After Selling Seek To F-Secure, French Entrepreneurs Land $3M For Ezakus Labs

Robin Wauters currently works as a staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. He can often be found working from his home or... ? Learn More

French entrepreneurs Christophe Camborde and Yannick Lacastaigneratte, who founded cloud storage storage Steek and sold it to F-Secure for close to $40 million in 2009, are apparently at it again.

A year after founding a company called Ezakus Labs, which has yet to launch a product, they’ve raised $3 million in funding from Idinvest (formerly AGF Private Equity) – for those who understand French, check our coverage of the news on TechCrunch France.

Not much is known about the company at this point, but here’s the buzzword-laden pitch from the press release:

The company features a groundbreaking audience targeting service allowing publishers and advertisers to easily set up social profiling offers with a cutting edge precision compared to the current standards.

Groundbreaking and cutting edge? Clearly, it’s a revolutionary, next-generation service.

For what it’s worth, Idinvest is an investor in several successful French companies, including Meetic, Criteo, Viadeo, Deezer and Dailymotion.

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Kevin O’Connor To Entrepreneurs: Don’t Be Afraid To ‘Throw A Turd In The Punch Bowl’

Rip Empson is a writer at TechCrunch. He’s not here to make friends, he’s here to WIN, and don’t you forget it. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More

On stage today at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, Kevin O’Connor, the former Co-founder of DoubleClick and current Founder and CEO of FindTheBest, offered some pointed advice to aspiring entrepreneurs.

Having co-founded DoubleClick, which was acquired by Google in 2007 for over $3 billion, O’Connor said that a lot of people think he has more money — and perhaps more brains — than he really does. He was being modest, of course, but the truth is that DoubleClick sold twice, and the co-founder was not part of DoubleClick’s second, more lucrative sale to Google. Engineers, which O’Connor is by background, do not always make the savviest businessmen, he said, but they sure can be quotable.

When TC’s Erick Schonfeld asked O’Connor what advice he would give to aspiring entrepreneurs, he said that the most successful entrepreneurs are not only those who are willing to break the rules and disrupt stagnant, fragmented industries, but also those willing to “throw a turd in the punch bowl”. O’Connor’s odd but memorable metaphor is a great image for the true disruptive quality that real innovation can have. (Especially in non-potable ways.)

O’Connor continued on to say that all the great ideas — and the great thinkers — have been delusional to some extent. Or, at least, their ideas seem more than a little far-fetched or crazy, which can be a sign of something poised for innovation — or for a big flop. The key is finding the balance between delusion and foresight.

The FindTheBest Founder said that he remembered first hearing about eBay and saying to one of his friends what a stupid idea an “online flea market” was, that it was something that would never gain traction. His point being that the best ideas can often be the craziest, and sometimes it takes a crazy person to see the clarity in those nutty ideas.

Another big problem that entrepreneurs run into with frequency, he said, is the problem of saying “no”. Entrepreneurs are creative, quick on their feet, and run through an idea a minute, he said. When you’re starting a business, there are one thousand and one things that you can do, but, really, at the end of the day, there are only three or four things that fit into the true strategy of one’s business. The challenge is for entrepreneurs to find those priorities and stick to them with one-pointed focus.

O’Connor, like Intuit Founder Scott Cook yesterday, encouraged startups to tackle the big problems, and not become so wrapped up in the solution.

As we wrote yesterday in summation of Cook’s advice to startup founders: Be careful of “falling in love with the solution rather than focusing on, or being delighted by, the problem. Often, founders end up finding — after much wasted time and frustration — that it is their original vision of the solution that is flawed. But if founders never lose sight of the problem, how teams attack the solution can remain more flexible, more iterative, and in the end make a product more likely to succeed”.

O’Connor said that it was this obsession with the big problem of web users finding it difficult to make significant decisions on the Web that led him to create FindTheBest and develope tech-assisted, human curated decision-making engine.

So find a digital problem that all your friends — geeks and non-geeks alike are having in today’s digital world — and throw a turd in that punch bowl.

That’s right. A turd. Figuratively speaking, of course.

FindTheBest, based in Santa Barbara, CA, and New York City, is an unbiased, curated, decision-making engine that gives users the ability to search through a broad range of topics—from Ski Resorts and Venture Capital Firms to Colleges and Smart Phones—compare options and select the optimal choice based on criteria important to them. FindTheBest is part of a network of purchase-intent driven sites powered by the company’s Data Driven Content Platform, which marries technology with human curation to organize data in...

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Kevin O’Connor is the co-founder and CEO of FindTheBest.com. Before founding FindTheBest in 2009, O’Connor started O’Connor Ventures in 2001, a company specializing in tech startups. In 1995, he co-founded DoubleClick, an Internet advertisement-technology company which was acquired by Google in April 2007. Prior to founding DoubleClick, O’Connor co-founded the Intercomputer Communications Corporation in 1983, a microcomputer to mainframe inter-connectivity company. When the ICC was acquired by DCA in 1992, O’Connor eventually became its CTO...

