Ashton Kutcher started dabbling in tech startups a few years ago, but he is no longer a dabbler, as his his Disrupt interview with Charlie Rose last week made clear. Kutcher is an investor in a dozen tech companies, including Skype, Foursquare, Path, and Kevin Rose’s Milk. In this backstage interview with Sarah Lacy, he reveals that he is also an investor in AirBnB (whose CEO Brian Chesky was also at Disrupt) and why he thinks the company is different.

Kutcher talks about his approach to investing in startups. At first it was very much a leraning process for him. “I became an apprentice” to other tech investors, he says, because “I don’t like to fail.”

Will investing become more of a hobby now that he is about to start a full-time job replacing Charlie Sheen on the CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men? Not at all, he says. Sitcom hours are much more predictable than movie-set hours. You can expect Kutcher to keep investing.

IAC-owned Match.com has set its sights on Europe’s largest dating site, Meetic.com. Match Match.com has put in a public tender offer to acquire all of the outstanding shares of Meetic for €15.00 per outstanding share in cash (that’s $21.42 in U.S. dollars). That’s a 11.6 percent increase in value from the closing price of Meetic shares on May 27, 2011 (€13.44) and values the company at nearly $500 million.

Match.com actually already owns approximately 27% of the outstanding shares of Meetic, which it obtained when it combined its European businesses with Meetic in 2009. Back then, IAC sold 100 percent of the stock of Match Europe – the entity that houses Match.com's European operations – for an approximate 27 percent stake in Meetic, plus a 5 million euro note.

Marc Simoncini, Meetic’s founder and Chairman, has agreed to offer Match.com approximately 3.7 million shares, representing approximately 16% of the total number of shares outstanding. Simoncini will retain the balance of his stake (approximately 1.6 million shares, representing approximately 7 percent of the total number of shares outstanding) and intends to remain on Meetic’s Board. The two companies say that Meetic’s executive committee supports the decision.

This would probably be one of the dating site’s largest acquisitions to date. Match just recently dropped $50 million to acquire online dating site OKCupid. And the company bought People Media for $80 million in 2009.

So why does Match want Meetic? On paper, the site sees to be expand the company’s reach and revenue. The site is available in 16 European countries, in 13 languages. In 2010, Meetic posted total sales of $266 million, and has a market cap of $437 million. Match’s offer values the company at nearly $500 million. In comparison, Match.com’s core revenue came in at $93.3 million in first quarter 2011 (up 18 percent), and subscriber are up 22 percent.

Match says that it plans to file offer with the French Securities Regulator within two to three weeks. Match does not intend to de-list Meetic, which is listed in Compartment B of Euronext Paris of the NYSE Euronext, following completion of the tender offer.

Here’s a video of Simoncini speaking at LeWeb in 2008.

Seems like it’s Sub-Saharan Month around here: first Sarah Lacy went to Nigeria, and now here I am in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital and Africa’s fourth-largest city. It feels like a boomtown. There are cranes and construction sites everywhere, throwing up gleaming new glass-and-steel buildings full of shops selling computers and mobile phones. The major thoroughfares throng with people making, trading, repairing, unloading, selling, and generally hustling.

Don’t get me wrong: this is still a poor country. Electrical outages are regular occurrences, the taxis that patrol the city’s broad avenues are rusting Ladas, and the side streets are harrowed dirt strewn with garbage, lined with tin shacks, and patrolled by beggars and feral dogs. But I’ve only seen occasional pockets of the poisonous stagnation I’ve found so often elsewhere south of the Sahara. This feels like a place where things happen. It’s a city and country that could be on the cusp of a genuine transformation, catalyzed by technology—were it not for a single, gigantic roadblock: its own government.

"Oh, they’re great," Jörn Schultz deadpans about Ethio Telecom (ETC), the government monopoly that controls all phone, mobile, and Internet service across the nation, and everyone in the room bursts into laughter. He shakes his head. "No, no. They’re terrible."

It’s not just the censorship, though that’s bad enough: the entire blogspot.com domain is blocked, along with various Facebook pages and newspapers. But it’s not what most angers the people here at iceAddis, the new "innovation/collaboration/entrepeneurship" space modelled after Nairobi’s legendary iHub. (I’ll tell you more about it in a separate post.) What upsets this crowd is ETC’s sheer incompetence.

