dotmatrix

A lot of debate has been raging whether or not the Valley has racial undertones that inhibits minorities from succeeding.

This post is purely my opinion on this topic, coming from my perspective as both a business person and entrepreneur of middle eastern descent.

Before I jump into my personal opinions, I wanted to give you some background about me. I started a company in college and sold it to Chegg in 2006. I worked in various roles from product marketing manager to my current roles as VP of Marketing for Kno and have either had discussions, worked on projects with or interacted with a number of Venture Capitalists and entrepreneurs throughout my last 5 years in the valley. Meanwhile, despite some success I also have been rejected from YC twice and have failed to raise money for some of my projects for a number of reasons, none of which I believe had to do with the race card.

Here is what I learned from the valley:

1. It's much less about racism, but rather more of an issue of pattern recognition. Investors are looking for people that follow a particular pattern. For example, did the entrepreneur go to Harvard, did they work for Google, are they an active member of Hacker news, etc. This is not because they are racists, but rather because this is cognitive instinct, its what they believe works since it's what they are most familiar with. It's the same patterns that sport scouts use to find raw talent. There are also a lot of examples where world class founders broke stereotypical patterns of what makes a great founder and the rule of any great vc is their willingness to break any rule.

2. The valley isn't a meritocracy but rather a referal-tocracy. The valley breathes with referrals. Every meeting I had, every opportunity I got was a result of a referral, rather than the work I achieved- great work is expected. Nobody gave a shit that my name was Ousama, it's how do you rate this guy in terms of quality, intelligence and determination and his idea. And if they were skiddish for any reason, which I don't believe so, then open their fucking eyes, by proving your not what they expected!!!!

3. Educate people about your culture. It's amazing how often people have misconceptions about things, if they do exist, it's not because they are inherently racist but because they simply have had limited interactions with a certain type of of person. Whether it's their culture, religion or academic background, don't be afraid to open conversations about your identity with the people you work with, investors or other entrepreneurs. The valley is one of the most open societies i have seen, and trust me I grew up in a small redneck town in Wisconsin, this place is like heaven.

We would love to get your feedback on this project. It's a cause driven e-commerce platform. Think kickstarter meets amazon, but for cool stuff. Essentially you find something you like and pre-order it, once the item has hit a number of pre-orders the item goes on sale and for each purchase of that item some of the sales go to a goal towards a cause. It's a dead simple idea, but we are not entirely sure if it has been done right so were giving it a shot.

Here is our first project, some cool cufflinks that will help fund Oakland CA schools.

www.madlov.com/qa

We would love your feedback and ways we could improve this.

I came to Silicon Valley in 06' in pursuit of doing something great. In fact I boarded a flight on one of those low cost air carriers you have never heard of just 4 hours after I finished my final exam from the University of Minnesota to start my new life in a place called Santa Clara.

A guy name Greg Soroka, who was Chegg's first Product Manager was kind enough to pick me up from SFO. I arrived at 10PM, a bit tired, full of hope- thinking to myself is this really happening? Greg, I would come to learn was a habitually late to everything. It was December 15th 2006 and I came to a harsh realization that California weather did not warrant short sleeve shirts year round. To my surprise, I saw a black Honda Civic roll up and a twenty something pop up with a smile and cigarette freshly lit hanging from his mouth greeting me for the first time "Hi, im Greg, are you Ousama."

I threw my suite case, my life belongings in a tattered 1980s Samsonite I stole from the family basement, and jumped in. The ride from 101 South to our familiar Great America parkway exit with filled with awkward moments, ones you would expect when meeting your host for the first time. As we strolled down 101 at 11:30PM I starred out my window at the buildings lining the freeways in awe of companies I had always admired but never seen. It was almost as if a factory of start ups and companies was neatly arranged alongside perfectly manicured palm trees. We finally exited towards Great America Parkway. Greg asked me if I was hungry and recommended I try a "Double, Double, Animal Style with Animal Style Fries." As in Rome do as the Romans I thought, "Sure, sounds good to me."

We pulled through the drive through, with food in hand Greg reaches over and says "Welcome to Silicon Valley...Now let's get to work." A few minutes later we pulled up into a mushroom shaped building on Old Ironsides Dr, the building completely vacant other than a few inoperable cars sitting out front. Greg switched the lights on, pulled out his macbook and started back up where he left off before picking me up from the airport.

