Keep at it!  But concentrate on development and creating an actual solution more than investment if you can.

I've been part of several startups (CTO several times), founded my own (classic "Internet startup" last cycle, and various other little companies), worked in small and large companies, been part of W3C and IETF standardization efforts, and worked with government customers.  I've given pitches to investors, helped others shop ideas or companies, and demoed and/or pitched projects to various customers, winning plenty of large projects.

And, I am very interested in solving a large set of problems are answered by solutions such as a "semantic desktop".  I have experienced and observed many pain points and inefficiencies around knowledge management, organization, and visualization that I have been building solutions to.  I have put in a lot of R&D over the last several years, have a lot of strong ideas, and have gone deep on some of the dev tech required.  If I build just what I currently know how to do, I'll have a killer app & service.

I'm perpetually about to dig into actual product implementation...  Knowing how various levels of investors are, plus having experienced the problem of lack of vision that is rampant, I've decided the only reasonable play here is to bootstrap a useful product.  Although it takes longer, perhaps too long, to get to market, it cuts the wasted time and headache of dealing with that angle.  Additionally, it takes a lot of the pressure off business model decisions.  I can release a free app if I want without deadlines a certain income level.  I wouldn't necessarily refuse a particularly enthusiastic and trustworthy investment source that came to believe in me, but I'm not wasting time chasing it.  And, I suspect, that path may run counter to some of my goals.

Luckily, practically no one seems to be exploring the directions I want to go in the way that I'm going there.  There are real customers with real problems.  I am directly attacking those to get something to market as soon as I can, selling shovels along the way to fund my development / sharpen my knowledge / skills along the way.  Some of what I'm putting together is radical enough that it will be a "try it, you'll like it" far more than "just imagine it works this way".  Expect a chronic lack of vision.  I have been running my interfaces in my head for a year.  I've stopped expecting I can do the same with others to any useful degree.  I have good stories to illustrate this problem...

I do plan to integrate with many other things, have open data/metadata, and partner when interesting, however I have everything I need to crank out something very useful.  Except perhaps available time and concentration.

Stephen

On 11/18/10 8:41 AM, Juan Sequeda wrote:

Leo,

I go through the excitement/trouble of explaining and pitching semantic web in general to VCs, angels, entrepreneurs almost on a weekly basis. Few things I have learned from 4 years of actively doing this (from an american perspective... I don't know how it is in europe):

- Never ever use "semantic web" in your introduction. It is a red flag and people will not take you seriously. (sad but true... I've had people laugh in my face)
- explain what is the problem that "semantic web" is solving. Saying "linking data" doesn't mean anything. What does "adding semantics" mean? I usually say" try to FIND for football players who went to UT Austin and have played for the Dallas Cowboys as cornerbacks". People will realize that they can't use google to do this. Then if I have a laptop, I'll show them faceted browsing on top of DBpedia and how I can get that answer. Now people are paying attention. It wasn't possible to do this in 2006 :)
- I've got the semantic web pitch down in two areas
   1) Using "semantic tags" you can become more visible on google, yahoo.. SEO and stuff ---> use RDFa
   2) If you have several databases and would like to make queries on them at the same time  ---> using RDB2RDF for data integration

Remember that investors hear pitches all the time. You need to stand out. Be unique. and do that in less than 2 min! So be short and concrete. Go straight to the point. Tell them something they didn't know. Some interesting statistic... and if it involves them, even better. You want them to leave the room remembering you and in case somebody asked them the next day about their pitch, they are able to summarize it in one sentence. What is that sentence? If you don't know what that sentence is.. then you don't have a pitch yet.

As timeline during the pitch, if you don't grab the attention of your audience in the first 30sec - 1min, you lost. So be able to explain what the problem is, and what is your solution. Depending on the investors (west cost USA), all they care is if you can get a lot of people to use your solution and don't really care if you can make money initially. The idea is always that if you have millions of people using your solution, someday you will figure out how to make money (twitter). Other investors will care about how you are going to make money (enterprise investors). So be explicit with you competitive advantage. What makes you different and unique. Why can't other do what you are doing. It could be because you have the best team, you patented the technology, or discovered a new market.

sorry if I went too much off topic.

Good luck! keep us posted with your venture.

Juan Sequeda
+1-575-SEQ-UEDA
www.juansequeda.com <http://www.juansequeda.com>


On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 1:27 AM, Leo Sauermann <leo.sauermann@gnowsis.com <mailto:leo.sauermann@gnowsis.com>> wrote:

    Dear Tim,
    SWIG


    My Current Task is somehow tricky:

    I am pitching our company Gnowsis to investors. It makes an Enquire-Like
    Semantic Desktop, a personal semantic web. It seems investors
    only understand anything on the level of "we do twitter for dogs" or "it
    sells crowdsourced clothes via mobile phones".


    So Tim, as Elder of the Web, I turn to you for an expert opinion to
    reassure we do a useful thing.


    Here are the Statements I patch together from "weaving the web" etc.:

    Enquire - linking everything bidirectionally is an
    entire new way of writing.
    I guess you also realized that the system changes the way you look at
    things and your
    thinking.

    WWW - give everyone a tool (read/write) web that everyone
    can publish information. The links are first unidirectional and untyped
    and will be typed
    "later", once the RDF riddle was solved in 1999.

    SemanticDesktop/PersonalDataWikis/PersonalSemanticWeb - we finally give
    the peoples the
    Enquire that Tim already used in the distant and mysterious past.
    The first distributable results are NEPOMUK-KDE, PesonalDataWikis,
    Personal Data Lockers, and services around this idea of personal
    semantic web services for personal information management.


    The question:
    Tim,
    Is this THE idea?

    Do you agree this is a sensible thing to do?



    If yes, then my argumentation to investors and to myself is:
    "TimBl basically inventend blogging, wikipedia, and twitter with the
    idea of a read/write WWW, which it originally always included. You can
    trust that guy to be clever. You can also be assured this was around
    before, some ideas for millenia, some since Memex.
    Now Gnowsis works to realize the proto-idea - Enquire. There must be
    something going on here. Dear Investors, look at it, spend some time
    understanding what happens here with technology and then invest."


    Sometimes I feel like Frodo and together with Bernhard "Sam" Schandl we
    go alone to Mount Doom ("Microsoft Outlook") to finally throw the Ring
    of RDF into its center, to crack it open to the web. Then I see you guys
    over at the Minas Tirith of LinkedOpenData and data.gov <http://data.gov> and the battles
    Martin Hepp fights with GoodRelations and ... there is hope :-)



    ok, looking for interesting answers
    best
    Leo Sauermann, Dr.
    CEO and Founder

    mail: leo.sauermann@gnowsis.com <mailto:leo.sauermann@gnowsis.com>
    mobile: +43 6991 gnowsis
    http://www.gnowsis.com

    helping people remember,

    so join our newsletter
    http://www.gnowsis.com/about/content/newsletter
    ____________________________________________________

-- 
Leo Sauermann, Dr.
CEO and Founder

mail: leo.sauermann@gnowsis.com
mobile: +43 6991 gnowsis           
http://www.gnowsis.com

helping people remember,

so join our newsletter
http://www.gnowsis.com/about/content/newsletter
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