The shocking suicide of a college student whose sex life was broadcast over the Web illustrates yet again the Internet’s alarming potential as a means of tormenting others and raises questions whether young people in the age of Twitter and Facebook can even distinguish public from private.

The TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield is approaching its dramatic conclusion, and the 7 finalists remaining are making their closing arguments in front of a panel of all-star Silicon Valley judges. Here are their questions and the startups’ answers, along with links to our past coverage of each company.
Judges:
Kevin Rose
Marissa Meyer
Jason Goldman
Ron Conway
Roelof Botha

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Badgeville
Read Our Past Coverage: Badgeville Wants To Layer Social Gaming (And Yes, Badges) Across The Entire Web
Team of five, raised $250k, profitable.
KR: I love it. Foursquare for the web.
MM: I also like it. I think the analytics piece is powerful. You have to integrate it on your site (i.e. it isn’t already everywhere).
JG: You allow custom rewards.. One thing that’ interesting about foursquare is that you have to be careful with how you set up rewards.
A: It is how you implement it. We’re finding that in implementations we are coaching customers about best practices.
RC: Impressive when your rev is double your capital and you’re a startup. Who are competitors?
A: Lots of consumers plays looking to adapt this to websites, non-whitelabel, not aligned with medium/large publishers… Our vision isn’t about gamification, it’s about influencing behavior and outcomes… There’s not just market with medium/large pubs. Can also go through medium and long tail with API products.
RB: I think this is a yes. Key themes: mobile, social. Don’t think website owners would do this on their own. So I think this company is off to a great start.

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Pinger
Read our past coverage: Pinger Now Turns Your iPod Touch Into A Free Cell Phone
MM: Monetization?
A: We already do ads for text. For voice you can buy or earn minutes. Earn though Offers.
JG: What was inflection point? Domestic only? Per minute cost?
A: Handing out real phone numbers. For now. About 2 cents a minute.
RB: Thing is scary is competition.
A: For carriers, we’re bringing devices/iPad etc for first time into network. Adding new traffic to networks. Skype costs money to get a phone number. Google Voice is different problem for different market. GV uses your minutes.
KR: You’re profitable and growing like crazy, why here?
A: Michael asked us. We don’t need the money but we need PR.
A: We’re banned in some schools which is a great sign.
RC: If you get them when they’re 18, how do you keep them when they switch to an actual cellphone.
A: Keep people using great products by giving them a great product.
JG: On calling plan. Download apps to get minutes value exchange is a little wonky. There are only so many apps. You’re creating maintenance problem where they download and have to remove.
A: We also let you buy it. Can use iTunes account.

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GameCrush
Read our past coverage here: GameCrush Lets Guys Pay Money To Play Online Games With Women (Seriously)
RC: Metrics so far? Enough women to meet demand?
A: 12% conversation rate for people registering to play. Yes. Got 6000 over last 3 months during private beta.
MM: I disagree with observations around gaming. I think having a unique title is big. I think you need more compelling games. I wonder about real-time nature especially if you are missing realtime and addictive nature.
A: We noticed that players are building relationships with PlayDates. We want to expand to have more engaging games. Could also put platform on other platforms.
KR: 60 cents a minute sounds high.
A: We launched at a dollar a min, we discounted it. That seemed to be price point they were satisfied with.
A: We have ‘the edge’ which is more edgy but we are not an adult site.
JG: You talked about sports bar metaphor. Games might not be pickup mode.
A: If I go to sports bar I don’t expect to see women I’m going to talk to about sports… This mimics mecanics of bar.
RB: Innovation is interesting. Video used to sit on the side. Realtime video hasn’t been integrated the way you’re doing it. I think Chatroulette was one of first.. this is an extremely interesting innovation. My question, do you do anything more as a social engagement service of which gaming is only one arena.
A: End of the way we’re about enhancing interactive experience, but it could be around watching pilots, cooking.

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Opzi
See our past coverage: Opzi: A Quora For The Enterprise
RC is an investor
RB: Converting users to paying customers.
A: Looking at what Yammer has done. Going to create a product, from then on want team leaders at a company to adopt it and spread it virally.
KR: Why can’t Quora do this?
A: Quora is aiming to extract knowledge and make it public, they’re a consumer play, don’t think it falls in what they’re thinking of. Companies will go in diff. directions after Q&A.
MM: I think integration points are interesting. A lot of info gets created in a company as a byproduct of something else. Need to provide great enterprise search.
JG: I think Google, Salesforce are you bigger threat than Quora. They already have these touchpoints, this in place with the businesses.
RB: Don’t think you need the most comprehensive search, just need to connect people who know where to find the answer with the question asker.