That night we debated about new products, how to attract more users and what the coolest internet companies were up to. It was like a fraternity, literally...cans of mountain Dew lined desks, pizza boxes littered the floor, and the smell of dirty laundry aired the room. We worked that night until 5AM, I remember because I was exhausted and coming down with a cold.

We locked up the office and headed out to Greg's apartment where I was given VIP access to his couch, which also served as my bed for the next few weeks. I guess this was my first taste of what it meant to be a hacker, it was more about being open to any situation, rapidly adapting yourself to your surroundings and making things work for the better..

My name is Ousama Haffar and I was one of the early guys at Chegg.

While Chegg isn't a Zynga or a Facebook story that attracts the oohs and ahhs of Silicon Valley, I would love to share a bit with you about what I learned about entrepreneurship and being scrappy during my time at Chegg as founding member of the team from 2006-2010 and how we went from $0 to over $100M in revenue.

Chegg originally start its life as a college classified site that attracted 60,000 students across the country to buy and sell your everyday college type items; t-shirts, mini fridges, old beat up Pontiacs, etc. Our team was about 5-7 people, mostly engineers and I focused mostly on product, marketing and whatever odd jobs that needed a hand.

In our early days we attracted a couple hundred thousand visitors to our website each month, mostly buy building a campus marketing team and doing your traditional marketing. We would give away pizzas, flyer in dorms work with student organizations to create swap meets at the end of the semester and even created a textbook exchange.

Well, back in 2006 the name of the game in Sillicon Valley was user generated content and eyeballs. We dreamed of building this vibrant and massive classifieds business that could be monetized by advertising in each vertical in the already $200BN college market. In reality, we hit the same problem most marketplaces hit, the good ole' 80-20 rule. Users seemed to love browsing the site but never felt like posting items for sale. And as a result we hit a growth ceiling. Well, back in 06 and 07 with Facebook's popularity storming off and sites like Youtube changing the world, most web startups felt most strongly about generating users, and well when your user growth hits a wall...you're in trouble. So we did what any startup with a million bucks in the bank looking for quick fix to growth problems would do, Marketing Promotions.

So, me being the marketing/product guy thought hmmm...what would college students want that would make them tell all their friends and magically grow our user numbers overnight? In 2007 that answer was the hottest item on the market, the Nintendo Wii. So with a couple thousand bucks in hand and a skill for finding sellers of the hottest gift on the planet we went to work and secured a supply of 6 Wiis. Here comes the kicker, we planed a promotion to sell them for the insanely low price of $99 on our wonderful classifieds website and promote it using Deals of America, Fat Wallet and sending an email to our user base.

What happened was predictable, but nevertheless exciting. A fresh line of oxygen and the beginning of my misery. Within an hour after launching our promotion the website came to a standstill, our server couldn't handle the traffic and our best case scenario turned into a nightmare. Meanwhile, some college hackers thought it would be fun to hit our site with a D.O.S and as soon as we were up and attracting hundreds of thousands of users we were down and scrambling to get it back up and running. The pure exhilaration of seeing an idea become an instant hit to turning away tens of thousands of users was just a taste of the the roller coaster of emotions I would experience over the next 3 years at Chegg.

We finally got the site back up and running and within seconds the Wiis sold out. We thought to ourselves wow, our "Hatch of the day" as we called the promotion was a mega hit and it's time for us to start repeating it day in and day out. With a $50,000 budget I went to Frys, scowered amazon and found the most popular college items of the day and loaded a back room with marketing inventory for our daily deal sales. Within the week the website seemed like a vibrantly growing community, the word was quickly spreading and our story to investors seemed bright and optimistic, the day was saved thanks to the Hatch of the Day, or was it...

Part 1 of 6

I am looking for technical co-founder in the Bay Area to partner up with for my startup called digizal.com, an e-commerce platform for a disruptive industry.

If you consider yourself a guru in PHP, Javascript, Ajax, HTML, CSS, MYSQL and other languages and just love to hack stuff please send me some info about you and your projects to digizal08@gmail.com. As a co-founder you will be responsible for heavy coding, infrastructure, and all aspects technical.

I have recently applied for Ycombinator summer term and with a kick but technical partner this startup can't be reckoned with. I have vast experience with e-commerce and have generated a lot of moola for a successful e-commerce company.

About me, this is my second startup the first was acquired when I finished college by a Bay Area technology company. I can give you all the details later, I am welcome to face to face meetings.