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Today I want to present you Altodot | Social Marketing Technology, my latest, biggest, and most exiting start-up that I’ve been involved so far.

Altodot is a company which develops technology over social platforms. We understand people, we understand virality, and we definitely understand the technology that allows us to get your company successfully inside the social world by making a great mix of those elements. Social Apps is our core business (specially Facebook Apps), and we’re working on our own social marketing platform, integrated to all major social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, OpenSocial) so that we can add value to lots of companies who are trying to get on board.

Altodot officially started in August 2009 when we hired our first employees and a small office in Belgrano, Buenos Aires (always staying lean), a few weeks later we were legally a real company. (An update of our new offices is coming soon).

My fellows, partners and friends that are fighting hard next to me at Altodot are Claudio Cohen (the most dedicated, honest and geekest guy I ever met) and Anton Chalbaud, who left his position as CRO at Sonico.com to start over again with us, which demonstrates once again his true entrepreneur vision of business and life (the reason I admire him).

In only 5 months we went from success to success, having a stable and growing company today that continuously adds value to our clients, full of energy to keep learning and becoming more professional each day.

To learn more about Altodot, visit www.altodot.com or our blog at blog.altodot.com. By the way, if you’re a challenge seeker, check out jobs.altodot.com for opening positions.

You can also follow us on twitter at twitter.com/altodot and our company profile at CrunchBase.

I invite you to read our welcome post at our blog here. Below there’s an interview at Ideando.tv about Altodot, and you can download here a PDF version of another interview on a regional newspaper made by Fernando Quiroz (both in spanish).

Stay tunned!
Matias

paterlinimatias Entrepreneurship, Facebook, Social Media altodot, facebook apps, social apps

A few days ago I saw a really interesting slide from a presentation made by Dave McClure (founder of lots companies in Silicon Valley), it was called “How to pitch a VC (aka startup viagra)” , and I want to focus on one of those slides which really made it drastically clear how important is to have a great team with you, instead of just having great ideas. Your Team must be filled of superheroes, rockstars, etc. and the most important thing is that they all need to have “balls of steel”.

And when I was reading that presentation, it reminded me my first answer from a VC:

“Sounds great!, send me an executive summary!, oh, I almost forgot, send me a full detailed bio about each people on your team!!!”.

At some point you will be tested about the way that you’ll get your project done by the way you built your team before, and by your ability to find “exclusive” partners and employees!

I heard an interesting phrase a couple of years ago saying:

“It’s more important who’s going with you, than where you are going…”

Taking the right people with you will determine how far are you going to go. It’s not that if you have a clear vision of your goals and so much effort you will get there. It’s a lie, because, if you have the wrong people going with you, you could find yourself fighting the wind on an uphill.

Instead, if you have the right people on your team, they can amplify your vision, they can break your mental limits, they will make you think out of your box and you will probably have a new horizon at the end of the journey.

In coaching we use a very important phrase:

“Nobody goes further than their relationship network allows…”

We live in a relationship world, and this was so true even before Facebook and Social Media appeared. In some way, Mark and the other guys after him knew this and found a way to take advantage from it, and to add value to people by creating great tools that will help us hit the right person, that will help us make our project a successful company.

It’s more important to have a small percentage of something huge than having a big percentage of nothing. A great idea is nothing without a team pushing and pushing hard to make it real. Let them be part of your dream and they will spend their efforts non stopping!. People’s efforts are determined by their mayor compromises.

If your team believes in your project, then you’ll have too many possibilities of having success. Share your vision constantly, and get your people involved. If you have money, pay great salaries, if you don’t, be generous when you share your stock, let them work happy! That must be your mayor investment because their minds will only have place to think how to make your project an art piece, instead of asking themselves if it’s the right place to work.

And my last advice, pay attention to your peoples disadvantages and weakness, and check how malleable are they. If you are aware of this, you will have the possibility to work on those problems, but be sure to have malleable people on your team, and of course be sure they want to keep learning every day!

Matias Paterlini

Post written for YoungTechStars.com

Original URL: http://www.youngtechstars.com/entrepreneurship/the-importance-of-building-a-dream-team

paterlinimatias Entrepreneurship, Social Media company, compromises, employees, Entrepreneurship, heroes, team

Facebook 534, Twitter: 35, Linkedin: 34. If you’re asking what are those numbers, they represent how valuable are those projects for certain people (in millions dollars invested!!). Those are just a couple of samples of how much funding can get a web project. But how far is going to be yours?