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DataSift
See our past coverage here: Tweetmeme Founder’s Datasift Helps You Find A Needle In A Tweetstack
RC: Business model?
A: 50% of rev comes from data sales. Cloud based, we charge you for complexity involved and how long we run it for.
KR: I think of Yahoo Pipes where it’s fun, but how do you get a lot of people do use this?
A: iPad app able to visualize news with magazine style.

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CloudFlare
See our past coverage: CloudFlare Wants To Be A CDN For The Masses (And Takes Five Minutes To Set Up)
Since stepping off stage at Disrupt, getting 2.1 website signups per minute.
MM: Market need is very real. Hard problem. Future roadmap?
A: Goal is to protect the entire Internet.
When a visitor comes to a site on the CF network, get the best possible experience.
JG: You built five data centers with fudning?
A: Not from foundation up. We raised 2 million from some amazing partners.
RC: Soluto won the last Disrupt… was so good but can you explain the IP behind it. Prove that it works.
A: I would encourage people to look at users.
JG: Pricepoint?
A: Have freemium. Enhanced features for money. SSL. Also, sort of like OpenDNS model where users have given us permission to monetize certain number of pages, like error pages. We’re not messing with your content, we’re unintrusive. If infected computer comes to your site can tell them about it.
KR: Curious as to if you had a medium/high vol site can you handle it. What happens if you fall over.
A: We’ve done some high traffic site. SXSW Panelpicker. Can hit a big button and route traffic direct to backend. If DNS goes down can go to other large DNS providers.
RB: We’re an investor in OpenDNS. Question is around customer acquisition and distribution.
A: We think going forward opp for channel program. On Monday announced partnership with HostGator. They’ve built CloudFlare into their control panel.
KR: Technical team?
A: We started Project Honeypot six years ago. Been tracking online fraud. Started out with Email. Have someone who was on original Ops team at Yahoo. We’re hiring.
A: We think there’s an opportunity to work with hosting providers, rather than charging them, to work with them to build out or infrastructure.
RC: What’s data center cost?
A: Fixed cost. Minimum data center is three machines. Can’t say actual cost.

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Qwiki
Past coverage: Qwiki Just May Be The Future Of Information Consumption. And It’s Here Now
RC: Biggest application?
A: Qwiki is a platform.
KR: Beautiful, elegant. But is it just reading from Wikipedia?
A: Wikipedia is a source but there’s much more. Many other sources for media, videos, structured data.
MM: I think it’s really polished, visually beautiful. Well packaged. Watching information is a sweet spot. How interactive?
A: You do put more time into a video, but you recall better.
JG: People react to personal assistant metaphor. But seems like different usecase than information retrieval.
A: We are worst audience for this text, because we spend our days going through a lot of text. But everyone else gives what they want plus what they use.
JG: Think about which usecases you can own. I think you can own having your iPhone waking you up and waking you up like HAL.
RC: I don’t know if I’d use it I’d have to think about it. Barry Diller would try to buy this for CityGrid. Lot of text and video on the web, am I right in thinking that the audio is what makes this the most unique. I think this is Flipboard-ish.
A: We draw from a lot of sources, the presentation is the difference. Different use case from Flipboard.
RB: What you’ve hit on is “site, sound and motion” captures our imaginations. Question is, what’s the cost of processing?
A: All programmatically created on the fly. If it’s a reference we can cache. Depends on use case for caching.
How do you monetize?
A: If we get a large footprint we can build a sophisticated advertising engine. Right now we’re on product. But with consumer’s undivided attention, there’s a lot you can do.

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Meet GameCrush, a startup that manages to sound both ridiculous and very promising at once. The gist: take the millions of male gamers out there and offer to hook them up online with a gaming buddy of the opposite sex for a fee. Or, as founder Eric Strasser put it, “if you can buy a girl a drink in a sports bar, why not buy her a game online?”

