Live: Brave New Web – Jeremy Allaire Keynote Discussion

Here are my notes from Jeremy Allaire's keynote discussion at the MIT Brave New Web event. I think he did a good job and kept the Brightcove mentions to a minimum. My only nitpick is that many of his slides kept saying, "same as 1-2 above" – since we can only see one slide at a time, this is not a good technique to use. He also did not mention YouTube at all!

To download the audio, please visit this link on rapidshare. File is 21 mb and is 60 minutes in length.

Genesis of a company
– pattern recognition around a problem or opportunity
– vision and passion for a consumer or business problem
– serendipity
– explicit strategy and planning

What's the scale and scope of your dream? Jeremy believes this is a crucial question to ask before you start.

Early Financing choices include going from bootstrap to angel to venture or going direct to VC. Must ask yourself whether your potential partners are focused on building the kind of company you want to build.

Building the early team – Jeremy discusses that he didn't just hire all his friends for Brightcove.

Finding your customer – Jeremy notes that innovation and invention are generally cop-outs

Build great products that people will talk about, and if they don't, you've built the wrong products — the blogosphere is the great equalizer

He talks about the importance of building industry awareness and credibility

He discussed going after institutional funds and hedge funds instead of just traditional venture capital. Rarely available to most private companies.

Global video industry is a $350 billion industry. The internet video market represents .01% of this total. This does not include the booming growth in the user-generated video market.

Video is becoming as ubiquitous as text — on the verge of video as a "communications medium"

Lessons for media businesses include finding ways for consumers to become creators of programming. Get out ahead of the pirates and build your own video business and embrace ways for consumers to participate in and manipulate your media

He shows examples from Brightcove, Elle magazine (I think it's supported by Brightcove)

Monetization space – dominant one is from broadband advertising, pay media, syndication as content-owners expect to get paid for use and distribution of their content

Jeremy believes we are starting to move into better quality video from the 250kbps and exciting new UI metaphors

Conclusion – exceptional time for entrepreneurs, many approaches to starting and growing a company, follow your passion and your customers, online video is at the center of the online revolution right now, and it's still very, very, very early — hundreds of companies will get built and create value.