I always liked to merge entrepreneurship with leadership. I think that an entrepreneur needs to be a good leader to be successful, and a leader by default, is generating new things all the time, he’s taking people to places that they couldn’t go alone (sometimes they couldn’t even imagine to be there) and that’s done by being creative, by looking forward, and staying sharp as a leader.

But “generate new things” it’s not the only job for an entrepreneur. The reason that companies like Facebook went so far, or that startups like Twitter or LinkedIn are going so far in the middle of this crisis, it’s not because they’re lucky, but it’s because they’re leading the process which includes overcoming difficult times.

I have failed sometimes in the past, even when there were great forecasts announcing really high revenues, I saw great ideas die after a hard reality hit them. But I reject to talk about this “crisis” that everybody’s talking about, I prefer to say “Silence, I kill you” (see Achmed video for reference) to the idea of a global crisis because the way we talk, the things we say, the conversations that we maintain have impact in our reality, that’s why I always prefer to talk about possibility. We need to understand our reality, but as entrepreneurs, as leaders, as people that live on the cutting edge technology we must talk about a possible future, always.

There’s a very interesting principle that the ontology studies which says something like: “The human being is a linguistic being”, which means that the second thing that we do all the time after thinking is talking. That said, we really need to think about what we’re saying!.

The second principle that I learned, is that “the language is a reality generator tool”, every time you declare something with your mouth, you’re generating changes, when a judge says Jail to somebody, he’s changing somebody else’s life. The same happens when you declare that you’re done with something, that 2009 is not the best year to start anything, or to invest time on anything. When you say that kind of things you’re actually “jailing yourself”, probably without being aware of that.

I always remember three advices that helped me be strong in those “critical times” in the past.

1) “If somebody did it before, then you can make it”. When I see countries rising up after very long wars, or after horrible events like 9/11, when I see them strong again, I think that’s a miracle, but it’s not. Whenever you feel like you can’t keep up, whenever you feel that you have spent too much effort on your project without any reward, think about this kind of events, they will show you that there’s nothing impossible, that there’s not a situation that you can’t overcome if you really strive with a strong entrepreneur’s vision, being focused on the future.

2) “A leader is never dropped, he’s always rising up”. As I said I had difficult times in the past, times where I didn’t have even one dollar for the bus to go to a meeting. But you can’t quit just because you feel tired, you can’t forget about your vision because it’s difficult to keep up. Leave your projects when you feel that it’s done, when you feel that the time has passed to that idea, but not because you’re holding fear about the future, or because someone else is saying you can’t.

3) “Go get the opportunity, don’t wait for it”. It starts in your language, it’s starts in your brain where you let your thoughts exist. Don’t believe that phrase saying that the opportunity comes next to the crisis. The real entrepreneurs are those who generate the opportunity with their efforts, their passion of what they do, and their constancy in those difficult times. You won’t find people touched by a wand, that didn’t happen to those companies that I mentioned before, they just remained strong, and as Steve Jobs said, they probably remained hungry and foolish too, that’s how they got so far!.

Two days ago I posted my goals for 2009 at Facebook and somebody told me: “isn’t that too much?”, that remembered me a great phrase that I want to share with you, specially today:

“We all live under the same sky, but we don’t all have the same horizon.”

Matias Paterlini

Article originally written for YoungTechStars.com

paterlinimatias Entrepreneurship, Social Media Entrepreneurship, Facebook, leadership, opportunity, possibility, twitter

For some reason, all of the conversations I have had with entrepreneurs in the past two weeks, the main conversation that we’ve shared was about being or not being funded. Some people wants to sell advertisement cheaper while their project grows, some others prefer to get the funding before starting, and some others prefer a mix of both ideas.

I know this is a very difficult topic. As a matter of fact, one of the things that came up while I was talking to these guys was that there wasn’t an agreement between the associates and partners about looking for investors for the projects that they were working on.

Success without venture capitalists or angel investors is completely possible. Perfect case of this is Meneame in Spain, which created an amazing company with almost nothing. Even more, I understand that the context in which entrepreneurs and developers undertake their projects is completely different across the board. For example, People in foreign countries have to fight for their startups, while others make a couple of calls and meetings and that’s it. In any case, there’s always the question of going out to offer your idea, your dream, your efforts or not…

About this matter there are several stances:

• Those who are scared about having investors behind them.
• Those who think that their business is not ready for an investor, and those who think it’s ready when it actually isn’t.
• Those who want to be owners of the whole thing, without adding strangers into their magical circle.
• Those who want to wait some time before asking for help.