The site looks like the fusion of a social network, a casual gaming portal, and a porny cam site. But, as the founders make clear, this isn’t a place for porn — though there are photos of attractive women abound.  After signing up, a gamer (usually a male over the age of 18) browses the profiles of “PlayDates”, which is the term used to refer to the women on the site. Each profile includes the woman’s interests and commonly played games, and of course a gallery of photos are featured front-and-center.

Once a guy has found a profile he likes, he can message the PlayDate and see if she’s interested in playing a game with him (video chats are encouraged). GameCrush has a small library of multiplayer Flash-based games integrated into site, and users can also coordinate a meetup in another gaming environment.

So what’s in it for the PlayDate? GameCrush charges gamers (who are usually men) 60 cents a minute to use the service, and it does a revenue share with both the PlayDates (usually females) and the developer of the game they’re playing. In other words, women can earn money by playing video games with men. GameCrush will also allow men to earn money as PlayDates, but the demand for men-for-hire is significantly lower at this point.

GameCrush has been in private beta for months and has already drawn investor attention and it’s now open to the public.

Q&A

JS: Another reason to be a terrified mother of a teenager. That said, huge market. Interested to know of 10k beta users, what’s the ratio?

A: We heavily restricted. Only about 3000, 7000 Playdates (I think this means females). Playdates can be male or female.

LL: On Chatroulette people show off penises.

A: Chatroulette failed because it’s anonymous. Game community is more respectful than you’d imagine (Jason’s note: false). Can block Ip address. If someone disrespects anyone they get flagged/kicked off.

DD: Three big ways, and you’re potentially hitting two of them: gaming and dating. You’re not doing porn, but it could go that way.. What is monetization strategy?

A: Charge 60 cents a minute to use the service. Rev share with PlayDate community, which is why they are playing online. So a woman can go on, play with gamers and gets a cut. Adult sites are about 7 minutes, you can imagine why. Our sites, because they’re playing 3-4 hours. If we keep clean can target military, univirisites.

JH: First place my mind went when I saw call to action to developers. I wonder what the developer ecosystem is.

A: Beauty of our model is that we do standard rev share, we’re talking about games that are intimate gaming experience with 2-4 players. We can be lucrative for a developer.

Mobile?
A: Challenge is small interace, so you can’t have webcam next to game but there’s an opportunity there.

Within businesses, employees can share information over email, and through collaboration platforms like Yammer, Salesforce’s Chatter and others. But Q&A platforms like Quora have recently taken off as a centralized knowledge repository for a vast number of topics that is easily searchable. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, Opzi is launching a Q&A platform designed specially for businesses.

Opzi, which was incubated at Y Combinator, is essentially a white-label Q&A site that any organization can use internally to store questions and answers about their business processes. The site was founded by 25-year old Euwyn Poon, who graduated from Cornell University at the age of 18 and then received a J.D. from Cornell Law School in 2007. Poon worked as an associate in a law firm after school and found that it was difficult to sort through knowledge and instructions from his fellow associates online. Poon says that a Q&A-like site for business information within a company could help fill this gap and increase efficiency within an organization.

Similar to Yammer, users sign in with their corporate email address and can then search for information by keyword. You can also ask questions, and answer directly from the platform. There are a variety of uses cases for the platform. For example, an engineering firm could use the platform as a way to sort through commands. And because most companies are tied to email as a main communication platforms, questions and answers can be distributed and answered by email as well.

You can also post questions anonymously, and follow questions to receive updates to certain queries. Unlike a wiki, all the content on the platform is organized around the questions. Opzi is also working on ways to route questions to certain users if they could be experts in answering the question.

Opzi charges for the platform via a per seat licensing model. Even in stealth, Poon has already raised $1 million in funding from an impressive roster of angels, including SV Angel, First Round Capital, Naval Ravikant, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC, Hadi Partovi, Ali Partovi, Paul Buchheit, Fritz Lanman and Raymond Tonsing.

Quick summary of “AngelGate” to date:

• A Blogger Walks Into A Bar
• Dave McClure Gets Mad
• Dave McClure Gets Really Mad
• Ron Conway Goes Nuclear
• Ron Conway Clarifies

As I said the other day, there would be more private emails getting published. This one is from Chris Sacca, a prominent “super angel” who was not at the meeting I stumbled into but was at a previous meeting. He wrote a response to the Ron Conway email. It’s worth pointing out that this email is time stamped a good half hour before our story broke, meaning he wrote it thinking it would all still stay private.