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Kevin O’Connor is the co-founder and CEO of FindTheBest.com. Before founding FindTheBest in 2009, O’Connor started O’Connor Ventures in 2001, a company specializing in tech startups. In 1995, he co-founded DoubleClick, an Internet advertisement-technology company which was acquired by Google in April 2007. Prior to founding DoubleClick, O’Connor co-founded the Intercomputer Communications Corporation in 1983, a microcomputer to mainframe inter-connectivity company. When the ICC was acquired by DCA in 1992, O’Connor eventually became its CTO...

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HealthTech FAIL: Lessons For Entrepreneurs From Health Startups Gone Awry

Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a patient relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice consulting to 25 hospitals and was the founder of Microsoft’s Health business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.

Healthtech is an ever-growing sector, but from the $1 billion pool VCs poured into startups over the last year, health companies only received about 3 percent of that total. Not many healthtech startups have been able to secure those big venture rounds; however, last week, I highlighted one healthtech company that seems to be doing it right: Zocdoc, which raised a $50 million round from DST earlier this month, and offered a few takeaways for startups looking to learn from Zocdoc’s experience. (Check out the post here.

As the aforementioned venture numbers from Rip’s post show, many startups really haven’t demonstrated the same wisdom Zocdoc has shown, which has led to an increasing number of healthtech failures over the last few years. One recent study in particular highlights this phenomena. After interviewing 110 digital health entrepreneurs, RockHealth recently released the findings of a study demonstrating the disconnect between the companies that are actually getting funding and the many that have come up empty.

This disconnect sheds light onto why so many healthtech companies have failed to make an impact, or have had to undergo significant pivots in order to survive. Below you’ll find some of the top causes of healthtech startup failure:

Lack of Specific Focus or Adoption point

It’s well documented that a lack of focus kills startups whether they are in healthcare or not but it is particularly prevalent in healthcare. The healthcare industry suffers from an abundance of pain points and is in serious need of disruption, so it’s tempting for new startups to try to solve them all to make the greatest impact. However, these startups are ignoring the old saying about how to eat an elephant — one bite at a time. Too many startups are biting off more than they can chew. It’s best to pick one major pain point to address and go with it.

Expected consumers to pay

With the exception of weight loss programs, there aren’t many examples of consumers paying directly for health services. Over time, this is likely to change as more of the burden of healthcare costs gets shifted to consumers as was highlighted in Part II of the Healthcare Disruption series (see links below). However, I’d be very cautious about any business expecting to have consumers pay in the near-term.

Expected consumer to enter lots of information

While I believe there was a bigger reason why Google Health failed, expecting consumers to enter information is one of the big factors in why Personal Health Records (PHR) have failed to gain meaningful traction. Most PHRs rely on the individual entering information and few are willing to do that.

Required huge amounts of money

This tended to happen in bubble periods where there was a grand vision and frothy funding markets threw huge sums of money. Ultimately, they weren’t sustainable franchises.

Require multiple and intricate partnerships

A startup dependent on too many partnerships is likely to run into issues as those partnerships frequently involve established players. Unfortunately, the established players have a dramatically different sense of urgency. Many good ideas have died on the vine waiting for business development and legal departments at established players who didn’t share the startup’s sense of urgency.

Lacked Understanding of Reimbursement Dynamics

This is by far the number one reason why healthtech startups have failed. The findings from RockHealth’s study highlight an important dimension of this. On a positive note, 77 percent of VCs think healthcare IT investment dollars will increase in 2011. Already 35 digital health companies having received $2M+ in 2011. The important point is that 80% of those receiving funding are B2B (i.e., selling to either healthcare providers, businesses, etc.) yet the majority of digital health entrepreneurs surveyed think consumers will pay for their product or service. Despite this fact, most early stage digital health entrepreneurs are building B2C companies.

Before it’s too late, hopefully these companies will find a way for someone other than consumers to pay. This could be via an advertising model or by licensing the technology to organizations. In this case, the consumer is the product, not the customer. The customer is the organization.

You can find RockHealth’s full study embedded below for your viewing pleasure:

The following is the Healthcare Disruption series referenced above:

Healthcare Disruption: Pharma 3.0 Will Drive Shift from Life Science to HealthTech Investing
Healthcare Disruption: Providers Will Use HealthTech to Differentiate and Produce Better Outcomes (Part II)
Healthcare Disruption: Providers Are Making Newspaper Industry Mistakes (Part III)

Image excerpt courtesy of Talking Technology With Leroy Jones

Avado is a Patient Relationship Management platform that enables a health-driven partnership between an individual and their health & wellness providers and gives the individual a Connected Health Record.

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Dave is the CEO and Co-founder of Avado. Avado is a Patient Relationship Management platform that empowers the healthcare partnership between individuals and their health & wellness providers while...

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