If  you belong to one of these groups , I want to share with you four “thoughts” that may help you in your decision to  look for funding or not.

1. The growing curve is not always the same. There are certain kind of tech projects that by default, require too much time to grow. The fact of having a angel investor accelerates the process of growing, but you have to be sure that your business is ready for a jump, and be sure that it will grow if you have that money on your back, because I insist, there are projects that will take time to grow even if you spent huge amounts of money and time.
2. Don’t let your business die of success. I have a friend who is a successful entrepreneur of 20 years old , and he always say that if you launch your idea when it’s still not ready for success, you will kill the idea, and it won’t get over. There are certain ideas that are so great, but if you push them when they’re not ready you can disappoint users, and it will be too difficult to make them give a try again. There’s a coaching principle that says “There’s not a second chance to give a initial good impression.”.
3. Show me your idea working, and show me what people think about it!. There was a debate at Le Web 08 (about two months ago) between a couple of VC and experienced entrepreneurs. One of the things that all of them completely agreed is that If you want to get an investment, the majority of the times VC’s are expecting you to show your idea working. The other clear result from that debate was that if people find your project useful, if people wants to get your product or service, then VCs just can’t say NO because it’s the market saying “I want it”.
4. Don’t loose the momentum. I’ve been working on social network applications the last year, and launching in time is so important. Google says “launch early and iterate”, and somebody also said “Keep is simple”. You shouldn’t expect to get the best service ever on your style before launching, because when you launch there will probably be 3 services already working with a growing community and it will be so hard to generate your own community after that.

I would have liked to have these tips before starting or launching some projects that I killed in the past, but now these are are my daily checkpoints list before starting or launching anything. I hope you can learn from them too, and it would be great to have your opinion about this topic. So please feel free to make your comments.

Matias Paterlini

This article was originally written for youngtechstars.com. Original URL: http://www.youngtechstars.com/entrepreneurship/to-be-or-not-to-be-funded

paterlinimatias Entrepreneurship, Social Media Entrepreneurship, financing, funds, grow, startup, success

If you want to create a rocket and put your flag on the moon, let me tell you it is late my friend. If you want to sell a million flying cars in the states, it’s probably not the right moment. One of the most important things that will make you successful is to be completely aware of what you’re doing, know exactly the time to do it, as well as the current status of the market.

“Finding the right idea is almost as important as finding the right time.”

When I was having my coaching training the first lesson that they gave us was “The future is all possibility!!”, but if we want to see the OPPORTUNITY, we need to be good observers of what’s happening around us. I saw many business fail because they didn’t take this in to account. I have a friend who wanted to put a computer shop together for years, but when he started his company it was a complete mess. 6 months later, he had to close the store.  Today, the idea wouldn’t be as succesful due to the fact there are big retailers with better prices in better places.

If I make a review of each of my four startups even when not all of them were successful and others are just beginning, I find that everyone of them was started when it came time. My first startup was a christian mobile contents company; it was the first one in Latin America and we’ve been alone in the market for more than 8 months. The second was a real state platform which provides websites to real state agents. We are still the only ones offering that service. The next was a new format to sell properties using videos over the internet and television- there’s nothing like that in Argentina yet. And the last one, a social media development company which was working on social media even when people didn’t know about Facebook in our country.

I really had that advice in mind before I started anything, but How can we know when It Is time??? Let me answer this with a short story in my own words.

“There was two rough fat woodcutters who were called the Kings of the handsaw. Nobody could beat them, till the day that two young and thin guys got into the business and started making twice the production that the kings were doing. Of course none of the woodcutters could understand what was happening, because they double their efforts to increase their production, but nobody could reach the young guys marks. So one day they decided to pay attention to the successful woodcutters and they found that they were taking 15 minutes every day sharpening their handsaw before doing anything.”

If we want to see when is the right moment for an idea or startup, we have to be sharp. How Can We Be Sharp?