A very brief acquaintance with Ethiopia’s Internet cafes will confirm everything they say in a hurry. Connection speeds are highly variable, trending towards painfully slow, if and when you can connect at all. Ethiopia still hasn’t linked up with the SEACOM fiber that brings broadband to East Africa, explains Markos Lemma, another iceAddis founder; as a result, the entire nation has only 1.2 gigabits of bandwidth for its 85 million people, more of whom are coming online every day. You do the math.

If you have a connection problem, things get even worse; by all accounts, ETC’s customer care makes Comcast seem like Rolls-Royce. Fitsum Assalif, a security hacker and penetration tester ("white-hat only," he assures me with a grin) grimaces with disbelief, remembering: he also works at a large NGO, and the last time they had a serious connectivity issue, "I had to go to (Ethiopia Telecom’s) data center and fix it myself… They send their workers to China for training, but I don’t know what they get."

But surely a place like iceAddis could end-run around the problem with a VSAT dish? Lemma (who has set up an entertaining "ETC sucks" Facebook page) shakes his head: "There’s no VSAT, it’s impossible." The government forbids them for all except the most powerful of organizations; he estimates that there are fewer than half a dozen in the country, for places like the UN, World Bank, African Union. The red tape doesn’t stop there: you need a permit to import "anything with an IP number," which takes a month—and they usually say no.

This is a proud nation, and with reason: Ethiopia is the only African nation which defeated their would-be European colonizers and remained independent throughout the colonial era. But they need to start looking to the rest of Africa as an example. "They’re so far ahead of us in Kenya," Assanif says forlornly, meaning the fierce competition among mobile and Internet providers there, and the access and innovation that has thrived as a result.

It’s ironic that Ethiopia’s current government are the same people who overthrew the brutal Marxists called the Derg twenty years ago; alas, they seem to have inherited some of their archenemies’ fondness for monopolies, protectionism, and bureaucracy. I believe mobile Internet access is a transformational force that could turn African nations into economic lions to rival Asia’s tigers—but only if it’s fast, cheap, and ubiquitous. And that will never happen here while every bit of Ethiopia’s Internet is controlled by a dinosaur monopoly with no competitive incentive to improve.

Seth Sternberg is the CEO and Co-founder of Meebo. He previously worked in M&A at IBM.

I love talking to aspiring entrepreneurs—I do it once a week at minimum.

I often get asked "what's the role of a startup CEO?" Sometimes people are curious about the pre-launch "CEO" and ask if a startup really needs one. If that CEO isn't an engineer, what do they do anyhow? Other times people wonder what I do today as CEO of a 180 person company. In this post I'll cover the pre-launch role, and in a follow-up, I'll get into the role post-launch.

So what does the CEO, who at the beginning is really the general business person, do at a pre-launch startup?

Let's go back to the beginning of Meebo, circa April, 2005.

Co-founders Sandy Jen, Elaine Wherry and I met every Wednesday night and all day every Sunday in an effort to get Meebo off the ground. We'd never meet in my apartment—it was always either at Sandy's or Elaine's. Why? Because they had the better computers and the faster internet connections. Frankly, that's pretty emblematic of one’s role as the "business person" pre-launch. I’ve touched upon this topic before in a Founder Stories interview with Chris Dixon (embedded below), but it is worth elaborating on.

For most consumer internet products, there's not a whole lot the business person can really do pre-launch. All of the company's value will come when the team builds and launches a product, so that should be the primary focus. There aren't any partnerships to be struck yet, as the product has yet to build any credibility in the market. There aren't any folks to interview, as you can't afford to hire a full team, and you're wasting your time looking for pre-launch financing—a controversial statement these days, I know, but that's a topic for another post. So what can you do if the most important thing is simply to minimize all distractions in the pursuit of getting the product launched?

Buy sandwiches.

Well, really, the business person's job, until the last 2-3 weeks before launch, is to be supportive.

When we got together on Sundays, I really couldn't contribute very much real work. I could make the sandwich runs to the Andronico's down the street (I still have the “buy 10, get the 11th free card” in my wallet). I could also take care of the mundane tasks like buying the domain name and paying the server bills. Heck, I could even suggest "that button might look better over there." But that was about it. I was the support.

