Category: Tech news

Hello, my name
is Omar Hamoui, I’m formerly
the founder and CEO of
AdMob, and now actually
a partner working on something called Churn Labs.
And at Churn what we’re doing is
really exploring what we think are some green field opportunities.
We’re really looking at areas of
technology that we think haven’t
really been fully explored, fully
charted and we’re basically building anything in those areas.

We don’t care how crazy it is, or how silly it is.into
even more interesting opportunities, and
so I am going to introduce
to Haider Sabri, a member of
our team, who is going to walk you through one of our very first projects.

Hello everyone.
As you all know the basic
principle of building a
new product or service is to
build something that everybody wants and needs.
Yeah, so, we decided not to to do that at all.
Instead, we’ve decided to
build something and expend
all of our engineering power
and our resources and our
brainpower on building a
product solely around gnomes.

Yes, gnomes, those magical
characters that that we all have grown to love.
Now you wonder why?
The reason why is we thought
to ourselves, “Wouldn’t it be cool
to have a gnome in
your pocket, to take him
with you, to build your very own
custom gnome and take him
with you to take pictures with
him, to take him
to different venues, to take
him to different landmarks and record that gnome at that spot?”

And then at some later point, to
hand that beautiful gnome off
to a friend, give it
to him on his device and
at that point in his journey,
your friend will take him
to wherever he goes, again checking
him in and taking him to
different places around the globe.

That ‘s actually the
entire concept behind – all
the while, by the way, all
the while you’re actually getting updates
on where your gnome is, where he went, and who he’s with.
With and what he’s doing.

So that’s the high
level behind what we’re calling non-stop gnome.
So why don’t you join me at
the iPad, so I can go
through the quick demo.

So here we
got a couple of veteran gnomes.
And we’re going to talk about Lebowski.
Lebowski’s actually very special to
us, because he was born
in the lab, and he’s
been traveling between devices amongst all the guys in the lab.
And he’s traveled almost 2500
miles and these are a couple of photos that he’s been taking.

his morning he was disrupting.
Later on he was
on the ledge of the hotel contemplating thoughts.
He actually rescued Batman in Times
Square on Saturday night and
visited David Letterman, and so on and so forth.
Hanging out at the lab.
And then took a wrong turn, and he got dunked in the toilet.
So that’s Lebowski and actually, all
of these, you can actually
see them on the map and
follow your gnome wherever he’s going.

So We know that
everybody here is gonna install this
app at some point so everybody
would like to know how do
you get a gnome on your device
and it’s very important to
know that, a gnome can only live on one device.
He’s a digital object, but
he is uniquely placed in one physical location all of the time.

So how do we do that?
There’s two ways.
One is to create a custom gnome.
Just like we created Lebowski, we
come in here and design our
gnome, and give him the
attributes he likes, and give him a name, and a mission in life.
The other way actually is what
we want to demonstrate where, lets
say you wanna transfer your gnome
to a new friend.

We’re calling this process Lift.
So in researching the way gnomes
actually transport, we came
up with the conclusion that they’re
magical in the way that they transport.
So, here I’m going to show
you, I’m not sure
if the camera sees this but, we
have a gnome actually that was born today.
It’s his birthday today.

And he’s called,
his name is Disrupt and he’s
actually going to leave my
iPhone where he Resides currently
and he’s going to end up
on the iPad, in a process that we call ‘lift’.
So, pay close attention
as I do this, because as I
open up with the iPad,
there’s going to be an image finder,
or the view finder, and
it going to ‘lift’ Disrupt from one device to the other.

Here we go.
So, in that
sense now, Disrupt is completely
on this device now, and
I think we had a small little bug here.
Murphy’s Law never proves invalid.
So, now this rep lives on this.
Oh, he’s on.

Try it again.

What’s that?

I think you should give it another shot.

So, moving on.
So, now he actually lives on
this iPad and we could take travel entries with him.
And the next time That
a travel entry is made.
Everybody who’s had Lebowski or
Disrupt, in this case, on his
device will actually get
a notification saying, “Hey, Disrupt
is actually at Disrupt in Manhattan.”
And here’s a picture of him
and everybody’s who been along
that path with Disrupt will
actually get to comment and join in the fun.

