I don’t know that Odeo has any reasonable shot at success, but kudos to the founders for making this decision instead of taking more money when they recognized the angels and VCs weren’t going to get what they wanted out of their investment. They were very lucky that they were made whole.

Investing in pre-revenue startups is risky. Seed-stage investors know that things typically don’t go according to plan. And sophisticated investors know that they will lose money in a good percentage of their investments — with the expectation that t…

Hats off to Evan and his group for being pioneers and playing a part in the development of the podcasting world. I wish them the best as they move into what sounds like an “obvious,” widget lab. :-).

I’m turning off the internet this afternoon. Kthx.

Its funny how I thought, I was reading my own thoughts as I read through his justification, as we have build exactly the same model at Better Labs (http://www.betterlabs.net) since Dec 2005. Most importantly, we have build this completely out of our Pune, India office which bring a lot more scalability for the experiments - what we call as the 12-24 month web service, beyond which the successful ones will thrive as independent companies. dealplumber (http://www.dealplumber.com), indiagoes (http://www.indiagoes.com), iNods (http://www.inods.com) are already in their 1.0 versions.

However, there is a BIG CHALLENGE of how do you follow through after your 1.0 version to drive traffic and customer acquisition, which will make or break this model for everyone who attempts it.

Its re-assuring though, to think someone else who is a lot more accomplished thinks the same.

All the very best to Evan, and his team.

I think self funded businesses can do well if you’re somebody who knows the game well. Evan sounds like he’ll do alright, but of course it’s his tail, his cash (not anybody else’s) if he doesn’t and that probably feels pretty good.

Your writing style is great, Michael (”If anything, Odeo gives every indication of going sideways”). Great article.

Once you’ve convinced people to hand over millions of dollars to fund one idea, don’t expect them to react well when you tell them that, er, you were wrong about its potential, and that now you want to try something completely different.

The one problem with the self-funded approach is the absence of an outside perspective–we entrepreneurs are overly optimistic by definition and that’s not a good recipe for wise investments.

Now the service is beinig kept alive artificially, with money shuffling back and forth.

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