This is also the first leaked email we’ve received that actually includes names in the header of some of the people who are involved in this mess. Presumably these were the people Ron Conway emailed, but the header was stripped out of that email when we received it. Like the Ron Conway email, we have separately confirmed this email is authentic, although Sacca will not comment on it.

I’ve removed one sentence from the email that was highly sensitive. Nothing that material to the overall message, but it was very personal and not appropriate to print publicly.

The email:

From: Christopher Sacca
Date: Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 7:05 PM
Subject: Re: Super Angels Gathering
To: Ron Conway
Cc: Josh Kopelman, Steve Anderson, Jeff Clavier, Mike Maples, Dave McClure, David Lee

Ron,

I agree with you that we all owe it to each other to be candid.

In that spirit, I will say that I will always be grateful for the opportunities you have given me in this business. You have shared deals with me, introduced me to colleagues, and invited me to events for years. Your philanthropy knows no bounds and has definitely inspired my work with charity:water and Livestrong. In fact, I have great respect for how you took my introducing you to will.i.am as an opportunity to become the single most important benefactor to his foundation. As I wrote last year before the Crunchies when I endorsed you for Angel of the Year:

I mention Ron last only because this one gets a little emotional for me. It goes without saying, his prolific reach is legendary. He is the Zelig of the startup world in that there isn’t a liquidity event in our industry in which he isn’t involved and a closing dinner to which he isn’t invited. Of course, he isn’t just invited as an investor, but usually as the guy who made the introduction, helped negotiate the terms, and saved it from the brink of disaster along the way. It gets emotional for me because no one in this business has been more generous, more selfless, or more caring with me. We all learn from Ron, and none of us could be here without him. I will never understand how he covers so much ground and how he manages to be so responsive and perform so much service for others. When you are with Ron, you know he will go to any length to help you. When guys with his success might otherwise take time to rest, Ron then redoubles his efforts for his charitable causes, not just giving money, but raising funds and awareness and doing hard work on non-profit boards. I feel lucky to know Ron and to have the chance to work with him virtually every day as I am sure many of you do too.

That said, I am having a hard time resolving the person I quite literally grew up with in this business, with the person who sent the email to which I am replying. Your anger and personal accusations hurt, and it is clear they are intended to.

I wasn’t in town for the second meeting, but I went to the first dinner. I wish you would’ve been there. Not only would your input have been valuable, but if you had attended, you would have seen firsthand these topics of discussion:

1) Standard docs to make financings cheaper for startups. The group talked about who would be willing to pitch in our own money and time to help draft a set of financing documents that would allow for priced rounds to cost the same as convertible notes. As you know, it usually costs 10-15 thousand dollars more to sell stock than issue a note. Entrepreneurs would directly benefit from that work by lower costs and less bullshit legal process to get a financing done. In fact, it is exactly what YCombinator did in building a model convertible note. I am sure you agree that would be a good thing for founders everywhere if we were able to publish docs like this to the public to be used as open source.

2) Pro-rata rights. At the first dinner, we heard, from guys who have been doing this for a long time, about the importance of securing pro-rata rights for future rounds. This would allow them to continue to invest alongside other investors at the new, higher, market price in future rounds. I have no doubt you would agree that entrepreneurs also benefit from having their early investors continue to stay involved and demonstrate their renewed commitment to the company. I know you would also love to be able to continue to invest in companies beyond their seed round, and you also know this is only ever helpful to your founders.

3) The futility of VCs blocking company sales. We also discussed how pointless it was for VCs to put clauses in deals that would prevent companies from selling and how the guys in the room had never invoked such a clause because doing so would create misalignment with their founders. We identified that as one way in which many traditional VCs were just missing the boat as to how to work with founders as peers and collaborators and not put them on the opposite side of the table. Each of us felt better knowing we weren’t alone in pushing back on this term that very directly harms founders.