So, there’s actually a lot
of other features that we have
in the app, but I’m going to hand it over to Omar to wrap things up.

Yeah, so actually I just want to
talk a little bit about ‘Lift’, because
we’re not going to go into that in too much detail today.
But that is kind of one of
the things that we thought were
more interesting in terms of
playing with this application that we’re
building and what we’re
really thinking about is, I have
an iPad, I have a computer,
I have all of these different products,
but how can I connect them in a more interesting way?

Is there a way I can do something
where I can get drag-and-drop to really
work between devices as opposed
to on only one particular device?
So could I drag and drop through the screen?
And so, what you can probably see here essentially is I have my phone.
On my phone there are three photos, so it’s hard to really see that.

But there ‘s effectively three photos
on my phone that I can
basically drag through the
phone and drop on
the iPad What will happen
there is it will disappear and basically
appear on the iPad through
the phone so I don’t know
if you guys caught that, so basically on
this iPad right now, imagine
this is folder or an area waiting to receive a photo.

And on my phone, I effective
have some pre-photos that I’ve just taken.
I can drag them over, and go
ahead and drop through the
phone, and it will basically appear on the iPad.
So, that’s basically what Lift
is, it’s way of doing a different way of device interconnectivity.
So there you have
it: a couple other products we’re working on at Churn.

Thank you very much.

Churn Labs everyone.
Gnomes, I think, I
hope every other startup pitching
today has a gnome, ’cause the bar is set way high now.
Yoshi – gnomes I don’t
know how I will live
without gnomes from now on.
I want to become a gnome.

You ‘ve heard it here first.
Yoshi to become a gnome.

So lift looks very interesting.
It kinda reminds me of Bump
So is that a
future plan to have
like some type of
API that people can
use to leverage that Technology?

Yes, essentially, it is something
that we came across as we
were working on this Gnonstop Gnomes app.
We were sort of just not really really liking how device interconnectivity was working.

Right.

And so we are thinking.
And so that is a project that’s actually underway right now.
And as you said, it tends to remind us of Bump too.
So, perhaps it could used
in a similar way Both with
Sequoia as investors, so we’ll see how that works out.

Wow.

Interesting.
Chris?

I mean Omar is one
of the most successful entrepreneurs of
the last decade, so if
he says gnomes are the next
big thing, I think he knows more than I do.

It’s a huge number of gnome relate apps.

That’s right.

We’ll see what happens.

I think we
might lead the market in gnomes.

Are there any gnomes among the crowd or Are there any gnomes among the crowd?
Well, right now the application isn’t available yet.
Probably in one to two weeks.
Another magical process.
Then his app store approval has to happen and then hopefully it’ll be available.

That’s all right?
So, oh sorry David Well
, I was just going
to, I had Omar – Churn
Labs, Steve Jenks –
Schematic, Kevin Rose with
Milk, so there’s you
know some kind of key entrepreneurs
who have started these little labs,
how is that, how’s that
going it seems like,
I don’t know where you were in
the process with the other, obviously milk was just started.

It seems like you started a few months ago, or maybe late last year.

Yeah, I started late last year.
So, I think what your nding.
Probably among his latest crop of people is.
When some body goes
through a, when somebody’s in
a situation where they can do
what they want; a lot of people will say,
well I’m going to go
hang out on the beach or go skiing or whatever.

But I think for all
of us this is what we want to do.
We just like doing this.
And So, whether it’s something
that’s going to be ridiculous and
silly, or something that is going to be a little more serious.
This is actually what we enjoy doing.
And so, I think that just with the process that you’re seeing.

It’s not a particular, new, crazy
way of – the most efficient way to make money.
I’m pretty sure that it’s not, but it is what we enjoy doing.
So, I think that’s what all of us are doing.

Right.
So, Ryan, any questions or thoughts?

So hard to ask questions about gnomes, right?
I knew I would stump all your guys.
They’re they’re digging, “what do I know about gnomes, how can I”?

Yeah, you don’t have to ask me a question about gnomes.

No, why don’t I ask
why gnomes?

Why gnomes?