I began to wonder, "Should I even be here?" Frankly, it didn't feel very good to sit there and watch Elaine and Sandy working away while I did comparatively little. I could just as well have been playing Frisbee.

When I wondered that aloud, the feedback from Elaine and Sandy was pretty clear: if you're going to be part of this team, then we want you here.

We were all equals with our own skills that we each brought to the table. My presence, at some level, was moral support. At another level, it contributed to the team bonding that you need pre-launch. Post-launch, things will tend to get crazy, fast, so pre-built trust is critical. At the end of the day, it's the team that really makes the startup. Strong teams—as Sandy is quick to point out—survive multiple ideas.

Let's fast-forward to the 2-3 weeks pre-launch, however, where the business person begins to get a job.

First, go and line up the right law firm to get incorporated.

The standard deal, at least at the time, was $20K in legal fees deferred until you raise your series A. I don't think much has changed. Make sure you get advice on which firm and partner to work with—the way your company gets incorporated can save you a lot of pain down the road. (Watch a relevant chat between Chris Dixon and Erick Schonfeld here). Do not work with a firm inexperienced in setting up startups. Rather, work with Fenwick, Wilson Sonsini, OMM, Gundersen, Orrick, and the like. And even in those firms, ensure you're working with the folks who have startup creation experience—all partners are not created equal.

Second, figure out your launch strategy.

Do you want to line up a bunch of friends to test your product before launch? Do it. Then corral all of their feedback and help prioritize it for your co-founders. Do you need to find a couple of folks who can introduce you to a blogger or two to write about your launch? Find them and go pre-brief those bloggers. Make sure you also line up your friends to give you some social media mojo—get them to Facebook and Tweet your launch.

Third, find a good mentor or two.

It's important to find someone who is passionate about what you're up to and who genuinely wants to work with you and your team to help you create an awesome product. Someone who is perhaps 2-4 years ahead of the process from where you sit, who has seen good and bad, and who can guide you toward good choices and help you avoid potentially painful early mistakes. Ironic, but when you have the least experience is also when you make a bunch of choices on how you set up your company—choices which will potentially burn you or save you years down the road.

In a future post, I'll get into the business person's role post-launch. But before we end, one more thing: do you even need a business person pre-launch since they do seemingly so little?

The answer is yes, for three basic reasons.

First, post-launch, the business person's job becomes very important. You want them there for their actual work product (beyond their amazing ability to remember your sandwich order) post-launch. You don't want to go through the pain of finding this person post-launch when things get nutty. Rather, you want them lined up and ready to go from the start.

Second, just like it's unbelievably hard to find great engineers, it's also unbelievably hard to find great business people. Just like a bad engineering co-founder can help ruin a company and a good one can help make a company, the same goes for business folks. Once you find a great engineering co-founder, hold onto them as tight as you can. And once you find a great business co-founder, do the same.

Third, team bonding is really important. The more time you have to do this, the better. I've argued that there's nothing more important in getting a company off the ground than finding and putting together the ultimate founding team. This bonding is super critical in the early days because you will likely spend years together. It's hard to explain ust how important it is that you understand and trust each other, implicitly. The sooner you get together as a unit, the better off you all will be.

Photo credit: Flickr/FotoosVanRobin

Ever since my first TechCrunch meetup in Berlin in 2008 and 2009 I’ve been keeping a watchful eye on this city as I travelled around Europe covering startups and explaining the scene to anyone who would listen. But since then it’s quite clear that a couple of things have happened. The whole European scene has improved massively. There are now startup events, activity and fundraising across Europe in an ongoing manner. Sure, it’s not Silicon Valley (I’m sorry, but who cares?) – in fact we should really be comparing ourselves to our own progress, not to other places. And the news is good. The ‘Valley Virus’ has spread, and Europe is now starting to boast some amazing startups.

Continuing our series of interviews with companies in the “Silicon Roundabout” area of London (we’re calling this The Roundabout Tapes), we interviewed Clearer Partners.

Clearer is a specialised tech/media consulting company but is also doing a startup. The soon to launch Frameblast is aimed at SOHO companies who want to handle video in a smarter way along the lines of Media Silo. Companies can upload their archives into the cloud and use it like a Google search engine for their archive, with tags galore.