4) Earliest stage founder cash-outs. Among efforts from others, we talked about my recent projects to get very early stage founders some liquidity. Traditional VCs have rarely been inclined to give founders any ability to cash out claiming it makes them less “hungry”. As someone who, just five years ago, had net worth of exactly zero dollars, I remember the difference between being “panicked” and “hungry”. As I have invested in more and more companies, I have learned that many founders would benefit dramatically from even the smallest amounts of cash (compared to the overall deal size). I have worked hard to get my founders as little as $25,000 to pay off credit cards and student loans. Or, in a small deal that closed this week, I was able to get a founder the money so he can pay for his wedding and not have to worry about taking on debt. I, and the other investors in this group who do the same thing, feel good about helping our founders in this way.

I hope you can really pause to consider who is on this list you mailed, as well as the others in the room you didn’t, and the way they do business. All of us have considered you a mentor along the way, and you have recognized that by collaboration with each of us. Inspired by your service, we have seen each of our firms evolve to continually try to always put founders first. Guys like Kopelman are so painfully pro-entrepreneur, and so service-oriented to the community of founders, one topic of discussion at our dinner was understanding all of the different founder perks on which he has spent his fund’s money. From the venture concierge and his hiring services, to his CRM software and CEO summits, I haven’t seen anyone add as much value to founders as First Round. I wish you could have been there to experience firsthand the discussion about how the rest of us could emulate more and more of that model. And, like typical Josh, he was certainly willing to teach us his best practices. I was so blown away, that I actually asked FR to lead a deal I sourced recently because I knew they could serve the company better than I could.

I know that each of the guys on this list coaches entrepreneurs they aren’t even invested with and continue to take time to help the entire startup ecosystem. They work to get founders access to early betas that they know will help. They call in favors to get costs down. They spend political capital to bring in the best hires and they lose sleep brainstorming how to solve problems. Each of the guys here takes phone calls and sends emails at all hours of the day and night. Everyone here hustles. Frankly, I find it hard to keep up with them, just like I can’t keep up with you.

I told you last night that I think some of this issue is worth discussing, even on stage. But, this message, and the ferocity and ad hominem attacks that you include, hurt. Both what you wrote to me before (calling this group “dirtbags”) and in this message above. I am not sure why it needed to get personal. In sharp contrast to your stereotyping about what you say is obsession with talking about cars, I actually drive a piece of shit truck with 115k miles, despite having been frequently encouraged to visit Franz to buy a Mercedes. I fly coach and I stay on friends’ couches in NYC and LA, not out of Signature Aviation and at the Peninsula. That said, though I haven’t yet made a buck, I sincerely hope I will. As I post clearly on my website:

“We don’t think of ourselves as money managers. That isn’t to say we aren’t tireless and competitive. In fact, we are ruthless negotiators, aggressive businesspeople, and have no allergy to disproportionately large returns. However, frankly, capital just isn’t that important to the early triumph of a company anymore.”

My founders will tell you, as will the founders of everyone listed here, that I/we sweat with these guys just like you do, bleed with them just like you do, and try as hard as we can to put their interests first. My founders stay at my house for team retreats. In fact, I just bought an entirely new place for them to be able to come to the woods, exercise, relax, focus, unwind, and bond with each other. That came out of my pocket. They get overweight? I buy them a mountain bike. They look skinny? I pick up groceries. Just talk to them and I am sure you will see that, though each of us investors adds value to our founders’ lives in different ways, everyone on this thread adds value, Ron. Everyone. To claim that SV Angel has a monopoly on adding value is disingenuous.

When I started angel investing, my first deal was paid for with a credit card check. It was a dumb idea, but I was so drawn to the notion that I could be helpful to the team and I relished the chance to be building something again. You and I were in that deal together and we both made out pretty well. As you know, at Google, I didn’t get rich by Silicon Valley standards. I left there worth less than a million dollars. I started doing angel investing in part because you and others like Coach Campbell encouraged me to and you knew I would be good at it. I wrote checks to companies when it was financially irresponsible for me to do so, then I went in there and busted my ass to make those things succeed. My days have been driven by a passion that makes it impossible for me to avoid the opportunity to help. Right now, 94% of my net worth is tied up in startups and I [REMOVED BY TECHCRUNCH]. I have every shred of my money alongside my founders, often buying their same common stock. No one but an obsessive idiot would ever allocate their money that way. But, I love what I do. And I know that goes for everyone on this list.