Yeah.

We just thought… honestly, the
concept of, we’re in
a place now where we’re going from
the proliferation of these smart phones to ubiquity.
Right now, everybody has them.
And so, I’m just interested to see if people will do this.
Like are they really going to,
like, connect their devices, pass a digital object
from one physical person to another and then will it matter.

Like 4 people down the chain,
am I gonna care that I’m getting photos back from this gnome?
It is going to be more interesting to me
than all these photos I’m getting on
Instagram, or all these other places
– because, lots of the
photos that he showed are completely
uninteresting, but they’re all funny
to us because we all
carry that gnome around, it’s like
this inside joke thatEverybody who had
the gnome or whatever it
is happens to be in on.

And so, I’m just curious to
see whether or not that
kind of social connection means anything.
We don’t know yet.
fine.

It reminds me a little bit of, do you guys geo cash?

Yes.

So, I like love geo cashing and
it’s like a million of people
that do it or whatever, and one of the cool things ready to see.
Had the little thing traveled around the world or whatever.
And it’s like Yeah, exactly.
You can see it on the map.
So, it’s pretty interesting.

Where my bill?
Where my dollar bill, where they stamp it.
I mean that was another one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And this augmented reality in
your picture where you can hold
up the phone and maybe see where the gnome might be in the future?

Yeah, actually that’s how it works.
So when you’re taking a picture –
we didn’t demo that part – but,
when you’re taking a picture, you actually
see the gnome, n the view finder.
And you can drag him around and resize him and turn him to scale and then position him.
That’s how all those pictures came to be.

So, it’s sort of augmented reality.

Are you gonna offer
non-gnome things – other objects that you could travel around?
Or, is it just gnomes for now?

For now, it’s just gnomes.
It would be a huge departure.
We’d have to be careful of that.
We don’t want to go crazy.

One thing, you’ve
got a lot of room for..
ya.
Alright, anymore gnome related questions?
Wow, you won the panel
over, everyone here is all gnome focus from now on.
Alright.

Big round of applause for Churn Labs.

Thanks very much.

Alright, and yeah great
way to end always gets to end on a gnome.
So just wanted to get one more

We’ve had really strong gross .
So 2009 we did a
100 million in gross
ticket sales.
in 2010 and we’ll be
worth more of 400 million this
year, close to half a billion which is exciting for us.
You know, I think when we hit the
billion dollar mark, extremely excited.

And what do you
see as, I mean, does,
there’s a lot of talk like Groupon
just filed their S1 two weeks
ago and everyone was so,
like, you know, excited about their
incredible revenue growth but then,
you know, there’s been a lot of
questions around whether this
is a defensible business model, they are just competitors move in and copy.

What do you guys see as, kind of, your moat, so to speak efensible.
Is it just the fact that you
have all of these long tail relationships and loyal customers?

Well, it’s really a few different areas.
So firstfirst and foremost is
that we’re a Silicon Valley company
and we’re building great product
and tech and really innovating
on that side.
So, you know, one example
of that is when you’re building
a payment and ticketing platform
and we’re building one that
allows customers to sign up and start selling tickets immediately.

You’re of course going to
attract an array of different fraudsters.
So, we have actually a data
services and anti-fraud team
to actually detect…

Because actually you’re an anti-fraud you don’t do it, you don’t?

That’s absolutely, this is the lesson from Zoom, lesson from PayPal.
It’s a very difficult problem
to solve, is how
do you trade off the security and convenience.
You want to make it very convenient for your 99% of the good customers.

Why does every company have to solve this symptom?
Why isn’t there, like, one company.
I don’t understand, so I’m
surprised that a ticketing has
to have their own fraud team, I guess.

You know, there’s components, there’s…

Yeahthe
way it works is the merchants
have to pay for the
charge backs, so there’s an incentive
to do it, but…

You know, that’s right.
I think credit card companies have
different anti-fraud techniques, but
when it comes down to it,
there’s a certain set of
circumstances where fraudsters will find
a way, and there
doesn’t seem to be any universal piece.
Now, you can use different tools from, you know..

I see.
So, you’ll have your own event specific
signals that indicate fraud that can’t be kind of?
OK.

