Charlie O’Donnell and Alex Lines, cofounders of Path101, are baring it all… and lucky for us, it’s their startup plan I’m speaking about.
In what they call anti-stealth mode, Charlie and Alex make the argument that the net benefit of baring it all (marketing, investor and employee prospecting, community feedback) outweigh all the possible negatives (tipping off the competition, annoying private investors).
Now, for people paying attention to Charlie and Alex’s anti-stealthiness, things can get a little boring sometimes (my Monday morning agenda is already enough of a sleeper), but in their most recent anti-stealth post, things get a little interesting.
“How we would like to work with LinkedIn and their upcoming API” is an daring, almost Robert Mosesian, biz dev call to, arguably, Path101’s closest ally in the “help people with their careers” space. Now, what strikes me about the post is how clear it is that Charlie as already reached out to LinkedIn, and that his calls have not been returned.
Why wouldn’t LinkedIn return a phone call from a guy who can bag, without skipping a beat, Fred Wilson as an angel investor? Are those the inside baseball, connected folks you partner with?
And that begs another set of questions: Who are they returning phone calls to? Who would be better to partner with in their new API platform? Is LinkedIn turning their back (and API) on the startup community?
Whatever the answers to these questions are, I hope Path101’s openness works out for the best. While drawing public attention to this snubbing could backfire, I bet it serves to get the right person at LinkedIn to return the call and form a partnership. And if this works, look for a lot more startups to go anti-stealth.
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3 responses so far ↓
1 john // Oct 28, 2007 at 12:09 am
why should linkedin respond to a startup that hasn’t even launched? many startups come and go, if LinkedIn were to take into consideration of every startup, they will never launch an API at all because everyone will have different requirements.
2 Nate Westheimer // Oct 28, 2007 at 12:26 pm
John, that’s a good point. You guys at LinkedIn shouldn’t have to work with everyone. I think the argument is that Path101, at least in New York, is taken seriously enough because of who the founder is, investors are, and the quality of their plan.
3 Charlie // Oct 28, 2007 at 12:28 pm
1) We’re building now and if we knew what the API looked like (it already exists, just not launched) we’d build appropriately to take advantage of it.
2) They should listen to every partner, current and potential… what’s the cost of just responding to an e-mail or taking a call? If they really want to steal some of Facebook’s thunder, that’s what it takes.
3) Is launching that hard? Anyone can launch. We’ll be launched in February… so they might as well take a call from us now.
4) If they really want people to spend their resources building on their platform, they should take the position of “Please, tell us what we need to attract you!!”, not “Come to us when you have 10,000 users… otherwise, we’ll ignore you.
I’m confident they’ll respond. We simply want to be as additive to their platform is possible. It would be silly to look a gift horse in the mouth.
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