Kopelman bids his kids farewell every few weeks to fly the redeye here and back to be with his companies. I have watched Maples, Clavier, and Steve all drop what they are doing to be supremely helpful to their founders and to their peers. Each of them shares opportunities and leverages their network to try to offer the best possible service to their companies’ teams. Sure, McClure is loud and swears like a drunken sailor, but he takes bullets for his guys, and his service to entrepreneurs through Geeks on a Plane and his Startup 2 Startup dinners series is unparalleled. His followings among founders make that clear. They love and respect him, no matter how you may judge his writing style. They know they have an ally in Dave.

I have seen guys on this list, and in the larger group of all dinner attendees, repeatedly back off terms or convince other investors to take haircuts alongside them so deals can get done. Ask any single one of the companies who has met with me and they’ll tell you that I always negotiate against myself. To a fault. I have given back shares to make room for hiring and I have talked other angels into waiving any fiduciary arguments so our teams could stretch a small deal farther. Everyone here has done that knowing we will get to work with those entrepreneurs again in better times.

This group of guys could all take a much easier path if they were just out to make a buck. Everyone here could raise megafunds, bilk them for fees, jam too much money into deals and repeat that process all over again just mooching off the system. Instead, the folks you listed are all your fellow pioneers in a new way of doing business, a way that admits the structural change the industry has undergone. This is a different era, and each of these guys knows that means greater accountability than ever before.

I described on my Lowercase site characteristics that I think apply to everyone on this thread, and especially you, Ron:

We dive in to work with teams that obsess over user experiences, customer happiness, and that, to quote Paul Graham, “make something people want.” Along with relatively small amounts of money, we give them the time, attention, and the empathy that catalyze winning outcomes for all involved. Rolling up our sleeves, we help design front pages, invent new services, prioritize product features, negotiate partnerships, and deal with the everyday professional and personal challenges of startup life. We are grateful for the companies who have chosen us, and feel lucky for the chance to collaborate with such brilliant minds. The dealflow that comes to us is flattering, and we are beyond thankful for the other individuals and firms with whom we partner and learn from along the way.

It makes me sad to hear you don’t think that is actually the case, because I actually don’t doubt for a second that the guys on this list all exceed the standard above. You know they do. You have worked alongside them for years. You have broken bread with them. You know who these people are and you know what their values are. You have referred deals to all of them because you know the positive impact they have on this industry. Now you are willing to throw that away over second-hand accounts of what transpired at a dinner you didn’t attend. I think you owe this group more than that. I also think you owe the press and the founders who are reading the accounts you have prompted more than that.

Ron, we live in the age of Twitter. If we ever fucked an entrepreneur, or if an entrepreneur even hinted we had fucked them, it would be broadcast immediately and the resulting blog posts would be permanently attached to a search on our names. Founders have never been better educated or more empowered than they are today. We aren’t giving them money; they are giving us the right to invest in their companies. Our founders hire us and they do so after consulting a rich network of datapoints confirming whether we are or are not helpful. Slackers don’t get deal flow. Jerks don’t get deal flow. Poseurs get left aside. Abuse the system once and you are tattooed with shame.

Entrepreneurs outnumber us and they talk more than we do. The good opportunities are more than any of us can handle. There are legions of investors at the gates hucking checks at today’s founders. The only possible way any of us can stay in business is by serving. If we are not demonstrably and materially helpful to entrepreneurs, we are dead.

Pausing now to look back and re-read what you wrote, it just makes me sad and your rush to judgment of people you called your friends is disappointing. All of this goodwill burned with guys you have loved. All of this time spent on an issue when we should be helping our companies. (I am writing to you when I should be calling a founder to help him weigh the demands of his VCs and a potential acquirer.) All of this anger directed at people with whom you didn’t even have a discussion to understand what was or wasn’t going on. I wish you had been at those dinners. First, I am sure you would have had helpful input. But, more importantly,you would have instead seen your peers working, as they have always done, to cut through the bullshit in this industry and continue to restore the purity and honor a decade of misaligned interests has left here.

I hope you will find some time over the next couple of days to chew on all this, some time to reflect on who we all are and what we all do. I hope you will spend a little time with our founders and ask them how they feel about working with all of us. I hope you will work to clear the air about what did or didn’t happen. You have such an important voice. But, with that voice comes the responsibility to investigate, know, and share the whole truth.