Yeah, exactly.
It’s very nuanced.
I think that’s why.
It doesn’t make much sense
when you put it that way, but it’s extremely nuanced.
And for us, it’s definitely a
competitive advantage to have it in house.
Not many ticketing companies
are looking at the problem the way we are.

People, so someone with a stolen credit
wants to then use it to
go to an event, I guess,
because that’s a common thing.
I had my credit card stolen and
they went to a drugstore and
a gas station, apparently those are like the easiest things, I don’t know.

It’s not typically someone buying a
ticket with a stolen credit card
and actually showing up to the
event, it’s actually, just becauseWe
are self service platform and anybody
can create an event, you know,
that presents opportunity for
fraudsters to run credit cards through our system.
And so we’ve built this
team of super intelligent people
who can attack these fraudsters
algorithmically and, and
basically, you know, not even,
I mean, I would say
like paid So they create
xactly, you’ll get like
a Ukranian gang say
market, you know, there’s
this dark, seedy market on
RSC and so on for
stolen credit cards and how
do you extract the money from that.
So you run them through
and then really the
as possible, get it into their bank account.
So, you of course draw
these nefarious characters and
you’ve got to be able to
identify and stop those before that money goes out.

And it’s not about stopping everything.
It is exactly what you
just touched upon, which is that
we actually have committed ourselves
to trying to get our customers
the money as quickly as we can.
So, their ticket sales that
are running through Eventbrite should be
in their pocket, you know, in real time, ultimately.

But, to do that you have
to have a good, intelligent
line of defense and that you’re
not just getting, you know, completely…

Yeah, yeah.
Interesting.
So, you have a new product that you just announced?

Yes, we have great tech.
We have been working on
this almost a year, our mobile box office team.
We call it Eventbrite at the Door.
And it’s a way to
collect money, look up
will call, run reports at
the door of events so traditionally
all of our sales has happened
at the pre sale and online.
That is really what you want

Yeah I’ve done, the print out of the ticket or whatever, right?

That’s exactly right.
And with this iPad
based application, you can
now collect money at
the door, swipe credit cards,
collect cash, and really tie the two systems together.

You’re still married.
Yeah.

There’s often, there is debate.
There, this is, you know,
there’s a few famous companies
where they’ve been sort of
think, I don’t know
from where but we find it
to be extremely advantageous for us.
I think in any company especially
in a start up you look for
a strong founding team and a strong partnership.

And so that’s what we have.
You know, as I mentioned we
were engaged when we started
Eventbrite and we had
never lived together before, and so
we went from being in
a long distance relationship to living
together and working in
a windowless, but
we have complimentary skills.
But it’s not all you know
fluff and warm and fuzzy.

So we have pretty strict rules for ourselves.is
that we follow to make sure
that one doesn’t to
collide into the other and we
don’t affect our relationships or
affect our baby, the business, Eventbrite.

And so we learned a
really valuable lesson early on
from Michael and Sochi Burch
who founded Bebo, who are
sort of our mentors and good friends.
They said “Divide and conquer; never
work on the same project at the same time.”
We have actually followed on that
to a T for the last five years.
And you prioritize, we have
a small daughter and she’s
three, that adds a whole
other layer of complexity so
we prioritize accordingly and we’re partners.

So it really works for us.
And I think it sets the tone for the company and the culture.
We have an extremely balanced culture.
Our executive team is
comprised of five females
and three males right now.
So it’s actually maybe not so balanced.
But we just have a great
culture where people know that
we care deeply about the
company and that we
just happen to make really great partners.

You mentioned your complementary skills.
Do you need a third How do
you guys generally think about team composition?
Mean like who
brought which skills to the table?
So Julia is really
focused on culturing team building
and really finding that right chemistry.

Does she have a big roll apart of the company?

Yeah, she’s a. You know,
I would say one of the challenges
I had at Zoom is I
hired a lot on IQ and
not as much on chemistry or
EQ and Julia’s helped
bring that to the company
and that’s been absolutely critical.

Just kind of in the PayPal DNA,
right, sort of like there
is like hyper intelligent people who…

Absolutely.