I'm a creature of habit, of habits I create to push myself forward. When Twitter appeared, I knew it was a habit that would grab a hold of not just my generation but many others. In fact, it grabbed a hold of the notion of generations and twisted it into something special: a generation of the now.

The other day we were in Las Vegas, in a hotel that like all of Vegas stank of cigarettes and losers, which by definition included us for being there. We sat at a sushi restaurant, or what started with sushi and ended with samba — three kitchens with little crossover from latin to salmon. And so we sailed across the generations, talking music and the history of salesforce, and arriving at the movies. And in particular Citizen Kane.

Orson Welles' defining moment, the intersection of melodrama and politics, of the end of the age of controlled media and the dawn of what we now call social media. The story of Charles Foster Kane, a stand-in for Hearst who started wars when there was a dearth of headlines. We saw him in a fake newsreel standing on a balcony with Hitler, saw the arc of his life at the center of the Golden Age where Washington and Hollywood were two sides of the same coin. And as we were swept along in the daring pop media that the film invented, we became a generation of one.

Go look for Kane on Netflix and it's not available, at least not for streaming. That's because the owners of the film can still wring a handsome sum out of the 1941 release. Black and white, but stunning in its visual quality, the experiments of cinematographer Gregg Toland who flooded the sets with enough light to allow perfect focus with infinite depth of field. In enabling the dramatic perspective shots, Toland had ceilings constructed, anticipating the move to location filming when faster lightweight cameras were developed.

The story-telling was equally elliptical, with flashbacks tracing various stages of the great life, and in the process opening the picture up with the passage of time and intersecting impressions from a wide range of family, friend, and foe. Like the Godfather films a generation later, history and personal drive stood side by side, informing each other. Like the Kennedy assassination and the ascent of the Beatles, two polar opposites that defined the culture in ways that still are being played out.

And then there was the conceit of the enterprise: the idea Welles had that he could create a self-contained world, or universe even, where the natural laws of ambition and power met forces even greater. Kane was a hurricane without peer, a modern king who took his birthright and assembled a Xanadu to house the treasures of emperors and dynasties alongside the stars and leaders of the day. And Welles drove the picture through the force of his will, co-writing, starring, producing, and directing a film that would easily have won the Academy Award it was nominated for if not for the vendetta Hearst held against Welles and his team for the rest of his and their lives.

In the early Eighties, the computer revolution began to take shape, fostered by the space program and the spirit of the Kennedys and the Beatles. Apple synthesized the two threads with its choice of a name, and the Web birthed a generation of Kanes that has yet to subside. Viral wealth creation and the culture of the virtual king-making machine may still be playing out, but as the old saying goes in Hollywood, they don't make stars like they used to. As Zuck and Ev and even Larry and Curly attest, the era of the studio system has come to an end.

But the spirit of Kane is alive and well, and the proof is in the social wave. Just look at the entropy of Windows, the power of realtime building a head of steam as it reworks our language like the Front Page remade our dialogue, like the West Wing suggested we could carry on big decisions while getting plenty of exercise, like Twitter begat Foursquare begat Groupon begat the App Internet. We'll argue about all this across the realtime stream, claiming winners and losers and revenue in between. But we'll do this as one generation, united by the breathless mothers of invention, those who like Welles dared to produce a wave of innovation that will shape our lives far into the future.

Currently I am not in Cancun. The reason I am not in Cancun is out of my control (an over three hour Virgin delay on the tarmac at JFK caused me to miss my connecting USAirways flight at SFO). I spent a good part of those three plus plane-trapped hours bitching on Twitter, asking both the @VirginAmerica and @USAirways Twitter accounts for guidance, because calling their respective 800 numbers either put me on hold or wouldn’t go through.

Guess which Twitter account responded? Guess which one I’ll consider purchasing tickets from again. And according to a recent survey of 2049 Twitter users completed by Twitter Q&A search service inboxQ, I am not alone: 64% of the inboxQ survey respondents were more likely to make a purchase from a business account that answered their questions on Twitter, 24% were just as likely and only 12% were less likely.

Another added benefit of answering user questions on Twitter (ARE YOU LISTENING @USAIRWAYS?) is that users are more likely to follow a business that answers their questions, at 59% versus 29% who are just as likely and 12% who are less likely.

