Tim Spalding, Library Thing

1. Startups and
Entrepreneurism:
Rejecting ―The Bargain‖
Tim Spalding
LibraryThing Founder
The Conference for Entrepreneurial Librarians

2. Why I’m here: LibraryThing
• Social cataloging and social networking
site for book lovers.
• Founded 2005
• 1m+ members
• Software in 300+ library systems
• 8 employees
• Not a failure
Showing LibraryThing

3. Caveats 1: Ignore me
• I am not a librarian
• I use dramatic language
• I will seem like I’m bragging
Modest success
+ post-facto rationalization
+ over-generalization
– luck
– humility
———————————
advice!

4. Caveats 2: Can we talk?
• Cultural gap: Librarian vs. entrepreneur
• Entrepreneur?
• Intrapreneur?

5. Grades of Entrepreneurship…
(I have been all of these)
• Wage slave
• Intrapreneur: Frisky wage slave
• Freelancer: Wage slave with many masters
• Business-owner: Half-free man
• Start-up guy: Free man who works like a
slave!
• Alternapreneur? Entrepreneur, not for money

6. Are entrepreneurs born?
• Tim as a child
– Always had some project going on
– Started a software ―business‖ in tweens
– Suspected ―real world‖ was something of a
sham.
But signals point in different ways…

7. Making money
• Citizen Kane
Bernstein: ―Well, it's no trick to make a
lot of money. Anyone can make a lot of
money—if all you want to do is make a
lot of money.‖
• Thesis: Any one of you could ―make a
lot of money.‖
• The advantages of money.

8. Plan A: Scholar
• Georgetown, archaeology
• Michigan: PhD program in Classics
• Planned to become a scholar
• I accepted The Bargain…

9. Scholars as alternapreneur…
• Love what you do
• Work all the time
• Life = work
• Goal is non-monetary
• But…
– Goal is really non-monetary
– Dependency
– Limited control
– Sayre’s law

10. Sayre’s Law
―Academic politics is the most
vicious and bitter form of
politics, because the stakes are so
low.‖
Wallace Stanley Sayre (1905-1972)
Three years (over four years) and washed out…

11. Plan B: Wage-Slave
• Houghton Mifflin (Boston publisher)
– Sleepy, dysfunctional department
– Outsourced most product
• Accepted The Bargain
– Work 9-5
– Have hobbies
– Be good at my job
– Modicum of intellectual status, self-respect
– Feel like I’m ―helping‖
Tim turns 30…

12. Decided to Kick Ass
• Work 9-5? Ha.
– The power of working your ass off
• Learn everything, from everyone
– The power of learning
• Take control of my product
• Make new products, unbidden
• Created a ―tech startup‖ within a department
• Met Abigail Blachly, library student

13. Did everything wrong
• Throw fits
– Right way? Make solutions.
• Go over heads
– Make allies everywhere
• Impress but also scare and alienate people
• Thinking excellence was enough
Way up? Not clear.
• Bottom line: Frisky wage slave

14. Plan C:
Freelancer, Minipreneur
• Pitched a new life to my wife
– Move to a cheaper place (Portland, ME)
• Plan C1: Freelancer
• Plan C2: Minipreneur (Web publisher)

15. C1: Web Publisher
• Freelance web designer, web developer
• Things I learned
– Lots of advice out there
– True
• Billable hours, charge more, etc.
– False
• Set boundaries

16. C2: Minipreneur
• Highly-focused web directories
• $1 per day per site
• 3 days to make site
• Goal: Get to $100/day passive income
• This only half-worked
– Still viable business model?

17. C2: Minipreneur
• Reading about startups
– Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters
• Always thinking of new ideas…
– Bramblestory
– Marginalien?
– LibraryThing
• Took a month…

18. ―Kaboom!‖
• Sleeping with laptop
• Made the decision ―to become a
startup.‖
– LibraryThing is a part-accidental startup

19. What is a Startup?
• An idea
• A way of life
• An approach to business
– No bullshit
– Incentivize / forgo salary
• Embrace of risk
– Risk it all
– Fail quickly
– Failure is not shame
– Iterate, adapt, change course!

20. What is a Startup? (maybe)
• A funding model
– Angel investors
– Venture Capital
• An intended future
– Built to flip
– Built to dilute
• Founders lose control

21. LibraryThing: A different path
• Funding
– Initial funding: Abebooks
– Library-market funding/partner: Bowker
– Keep control
• Don’t flip
– Make money by… making money
• Incentives
– The job is the reward
– Then again, nobody expected it
– Work for a startup? Ask for a piece.

22. Advantages to a Startup
• You are truly free
• No bullshit
• Risk but you shouldn’t have existential risk
– Falling stone better than surfing an avalanche
– Falling…
– Health care
• Flexible hours
• Work with people
– Smart, smart people
• Use money
– Use it to learn
– Solve problems with money (eg., good equipment)

23. My two good ideas
1. Catalog books online
(LibraryThing.com)
2. Change OPACs without vendor
permission
(LibraryThing for Libraries)

24. Catalog books online
• People want to do it? Wow. Crazy!
• It opens the way to much, much more
– Social cataloging
– Social networking
– Wonderful people
– The apotheosis of book love

25. Change OPACs
without vendor permission
• Truth: Your OPAC sucks.
• Truth: Your OPAC is expensive.
• Truth: You’re stuck with it.
• Truth: Vendors don’t care.
• Opportunity: The technology exists to update
it without vendor permission, cheaply.
(show)

26. Opportunity begets opportunity
• Side-effect of
understanding OPACs
– Library Anywhere, a
mobile OPAC

27. Uncomfortable truths
and/or
Golden Opportunities
• Truth: Your OPAC sucks.
• Truth: Your OPAC is expensive.
• Truth: You’re stuck with it.
• Truth: Vendors don’t care.
Alas:
• Something is broken in library software.
• Something is broken in libraries.
• I hate this, but it also butters my bread.

28. Sources of the problem/opportunity…
• Tech outsiders look at libraries
• Libraries are special
• Moore’s law doesn’t apply
• Special, but not in control
– You are captive to OCLC
– You are going to be captive on ebooks
• Cost is equated with value
• You are captive to vendors
– LibraryThing’s approach to pricing [show]

30. Inspiration?
• Consider the Tim plan:
– Have mid-life crisis
– Decide to kick ass
– Reject the bargain
• Think of intrapreneur, freelancer as possible
stepping-stones to a startup
• Consider a startup
– Not for everyone
– Not for every time of life
– If you think you can do it, you can do it.

31. Startups are
• The scariest thing you’ll ever do
• The hardest thing you’ll ever do
• Extraordinarily fun

32. Thank you.
Tim Spalding
tim@librarything.com
@LibraryThingTim
Resources
• Paul Graham
• Hackers and Painters
• Jason Fried
QuickTime™ anda
decompressor
are needed to seethis picture.