Vinny Lingham’s Blog

I’m honoured to be this month’s cover story in Entrepreneur Magazine (SA). Many thanks to Juliet Pitman for the great write-up. It also gave me the perfect opportunity to test out Scribd – which is an amazing service that allows you to share PDF’s and other documents. Here is the article below, using Scribd to display it:

This man raised $20m in funding

I’m at the Endeavor conference in Miami and today’s keynote speaker is Reid Hoffman (Founder & CEO of LinkedIn). I’m going to try and paraphrase what Reid says – so this blog post is by no means verbatim and just highlights the key themes of his talk.

Part of the thesis upon which LinkedIn is based, is that all individuals are in effect small businesses and need to brand themselves as such and preserve their relationships with the people that you meet.

Entrepreneurs are typically always looking for people for advice, funding, employees etc. By using LinkedIn, you can narrow …

The world surely has changed since the heydays of the late 90’s. It’s been a little over 10 years since Yahoo acquired Geocities for nearly $5bn. Yahoo announced today that it would be shutting down it’s Geocities service – it seems that free websites are on their way out? Clearly, I have a lot vested in this industry (especially since Yola (previously SynthaSite) recently raised $20m in funding for a “free websites” business model) – so I thought that I should at least try to provide an insider’s view of this sector and how …

There are two models for any online business, either the user pays or someone else does…

We conducted a survey at Web 2.0 expo earlier this month, and here are the findings:

* 78 percent of respondents believed the freemium model will weather the economic downturn, compared to 27 percent who put their faith in subscription-based models.
* 90 percent of respondents believe partnerships will be a driving factor for Web 2.0 innovation over the next year.
* 46 percent of respondents saw strategic partnerships as the fastest route to profitability; 42 percent believe its only subscription-based services, while only 39 percent believed it …

So, today, SynthaSite is officially renamed to Yola and it’s been a pretty fantastic day for us – a lot of work has gone into this over many months and it was a tough decision to make. SynthaSite was really built into a solid and popular brand – supporting over 1.5m users and growing rapidly. We also raised $20m in financing last month – so we need to put that money to good use and build out a solid business!

This clearly begs the questions: “Why Yola?” and “Why now?”.

Why Yola?

In …