The inboxQ survey results are filled with other lovely “well duh” info nuggets like how users with high follower accounts are more likely to receive answers to their questions, at 41% respondents with more than 100 followers receiving an answer from a business versus 21% with less than 100 followers (Maybe brands don’t think its worth the effort? Or maybe the questions from low volume accounts get lost in whatever social media monitoring service businesses are using?).

In any case, pro tip: If you’re a business serious about user engagement on Twitter, go out of your way to sincerely answer sincere questions from users, no matter how many followers they have. They might just end up buying something. Or not hating you.

@bmull
Brenden Mulligan

I specifically this (6 hour) @usairways flight because they advertised it had wifi. But it doesn't. Boarding for my last @usairways flight!

about 18 hours ago via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

This past Thursday, Twitter rolled out a new small feature that garnered quite a bit of positive buzz. Essentially, they now allow you to see what other users see when they look at Twitter. In other words, if you click on the “Following” area in my profile, you can see the main tweet stream that I see with all the (public) tweets from people I follow. Very cool. But it’s actually not new at all.

In fact, Twitter had this feature in place two years ago. We mentioned this in passing in the post, but then I was directed to the blog post explaining why they removed it in June of 2009. It’s pretty interesting. From the post on June 4, 2009 on their Twitter Status blog:

Recently we made a change to remove the With Friends tab from user profiles. We did this after finding out that this tab was both a relatively rarely accessed as well as computationally expensive page for us to serve.

Yep. The feature was “relatively rarely accessed” by Twitter’s own standards. And it was eating up precious cycles on their taxed servers at the time.

So why bring it back now?

Well first of all, Twitter is clearly beyond their main scaling issues. Sure, they have downtime every now and then, but it’s nothing like the nightmare that it was two years ago. There would be hours seemingly everyday where the service was down or parts of it were taken offline to keep the main functionality up. This included features like the “With Friends” feature. This ended up being one of the many casualties. Other included tweet-to-IM, auto timeline updates, and yes, track.

Because of those issues back then, the building of a robust social graph was more of a secondary concern at the time. But today it’s one of the primary concerns as Twitter has had no problem adding new users, but they need a way to keep them on the service and engaged. Features like “Who To Follow” help with this, and the resurrected “See What I See” should help as well. It’s more or less a self-tutorial to show new users what Twitter can look like when you get a feed of interesting users to follow.

Considering it’s fairly buried (you have to click on a profile and then click on the “Following” link — or use the drop-down), it will still probably be “relatively rarely accessed”. But I would assume they’re figure out a way to highlight it more on the main homepage for new (or logged out) users. Perhaps that’s why they included a “Shuffle” feature as well.

Plus, again, it’s a feature that will no longer cripple Twitter, so why not include it? And it makes good on a promise made two years ago.

The reason for the aforementioned Twitter post was because a group of users were upset that Twitter killed off this feature without saying anything (specifically, the feed for the feature, which some were using to follow tweets). In response, Twitter wrote:

It's our hope to bring back the access to these feeds at some point. But for stability reasons, we're unable to restore them at this time. We should have done a better job explaining this up front and anticipating this problem. Apologies for this; it's our highest priority to provide a reliable, stable service for everyone.

Two years later, mission accomplished. Well, except the feed part. But who uses feeds anymore anyway? That’s what Twitter is for.

It’s good to see Twitter in a place where they can bring back old features rather than killing ones off to stay alive.

This guest post was written by Ethan Kurzweil. Kurzweil is a Vice President with Bessemer Venture Partners in Menlo Park, California. He works with Internet companies of all types, including Playdom, Zoosk, Crowdflower, Twilio, adap.tv, Reputation.com, Skybox Imaging, and OpenCandy. You can find him on twitter at @ethankurz. The views expressed in this post are his own, and do not represent those of Bessemer.

Hardly a day goes by anymore when I don't hear about a reportedly "radical, new" business concept summarized succinctly as "X" (some well-known existing business) for "Y" (some specific market segment, use case, or other qualifier). These descriptors range from the logical – "Groupons for Moms" (okay, clear enough) – to the absurd – "Pandora for Cloud" (huh?). Often, I don't even understand the analogy, as it's so obscure, or I have never even heard of the company being compared. Sure, these monikers may satisfy our need for efficiency and brevity, but I'm convinced that in the long-run, we need to expand our collective attention spans just long enough to really describe what our businesses do. Otherwise, we run the risk of setting a model for entrepreneurship that's entirely devoid of creativity and true innovation.