Three “How-To” Methods of Staying Sharp:

• Take Advantage of Twitter Momentum: If you’re on the net, you have to be on twitter. There are at least two or three special moments in the day that have momentum and those are the moments between 6 and 7 AM PST (9and 10am EST). That is when people get up and check all the tweets from the people they’re following. In the morning you can see the biggest amount of hot news about technology, startups, and the market. Of course you can read blogs too, but tweeter works like a efficient filter of the hottest changes in the world. That early moment in the day people are concentrated on twitter, paying attention to the new followers, so that is the moment when you can find opportunities, where you can hear the world telling you “This is the moment”, or “Not Yet”.
• Take care of your blindspots. Our eyes give us 180 grades of visibility, that means that you always have blindspots where you don’t know what’s happening. So, I think that one of the most helpful tools is to follow someone that you respect on your field. In the past you had to go to a monastery, or to the heights on the mountains. Nowadays we have lots of ways to follow people such us twitter, blogs, rss, email newsletters, etc. If you don’t have at least one person from which you are learning constantly, try to get one because  that will allow you to see something that your probably not aware of.
• Never lose your passion. The passion will help you take those risky decisions in the right moment, it will help you make unbelievable efforts when it’s required, and to fight for that dream that you have. If you fell like getting unenthusiastic, then you should open your eyes and get in contact with passionate people who are going to show you that success is still possible, and will put fuel into your entrepreneur’s heart.

Matias Paterlini

This article was originally written for youngtechstars.com. Original URL: http://www.youngtechstars.com/?p=263

paterlinimatias Entrepreneurship, twitter Entrepreneurship, opportunity, passion, success, ventures

It seems that it’s time to start blogging properly since I just know that I’m gonna be part of Young Tech Stars Blog which will be launched in January 12.

YoungTechStars.com is a website driven by a group of bright and talented individuals, all of whom are under the age of 35. YoungTechStars.com brings you to the core of the technology community by discussing hot topics, trends, and reviews while providing clear, concise tips and advice.

We have a variety of expert contributors in Marketing/Branding, Design, E-Commerce and Entrepreneurship.  Each week, the website will feature three posts (which will be highlighted in the wide screen display on the homepage) from the categories listed above.  Be sure to check each category and RSS feed the sections you are interested in.

This is such an honor to me, and I wanted to share this awesome news with you.

Cheers!!

Matias Paterlini

paterlinimatias Entrepreneurship Entrepreneurship, technology, youngtechstars

This is a note I received from Lee Lorenzen in the group Official Altura Ventures & AppFactory Facebook Investment Fund at Facebook. It really deserves to be read!!!

Here’s the note:

In a recent post (see http://www.insidefacebook.com/2008/12/16/facebook-now-growing-by-over-600000-users-a-day-and-new-engagement-stats/), Justin Smith noted that Facebook should reach 200 million users in March 2009. I’ve long been a Facebook Fan and had predicted about 18 months ago that this milestone was coming faster than almost everyone else was expecting.

In August 2007, I wrote a post that extrapolated from Facebook’s historical growth rates as follows:

FB 2004 (Dec. 31) — 1 million
FB 2005 (Dec. 31) — 5 million
FB 2006 (Dec. 31) — 12 million
FB 2007 (Apr. 26) — 20 million
FB 2007 (Aug. 1) — 30 million
FB 2007 (Dec. 31) — 50+ million
FB 2008 (June 6) — 100+ million
FB 2008 (Dec. 31) — 200+ million

So as the end of the year approaches, it looks like Facebook may have missed my 200+ million mark by around 3 months time.

Not a bad prediction, huh?

Before anyone else brings it up, I must say that my other prediction regarding Facebook’s ultimate valuation being $100 billion seems a bit less prescient with respect to them hitting this lofty valuation at the same time that they hit their 200 million active user mark.

However, I still believe that Facebook will eventually scale the valuation heights. The reason for my faith in Facebook is the incredible stickiness of their site and my firm belief that someone will crack the nut on extracting revenue from Facebook’s loyal users.

The reality is that almost no one who reaches a certain critical mass of facebook friends (made up of a mix of family, college buddies, relatives, business colleagues, etc.) is going to stop going to the Facebook site. Nor is anyone going to bother recreating this picture of their social graph again on a competitive site (especially now that any site who wants to can simply inherit this data via Facebook Connect). This gives Facebook an incredibly long time horizon to finally figure out a monetization method that will extract a significant amount of revenue per year from the online activities of their 200+ million users both on the Facebook site itself and on other sites that leverage the Facebook profile data.

What will it take to reach a $100 Billion Valuation?

Assuming a valuation rate equal to 5x sales (i.e., $100 billion valuation means $20 billion in annual revenues) and an ultimate active user base of 500 million active users, Facebook would need $40 in annual revenue from each of its users to justify a $100 billion valuation. This level of revenue will probably come from a mix of display advertising, keyword search advertising, friend-to-friend gifting fees, micro-payments for private group access, customer acquisition fees (e.g., credit cards, car loans, mortgage refinancing, etc.), product referral fees, mall membership fees from merchants and per-transaction fees from the use of the Facebook checkout system (and other Facebook Connect-related services like a Facebook-branded credit card).

