Brave CEO to unveil two companies Commentary:
Joshua Rosen may be crazy but he has guts.
By Therese Poletti, MarketWatch
Last update: 12:48 a.m. EST Jan. 29, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Joshua Rosen, may look crazy this week when he launches two companies simultaneously at a technology conference, but that is how some entrepreneurs have hedged their bets in the start-up madness of the past few years.
Rosen is not the first in the tech business to be working on two or more companies at once, but he is a rare CEO to make his multitasking so public at a high-profile conference. On Wednesday, Rosen is making a presentation on each of his new companies at the well-regarded DEMO conference, within 20 minutes of each other. Each company has six minutes to do a live presentation of the product. Canned demos are not allowed.
"We see a lot of serial entrepreneurs," said Chris Shipley, the executive producer of DEMO, which takes place in Palm Desert, Calif. and is known as a launch pad for new tech companies and products, and where young companies look for funding, partners, customers and buzz. "He is the first simultaneous entrepreneur."
Rosen is emblematic of a trend among entrepreneurs in the past few years who have placed multiple bets on two or more ideas. Lower startup costs enable them to work in parallel on a couple of ideas or more, and see which one idea pans out first. Other parallel founders in recent years include Evan Williams of Obvious Corp. and the fast-growing Twitter and Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, both of Digg and Revision3, a Web-based television network.
"Today if people are really smart they can develop technology with really small teams," Rosen said.
Right now, Rosen seems especially daring because of the many forecasts that the U.S. is heading into an economic downturn. But he remains unfazed.
Some in the venture industry note, of course, that a downturn can actually be good time to start up a company. The costs are lower and company founders may be able to tap into a better pool of more available employees. But the big question is how a downturn will effect the venture funding environment.
We haven't seen a downturn in technology yet, but there are some signs of slower growth by companies like Apple Inc.
CEO John Chambers said he believes corporate tech spending will be "lumpy."
Rosen does not think he is particularly rare or crazy. He said both of his small companies are in the collaboration space and running them at the same time has not been that taxing.
"I'm using both programs all day so I don't even think about it," Rosen said, when asked about the difficulty of running two companies at once.
Rosen is also an artist and a visual effects designer who has worked on some major Hollywood movies. He has been working on one of his companies -- Cozimo Technologies -- for about three years. Cozimo is a Web-based program that lets designers, such as movie makers, architects, or ad agencies, collaborate and make comments to each other on images and video, in real-time, anywhere around the world.
The product grew out of necessity, while Rosen was art directing the 2003 remake of "Peter Pan." He was close to being fired or "killed," he joked, because it was too time-consuming to dig through hand-written notes on changes for the film while collaborating with 15 people on four continents. Cozimo is a virtual company with four employees, with the three others, including co-founders Stuart Feldman and Juan Pablo Di Lille, in Montreal.
Rosen's second company is called Notebookz.com, which developed
http://www.ileonardo.com, a way to do faster, more intelligent research on the Web. It has a social element as well. Users can organize their research into notebooks, and share their notebook collections with others in iLeonardo. They can also keep their notebooks private. Notebookz.com has three employees.
Rosen got the idea for
http://www.ileonardo.com, named for Leonardo da Vinci, the ultimate Renaissance man and his famous notebooks, while collecting research for a voting Web site he developed. In 2004, he founded JustVote.org, to help people register to vote, and he needed a way to quickly and easily keep the best research he found, and avoid doing repetitious Web searches. He also says another inspiration was his own laziness.
For Notebookz.com, Rosen and his co-founder Kirk Chen have already raised about $800,000 from angel investors and they hope to raise more funds for the two-employee company. He also is looking for funding for Cozimo in addition to the $150,000 seed funding.
I admire Rosen's spirit and ability to pursue two visions at once. As he goes into this next phase, some venture capitalists may wonder what kind of attention a founding CEO can give to two companies at once. One VC said most investors want their CEOs to be fully committed to their startup.
"Because being a CEO is viewed as a 110%, full-time job, VCs don't feel that it can be done part-time," said Lee Lorenzen of Altura Ventures, who is a bit hyper-focused himself: he funds only Facebook application development companies.
Rosen realizes that his companies may be moving into a new, more difficult period. "Developing software is a creative phase," he said. "Building the company is a different phase." But he noted that so far, potential investors are not concerned about him running two small companies. "The issue has not come up," he said. "They just want to know that here is a potentially huge market in both sectors."
With that much confidence, Rosen could go far in Silicon Valley. End of Story
Therese Poletti is a senior columnist for MarketWatch in San Francisco.