I see two primary problems with the current state of affairs. First, we're losing the ability to appreciate a truly novel business concept that doesn't boil down to a knockoff of something that already exists. And when I say we, I'm referring to a large number of us in the startup community – angel investors, VCs, entrepreneurs, executives; we've all adopted the convenient shorthand of translating new business ideas into three words. Having a short elevator pitch that neatly summarizes a new idea is important, but constraining such descriptors to less than a tweet is a step too far in my view. It's understandable of course given the sheer number of new companies being formed every day, that we would need a shortcut for describing new concepts quickly. But this inevitably leads to constrained thinking as to the strategy and business model to be applied to a particular product or service. If Google had thought of itself in the early days as "Yahoo for better search results," they may not have happened upon the juggernaut business model that is AdWords. More alarming is our natural tendency to evaluate a company's prospects as an offshoot of the success of the descriptor. Would anyone have taken Groupon seriously if we had referred to them in the early days as "some Chinese company that no one has heard of for the US"?

My second concern is even more cause for alarm as this way of thinking is quickly becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy – at least based on the business ideas I hear about. This is not surprising since entrepreneurs take note of and emulate companies that get funding, press mentions, social media glory, and perceived traction – then turn around and get that same publicity with their copycat, reinforcing the same behavior. This sends a clear message that budding entrepreneurs should pick an idea only slightly dissimilar from something that already exists, get it out there quickly (because someone else is probably working on the same copycat), and then sit back and cash their ticket to fame and fortune. Even worse is the message that entrepreneurs should be afraid to champion an idea that's so new, it simply can't be categorized, because investors and others just don't know how to pigeon-hole it yet. We could end up unwittingly deterring the future Google and Facebook founders out there from ever getting started.

To be clear, it's certainly not the case that a knock-off idea can't be a good business – and often these kinds of derivatives pivot from the original idea to something different and, hopefully more innovative. But the odds of a true homerun for this model of company are exceptionally low and we need to stop glamorizing this model of entrepreneurship.

Think of all of the truly revolutionary businesses and business models out there, and you've rarely heard them described in knock-off terminology. Pandora toiled for years in relative obscurity, ignoring popular sentiment that you couldn't build a successful Internet music service with advertising, only to be saved by the groundswell of support from their users lobbying to keep them alive and profitable. Zynga built applications on a platform with no demonstrable track record or model for success. And the Twitter founders conceived of an ingenious and quirky way to let people share their thoughts, one sound bite at a time.

Nowhere along the way did Larry, Sergey, Zuck, Jack Dorsey, or the other founders of great Internet successes study some other business and wonder – what's some nuance of that other successful company that I can replicate? Instead, they focused on previously unsolved problems, and, by addressing these needs, built powerhouses that will forever shape the way we entertain, live, work and communicate. So the next time I hear "Airbnb for Endangered Species," I'm going to tune out and browse "Myspace for People that Use Their Real Name" and "Facebook Status Updates for people that like to express thoughts in 140 characters or less" instead.

Image by kubina on Flickr

Last week at Disrupt, Chris Dixon did a version of Founder Stories onstage with Quora founder Charlie Cheever. We learned that Quora is not looking to sell, but we also learned a lot more.

For instance, what convinced Cheever to quit Facebook with co-founder Adam D’Angelo was that tried to “imagine a world where I knew everything that I wanted to know, as long as someone else in the world knew it.” And that’s what Quora wants to build. It’s a pretty outrageous goal, which is what makes the startup so interesting.

But like all Q&A sites, Quora relies a lot on search traffic. Dixon asks, “Do you worry about being so dependent on SEO?” Cheever has a good answer:

“Not really. I think we do get a lot of traffic from search engines because there’s lot of good content that matches what people are searching for. But we also, Quora also kind of works a little bit similar to a blogging platform, where people sort of promote their own stuff that they write.”

In that sense, it is like a blogging platform for people who only want to blog occasionally, or can’t be bothered to set up their own blog. Quora takes a blog post that might only live for a few days and turns it into evergreen content. And since people are promoting their own answers, they also get a lot of traffic from Twitter. Watch the whole interview above.