Today, MyLikes unveiled a bundle of strong announcements that show the company continues to get significant traction, becoming the go to word of mouth recommendation service that lets people get paid through their streams, videos and blogs. About 10 months after the company gained seed funding from former Googlers and an advisory board (myself included), they have announced the raise of $5.5 million in Series A funding, led by Khosla Ventures. In addition, Gmail and FriendFeed founder Paul Buchheit is joining the company's board of directors. In parallel, the company has debuted its first apps for Android and iPhone. Big day.

Unlike traditional advertising platforms which are run of site or based contextual data, such as the page being viewed or the search executed, MyLikes is centered around personal recommendations from friends. If there is a good match of potential advertisers to one's interests, sharing a "like" becomes easy. The service has gained high visibility, not just in the Silicon Valley bubble, but even with A-list celebrities like the Khardasians - kid you not. Advertisers on MyLikes include Coca Cola, Microsoft, Sony Music, Axe Hair products and more.

Paul Buchheit's joining the board of MyLikes is especially intriguing due to his history at Google, where he is credited not just for launching Gmail, but AdSense as well. So this guy knows a ton about advertising success and should provide valuable feedback to MyLikes. He's also been in the trenches at Facebook before joining Y! Combinator earlier this year. I believe the role is Paul's first board of directors position.

For MyLikes, going mobile makes sense as well. The MyLikes On the Go app is now available on iPhone and Twitter, so active participants can get notifications for relevant campaigns on their smartphones, where they can instantly post likes to their streams, be it Twitter, YouTube or Facebook. Where the company can win and get even more visible is through true personal recommendations. There are two things wrong with ads today - that they are interruptive or irrelevant. MyLikes is solving for relevance, and the ads never get in the way of what you want to see.

Also joining the board of directors today is Alex Kinnier, partner at Khosla Ventures, who led the round. Existing investors including Lightseed Partners and Metamorphic Ventures, contributed.

DISCLOSURE: I am an unpaid advisor to MyLikes. I hold a small equity stake in the company.

MyLikes, the personal endorsement-based advertising platform best known for the ability to create sponsored tweets and YouTube videos, has seen significant growth since the company announced an initial funding round last April, opening up to the public and unveiling its advisory board, of which I am a member. The company's CEO, Bindu Reddy, reports more than 100,000 "influencers" are registered on the platform, reaching more than 160 million people. The company, who was founded by a pair of ex-Googlers, and who raised the angel round solely from former Google employees, has now added another three Xooglers to the mix, with the hiring of a new senior director of sales and engineering talent from the Mountain View search giant.

Like with Twitter, much of MyLikes' initial traction has come thanks to early engagement with notable Hollywood celebrities, and their loyal followers. Early users of the platform have included Snoop Dogg, Lindsay Lohan, Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian. Also like Twitter, many of the company's initial employees are former Googlers. Of the company's first 7 employees, 6 came via Google.


Of the new hires, the most visible is that of the company's new sales director John DiCola, who spent 7 years in Sales at Google, from 2000 to 2007, and is credited with opening and growing the Google offices in Chicago, Detroit and Dallas as the regional sales manager in the midwest.

John is joined by Tracy Scott, a new engineering hire at MyLikes, who was a senior ads infrastructure and system engineer at Google, receiving the prestigious founders award, before becoming the CTO of Pixelpipe, and Nick White, a senior software engineer at Google who most recently worked at YouTube on social features and personalization.

Also joining the company, the only non-Xoogler, Grzegorz Miaskiewicz, who recently blogged on updates to the MyLikes home page.

Growth on the company in terms of users, employees and clicks has also spawned new features and product improvements. As users "Like" items and share items through MyLikes, they get a unique MyLikes page, which can be shared on multiple sites throughout the Web, including Blogger, Posterous, Twitter and Facebook.

Also, an interesting twist, the company has created a patent-pending influence score that is based on user's social engagement, taking into account multiple factors like the numbers of friends and followers, clickthrough rates on shared links, mentions and retweets on Twitter, and more. The Influence score is continuously updated.

Disclosure: I am an unpaid advisor to MyLikes and hold a small equity position. Content of this post, and others, did not pass their way in advance.