Based on this, my predictions for Facebook’s active users and annual revenue for the next 6 years are as follows:

FB 2009 (Dec. 31) — 250+ million, $500 million, $2.00 per user per year
FB 2010 (Dec. 31) — 300+ million, $1 billion, $3.33 per user per year
FB 2011 (Dec. 31) — 350+ million, $3.5 billion, $10.00 per user per year
FB 2012 (Dec. 31) — 400+ million, $5 billion, $20.00 per user per year
FB 2013 (Dec. 31) — 450+ million, $13.5 billion, $30.00 per user per year
FB 2014 (Dec. 31) — 500+ million, $20 billion, $40.00 per user per year

We’ll see you in six years to compare notes.

Thanks,
Lee Lorenzen
CEO, Altura Ventures
LeeL@altura.com

paterlinimatias Entrepreneurship, Facebook, Social Network Altura, capital, Facebook, Lee lorenzen, predictions, revenue, venture

I’m so glad to tell you that I’ve been awarded as a Young Entrepreneur from Buenos Aires for my startup VirtualInmobiliario.com

Virtualinmobiliario is an integrator of technology solutions for the real state market. The first stage of our project was to build an easy to use platform that allows realtors to have their webpage at their own domain, by just paying a monthly fee.

We’ve developed the platform with the guidance of My parter Claudio Bianchi who is close to become a Realtor in the next months.

I also want to specifically thank to RED Estudio with Ignacio Repetto in front, and Manuel Contreras who is my faithfull collaborator now.

You can see more pictures at my Facebook album: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=45221&l=2c1b2&id=587412625

Cheers!!

Matias Paterlini

paterlinimatias Entrepreneurship, virtualinmobiliario claudiobianchi, entrepreneur, feba, fedaje, ucip, virtualinmobiliario, young

One of my basic goals in life is helping others. There are plenty of ways to do that, but I had the tremendous pleasure of working with social network applications that are involved one way or the other to different causes.

I want to tell you today about Everywun. Everywun has a vision to change philanthropy by putting badges about different causes on everyone’s profiles, blogs, websites, etc. that generates lots of traffic and spread the vision of those organizations at the same time that it generates income from brand sponsors that support those causes. Every one wins, Everywun!

This is the about page info:

Our mission is to enable every person and business to participate in making a better world – regardless of their situations and circumstances.

Everywun is a growing grassroots campaign to change the face of philanthropy and enable every person to support the causes that they care about. We do this thanks to our philanthropic “badge” network which enables people to procure virtual badges at www.everywun.com, and put them on their Facebook pages, blogs, and websites. These badges do three things:

1. Show that you want to make a better world.
2. Raise awareness for your favorite cause.
3. Raise funds for your favorite cause.

You can register at Everywun http://www.everywun.com , get a badge, put it on your facebook profile. http://apps.facebook.com/everywun_badges and start supporting your cause.

So this is one of the Startups/clients/causes that I’m very proud to be working with, and I hope you can find the potential of this vision too.

My other goal is to become a successful entrepreneur generating not only money but also a great set of  projects that add value to people and society. This could be far yet, don’t really know but I’m doing my best to generate the right context to let that vision grow up, and I thank all those who accepted my friend request, people who I’m learning from all the time.

I’ve been also collaborating with 911ice.org and currently starting to help Greenpeace Argentina, I’ll tell you about those experiences later.

Cheers,

Matias Paterlini

paterlinimatias Entrepreneurship, Facebook causes, everywun, marketing, opportunities, sponsors

In my deep desire of becoming a successful entrepreneur in the near future, I found this excellent article that describes my feelings every time a face a new opportunity in my life. I took it from Evan Williams (Twitter CEO) Blog, and I want to share it with you:

Starting a company is like landing on the shore of a deserted island

“You have a certain amount of provisions, which you have to make last until you find a way to make the island sustain life—or convince someone to send you more.

You don’t know how big the island is at first or what predators lie in wait.

There’s always a chance someone else will raid your island if it looks fruitful, so you need to shore up your defenses.

Eventually, if you’re successful, you’ll be king of your own prosperous world. If not, you’ll die—or, at least, have to go home.

Either way, it’s a fun adventure (until you get eaten by a tiger).”

Original post: http://evhead.com/2008/10/starting-company-is-like-landing-on.html

With passion!

Matias

paterlinimatias Entrepreneurship business, entrepreneurs, opportunity, startup