All told, I know that the gratitude that this group has for your work in this business can’t be undone with one vitriolic email. So, I am optimistic that after you have a chance to chat with each of us, you will remember the passion and selflessness that underpin the work all of us do. While I deeply believe none of us could have gotten here without you, I also ask that you respect that we have all worked our asses off to be here. We all care, we all help, and we all serve. We all learned much of that from you.

I hope in time that will be clear once again and we can all get back to helping our founders and each other.

Thank you,

Chris

Instead of another boring lecture, last week my students at UC-Berkeley got quite a treat: a lively discussion with TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington. I once described Mike as a cross between Oprah Winfrey and Howard Stern; so I was ready for a little controversy. But he ended up lighting such a big fire, that I’ve been bombarded with questions from students about their education and careers. The questions aren’t just coming from Berkeley; after the discussion was posted on TechCrunch, students at Duke asked me to discuss this at a keynote I am giving at their entrepreneurship symposium on Wednesday; and students at other schools, from as far as India and Singapore, have asked for advice.  So I’ll just respond here in the hope of quenching this fire.

At the UC-Berkeley Distinguished Innovator Lecture Series, this week, Mike and I discussed a variety of topics.  We agreed on most subjects—except on the importance of education (and dearth of women in tech—which is a battle I’ll fight another day). When I brought up my TechCrunch post on the importance of MBA degrees, Arrington questioned why students needed to get any degree or go to college at all.  He talked up the success of tech CEOs who had dropped out of college—Zuckerberg, Gates, and “countless high-profile entrepreneurs including Larry and Sergey” (Mike: Larry and Sergey both have undergraduate degrees and were completing PhD’s). Despite being interrupted by Berkeley professor Ikhlaq Sidhu (who I was afraid would come on stage and strangle Mike before he could finish his sentence), Arrington said that he didn’t learn much from college; gaining admittance to a Berkeley or Harvard is the only certification a student needs; dropping out from college doesn’t carry a stigma anymore; so “the best thing in the world is to go to Harvard for a year and drop out because everyone knows you were smart enough to get in”.

Arrington told students that the kind of person who wants to increase his chances of success by getting a masters degree isn’t an entrepreneur; older entrepreneurs have no chance of raising money (so they’re a lost cause); success means building a billion dollar business and making a lot of money—it’s not good enough to build a good lifestyle business that pays the bills and brings you happiness. So they should “ready-fire-aim” and go for the big prize rather than thinking small.

Here is the problem with Arrington’s logic: students may come up with great ideas and start a company, but they aren’t going to be able make it big unless they have the educational foundation. Maybe Zuckerberg lucked out by being at the right place at the right time, but he wasn’t born with the knowledge of how to grow a business. To build a business, you need to understand subjects like finance, marketing, intellectual property and corporate law. Until you have been in the business world for a while, you don’t know how to negotiate contracts, deal with people, manage and nurture employees, and sell to customers. Most importantly, if students don’t learn the importance of finishing what they start, they will never achieve success—this requires perseverance and determination.  And by dropping out of college, they won’t have the alumni networks that they need to help them later in their careers and in business.

The harsh reality is that for every Zuckerberg, there are a thousand who drop out of college and fail. Many get discouraged after their failures and move to other professions which require less skill and education. Some universities do readmit students who dropped out for a short period of time, but most students end up burning through their savings and loans from friends and relatives, and can no longer afford their education. Some give up and look for jobs in big companies, but big companies don’t generally hire people without degrees—because they want employees who have the discipline to finish what they start; who won’t jump ship and chase every rainbow.

Plus, if you look at the backgrounds of the people who actually built Facebook—the executives and employees of the company—you’ll find that they aren’t college dropouts; they are highly educated. Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple—all started by college dropouts are the most selective in hiring; they are the most fussy about degrees.

My advice to students is to get all the education they can, while they can. Complete at least a bachelors and get a masters degree if you can. The degree doesn’t have to be from an elite college like Harvard or Stanford; any education will carry you far. As this chart shows (based on an analysis of the backgrounds of the founders of 652 successful technology companies), there is a huge difference in the size and revenue of companies founded by people with college degrees. But there is only a small difference between those with ivy-league degrees and the average (which includes all startups).

After you graduate, you should gain some practical work experience and learn the realities of the business world before making the plunge into entrepreneurship. Work for a big company for a few years; learn about how the corporate world works; get good at people management, project planning, and teamwork. Then join a startup—which will probably fail as most startups do. But you get to fail on someone else’s dime and learn all the valuable lessons.