Parallel to my public activity on the blog and in various social networks, piled on top of my real-world work with Paladin Advisors Group and the home life of raising twins, I have added a number of advisory roles to startups in the last two years. The first to come my way was BuzzGain (since sold to the Meltwater Group), and current positions include, in order of chronology, SocialToo, TeensInTech, MyLikes and QwoteBook. I've been approached for other roles, but for various reasons opted out. My activity with these companies, their founders, engineers and others, as well as seeing other activities from fellow advisors, has put me in a position to recognize the good and the bad, so I thought I would share.

First things first, an advisor to a company, especially a startup that is pre-revenue or in the early stages of revenue recognition, is not lucrative in any way. Most companies tag four or so advisors, offering 1-2% of the company, and in some cases much less, for their work, and no money changes hands. It's not an official position in the company, like an employee, and there is no fiduciary responsibility, as would be the case with board of director seats in a public company.

The role of an active and engaged advisor is to provide guidance and assistance to the company, using all their resources available, and to find opportunities for the company to find new partnerships, users or visibility where appropriate. This can mean sitting in conference calls with engineers where the service's roadmap is discussed, and offering feedback on direction or lobbing suggestions yourself. This can mean acting as an early adopter and finding holes in the product, sending them by e-mail and offering an alternative. It can mean introducing people at the company to people within your own network, who may be interested in the product themselves, or can bring the product more awareness. It can even mean sitting down with PowerPoint and cranking out a VC deck if fundraising is in the cards.

But in almost all cases, advisors don't write a single line of code, and the capabilities and direction of the company still comes from the CEO/founder and the engineers themselves who are turning ideas into reality. No matter of advice and enthusiasm can help when milestones are missed or priorities of the individuals impacting the company go astray.

What an advisor is absolutely not is an unabashed fanboy and overly enthusiastic booster of the product. Any time it is clear that an advisor has slipped from a partner of a company to an aggressive spammer who can't fail to mention the company or its products all over the Web, a line has been crossed. But it can be helpful for the person to have the company in mind when opportunities arise throughout the extended network, and to occasionally message on their behalf - with tact.

I initially worked with BuzzGain because I believed PR companies were doing a very poor job of targeting the blogosphere. That turned out to be true and I think still is. I teamed up with ReadBurner because I believe strongly in the act of highlighting popular shared items on the Web and enabling discovery. Unfortunately, that project didn't meet all my hopes and was closed at the end of last year. I worked with SocialToo because Jesse Stay had introduced some top tools to manage Twitter streams and followers, and to block spam. Twitter continues to evolve as does his product, and it is essential for me. I added my name to TeensInTech because I want to help the next generation of geeks to have a central place to communicate and share ideas. This project is still ongoing. I joined up to MyLikes because I detest unfocused advertising and want to see people benefit from trusted recommendations. And most recently, I am working with Qwotebook to help bring a permanent repository for the amazing things so many people are saying which are often floating into the ether.

I have seen some of my peers sign on as advisors to companies even if they privately don't like the product, simply because they think they might make money in the end. This is not an advisor you want. I have attended advisory board meetings only to have the same people not show up who didn't show up last time. They are not advisors you want. And I know you don't want advisors who are unwilling to risk their own "personal brand" to do work on your behalf.

Two months ago, one company approached me with an option to be on their advisory board. I said no. Not because I didn't like them or because I was too busy or because I didn't think they had a future. It was because I just wasn't familiar enough with their product and didn't want to be disingenuous. Since that time, I have started using their product and think it's great. And in that time, an announcement already went out with their new advisory board, without my name on it. Do I consider that a missed opportunity? Not really. Even if I miss out on some great engagement and a few dollars some day, it was not the right time, and my intentions would have been wrong.

Entrepreneurs are already stretched with their resources and their time. It is critical that when the time comes to find partners who are going to have blood and sweat equity with you, who can help build your product and find you new outlets, that you pick the right people who are entrepreneurial themselves, who are willing to take calls at odd hours, and who truly care about helping you achieve your vision. If you choose wrong, all you have done is given up equity to people who are along for the ride, and you may have to work even harder to chase them down. So do choose well.

I told you before, I am not a fanboy, not even to the companies I am working with where I do get deep insight into their plans. But I do care, and I will keep fighting on behalf of users from the inside, and then fighting for them when the time is right.

Disclosure: I am an unpaid advisor to SocialToo, TeensInTech, MyLikes and Qwotebook.

