.

Damn straight, their service has "stickiness". Imagine the pain in the ass it would be for me to get the videos that VidCaster is hosting at http://hackersandfounders.tv moved elsewhere? And, really... how the fuck do you calculate a gross margin when you have a boot strapped startup with 10 paying clients?

Shortly thereafter, we introduced VidCaster to 500 startups, and they got funded. Their paying clients at the time included AirBnb, ZendDesk, Twilio and Microsoft. They just presented at 500 Startups demo day, and another VC after seeing Kieran's Demo said, "VidCaster's amazing. All my portfolio companies need to be using their service".

Pretty soon, they are going to be rolling out a service that allows a customer to have any of their uploaded videos automatically transcribed, so that transcript can be downloaded and indexed by search engines.

Not bad technical chops for someone who is just a "cab driver".

VidCaster knows the online video market cold. They run an amazing business. They help other companies make money, and they had revenue before even getting funded.

It's companies like VidCaster that made me put my own startup aside, boot strap an incubator with no money of my own, and do whatever we could to get them funded. Bubble, my ass.

It's going to be entrepreneurs like Kieran, Ray and Steve (the VidCaster founders) that lead this country out of the economic mess it's in. They've been work their assess off on their startup for years, and they do whatever it takes to keep their company going. Even, if that means driving a cab while coding. These guys are fucking heroes if you ask me.

But then again, I moonlight as an ER Nurse. What do I know? Must be a bubble.

Fuck the New York Times.
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