Not that they’re low IQ.
But they were just like super super high IQ and like…

Yes.
and the issue is, and
fortunately, for the most part it
didn’t happen at PayPal, was
that under stressful situations
when you have those personalities
and you don’t have chemistry, you have a lot of tension.
So really thinking about the chemistry
as well as the intelligence.
And Angela has really brought that to the company.

Renaud is our
CTO and architect and
has really been, you
know, chief in building the platform.
And I don’t know what I’d do.
I’d be gone.
Going to shows.

Kind of takes it to new heights.
It’s all about strategy.

Yeah.
So, what is your
long term, is your long term goal
to, I guess you’ve
sold the company, and obviously
a very successful company.
Is your goal to sell the company?
Is it your goal to?

We’ve got a big independent company
that we’re just getting started.
We’ll do 400 million
in gross ticket sales this
year and we want to
grow that to the billions and tens
of billions over time.
We’re moving internationally, we’re moving
up into larger events, we
have, we’re only
really one percent of the way
there in terms of building
this business out.

So we’re in it for the long run.
and we want to be an independent
stand alone public company when the time is right.

Do you, I mean, you’re someone who started 3 companies.
You want this to be your last
or, I mean, a lot
of people they, serial entrepreneurs
they want to go do another
one or something but this like
this is your This has a
very long, you know legs.
It has very long legs
to it, so it seems a life time of work.

So you can see it being interesting.

Yeah, somebody else just recently asked us what our exit strategy is for the two of us.
And I said when we die because at some point.

Yeah.

We really have out, like, wow
if we’re lucky
enough we’ll be doing this enjoy, we love the team.
It’s a very cohesive team.
I think it’s a
very special group that we’ve
taken years actually to assemble and have that right chemistry.
So, it’s a special thing to
be able to come accomplish all these great things.

So if people watching
are say aspiring entrepreneurs.
What would be your top advice you might give them?

I would say be astutely
observational and flexible.
So for us, I think our
biggest successes have come
out of always keeping your
eyes open and always being
willing to capitalize on what could be a new opportunity.
That doesn’t mean you get, go off all over the place and get scattered.
Really really understand what those
opportunities are when they present
themselves and immediately jump on them.

I think that’s one of the reasons
why we’re so deeply ingrained with
social commerce because we saw
that trend as it was
happening, as we were
watching the data and the metrics, you know, fanatically.

And I would say complementing that is talent density.
So it’s a very frothy period right now.
There’s a lot of opportunities out there
and I fear that the talent
has been spread thin
and really maintaining very high
standards and keeping, you
know, really being
patient to bring the right
people, again, with the right chemistry on board.

Yeah, people have, a lot of
people have found that I talk
to have said that the biggest
competition now is not, you
know, Google, Facebook, other start ups it’s people starting a company themselves.

Absolutely.
There is a theory that says the
reason that Google and PayPal were
so successful is that they
came out of the dot com
wreckage when they could scoop
up all the talent when all the startups had dissipated.
And that’s a big challenge right now.

Are you still actively angel-investing?

I have slowed down significantly and
part of it is Is is because you’re busy or because on and off the air or both?

A combination of both.
It ‘s, one is that
we’ve got so much
on our plate and so much
to do with the events right now, but
secondly it is hard to
distinguish so many companies getting
started, that I’m stepping back a little.
My last investment was a
company called Pintrest, though, and really love the business.

And you’re also an investor
in Airbnb, which seems like
a wildly successful company.

Airbnb is incredible.
My perspective of it, it’s distributed storage.
So, if you think of hotels as
a, you know, as kind of enterprise class storage.
We have to maintain these structures, and so on.

Is it peer to peer?

Yeah, Airbnb is this wonderful model.
It was, Keith Jauther and
I invested in it two years ago.
And it felt weird, but
just seeing the people using it.
You always look and see the
behavior on the service
and then seeing Nate, Joe, and Brian.
They’re a remarkable trio of
founders, very inspiring and
again, it’s how I
learned is by seeing
great entrepreneurs like that in action.

Yeah.
OK.
Great.
Well, that’s a great investment.
I think we’re out of time, so thanks much for being here.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chris.

OK.