Increasingly, some of the new rules issued from popular Web platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, are raising more questions than answers, with words so carefully interwoven as to be interpreted any which way. The call for clarity from Facebook around privacy and from Twitter around what is permitted in users' streams from developers and programs alike seems to be unending - and it seems at times that the companies are being obtuse so they can be selective on how they choose to endorse the rules down the line. Monday's announcement from Twitter on blocking "injected paid tweets" on any service that leverages the Twitter API had a lot of people asking what this meant for services who derive revenue from posting content to the service. MyLikes, a company I advise for, was one that received questions. I spoke with CEO Bindu Reddy (@bindureddy) that night to gain her take and get some of the answers myself.

As best as I am able to understand it, Twitter is continuing to try and improve the user experience on their service, which at times has been less than fantastic. On the back of their efforts to weed out spammers, reduce the artificially-inflated visibility of hand-selected celebrities, reduce negatively-intended automation, improving uptime, and expanding a familiar presence to onboard new users, Monday's announcement looks like they want to improve the clarity of sponsored content on the network, while also protecting their own revenue stream.

The relevant line in question from Twitter COO Dick Costolo, says: "aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API." This line particularly focuses on the use of API for automation, and also the phrase "paid tweet", which is open for interpretation. What is promising in the piece is that Costolo says the company does not seek to control the content on the service, and that companies are open to sell ads, build vertical apps and analytics, and that the company does not always need to participate in revenue generated from their service. It sounds to me that Twitter is planning ahead for future battles with nefarious networks that are not in users' best interest, much more so than they are seeking to slow legitimate companies that have been built around their ecosystem.

As I mentioned when I first announced my affiliation with MyLikes, I am attracted to the company's model because the ads posted to Twitter, blogs and other networks are done by hand, by the users themselves, with the user creating the message. There is no automation on the user's behalf that they have not created themselves, and all the activity is above board.

In talking with Bindu, she agreed this sets the company apart from Twitter's foes. Also - a MyLikes generated tweet is as much of a personal endorsement as it is an ad, leaving this activity free and clear. In fact, while Costolo's post was somewhat confusing, we both agreed Twitter's move was one that continued their path toward maturation.

Update: You can also see Twitter API Lead Ryan Sarver (@ryansarver)'s comments on the situation here.

To hear more of Bindu's thoughts, check out the Cinchcast I recorded below:



DISCLOSURE: I am an unpaid advisor to MyLikes. I hold a small equity stake in the company. My comments on the company's product are always independent, and do not pass their way in advance.

Today, MyLikes, formerly Likaholix, announced they have raised more than $600,000 in funding from former Googlers, and the addition of a few names to their advisory board, myself included. As you know, I've been watching Likaholix (and now MyLikes) since their launch in March of 2009, and outside of the blog, I have had numerous conversations, by phone, e-mail and in person, with co-founder Bindu Reddy on the company's progress, morphing from a social recommendation engine, to one focused on word of mouth advertising for the Web. It will be a fun challenge to have a helping hand in the company's move to the next stage.

As I have said many times here, I am not a fan of unfocused advertising or low-quality ads and for the most part, I am not a fan of advertising for advertising's sake. But I am a big fan of relevancy, and leveraging one's social graph to discover what people are not just liking, but recommending, and actually buying. Those are reasons I have been working with my6sense on relevancy, and what attracted me to sites like FriendFeed and Likaholix in the first place - as well as Blippy, where I am a happy oversharer of my actual purchasing history.


MyLikes' attraction to me is the platform's ability to have people act as influencers in their community, promoting items and services that make the most sense for them, to their friends, and getting rewarded for spreading the word. It's something I do informally all the time as I praise some products and ignore others, and while I may not be the perfect target for this kind of affiliate model, others are finding the approach to be significantly improved, in terms of click-through rates and payouts, than standard keyword advertising.



Ads on influencers' blogs or tweets or other social activity, which are hand-selected by the individual, carry much more weight than those selected by a generic ad network. And as Twitter has made a lot of noise around their own approach to revenue, enabling big companies to promote their services in the tweet stream, MyLikes lets the users benefit from similarly promoting exactly what they like and signing their name to it - extending beyond Twitter, but to blogs and other sites as well.

Given my history of not embracing off-topic advertising, I am looking forward to working with MyLikes to drive quality through the system. You can be sure I will be one of their more interactive advisors, and they will hear from me often.

DISCLOSURES: I am an unpaid advisor to MyLikes. I hold a small equity stake in the company. In addition, my6sense is a client of Paladin Advisors Group, where I am Managing Editor of New Media. My comments on the company's product are always independent, and do not pass their way in advance.