In his talk, Mike Arrington said that he got little from his education.  He also said that he wished he had gotten an MBA instead of a law degree.  But what Mike didn’t seem to acknowledge was that he needed the law degree to become a lawyer; when he was a lawyer, he gained an in-depth knowledge about the tech world and its problems —which led to his startups; and this education gave him the knowledge to take on unethical companies and question unethical practices—all of which have helped make TechCrunch the world’s leading tech blog. Does anyone think that Mike would have been able to build TechCrunch if he was a college dropout?

In our discussion, Mike joked that instead of doing the law degree, he wishes he had learned to play the guitar in junior high—“maybe he would have become a rock star”. I have no idea if Mike has any musical talent, but a smaller proportion of guitarists become rock stars than techies who become CEOs.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa  is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwaand find his research at www.wadhwa.com.

Apple, no doubt, has a history of creating commercials that resonate with consumers. And with the recent Facetime ads, Apple has taken it one step further, appealing to the human emotion. But honestly, sometimes the best commercials are not produced by a big-name agency or a famous director. TechCrunch reader Paul Sanduleac sent us this video of his four-year-old brother using an iPad. It’s nothing short of impressive.

Not only is the little boy able to swipe on the device, but he’s taped playing various with apps, including a Keyboard app and a few games. You can see he’s having the time of his life, while also interacting with the content and learning alphabets and colors as well.

Since Apple first introduced the device, the iPad has been lauded as being a revolutionary way for kids to interact with apps and media. But sometimes it takes a simple video to remind you just how effective the device is for tots.

Let’s imagine a scenario; scenarios are usually fun. Let’s say you’re walking down the street, or in the mall, as you do, phone in hand, and see something in the shop window that catches your eye. “Hmm, this looks interesting,” you say to no one in particular. “Let me check that out.” So you walk, inspect the item, then say to yourself, “You know, this looks pretty neat, but I’m not quite sure I want it yet. $X-Amount isn’t exactly an impulse, you know?” You whip out your phone, launch something called SpringPad, then scan the item’s barcode with your phone. SpringPad goes out to the Internet, pulls all sorts of metadata, then stores said data for you on its Web site. When you get home, and you have time to think, you pull up SpringPad, then all of that data is ready and waiting for you.

Twitter is readying a free real-time analytics dashboard to help users make sense of their tweets, according to the company’s business development executive Ross Hoffman.

Speaking to attendees of the Sports Marketing 2.0 Summit yesterday, Hoffman at first said that sports leagues, teams, and players would have access to the analytics tool, the web analytics company WebTrends reports. He later told WebTrends’s Justin Kistner that the tool is expected to start rolling out by the end of the year.  Hoffman didn’t mention the dashboard’s availability for non-sports industry users, but we can assume that it will be available for all users.

The tool will use algorithms similar to Twitter’s “resonance” concept — which the company is using to determine the usefulness of promoted tweets — and will be able to show users how their tweets are spreading, as well as how influential their friends are, all as it happens in real-time. It’s being developed by the team behind Trendly, which Twitter acquired in June.

Analytics was one of many potential business models Twitter has been eying, so the fact that the company is prepared to offer it for free is surprising. In 2009, Twitter-cofounder Biz Stone said the company was in the first phase of rolling out commercial accounts with detail analytics. “We want to build statistics or analytics that let users know — ‘How am I doing on Twitter?’” he said at the time.

There’s still the potential for Twitter to offer even more detailed analytics for commercial accounts at a price. But now that the tool will be freely available for all users, there’s less reason for businesses to actually pony up for it.

Tags: Analytics, DataBeat, real-time, tweets

Companies: Twitter

People: Ross Hoffman

I’m at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, where the social network is having a special press event to talk about the current social gaming landscape. We expect there to be some important announcements this evening — the event is being led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and there are myriad game developers in attendance. My live notes and a video stream are below.

Facebook’s Dan Rose has taken the stage.
Talking about changes to FB platform, user experience around games.

• Mark Zuckerberg has taken the stage. Today, talking about two themes: quality and apps/games. Every day almost 300 million people come to FB.com.
• Hundreds of millions of people love games on Facebook. Hundreds of millions hate them.
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