Showing posts with label Peter Thiel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peter Thiel. Show all posts

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Adoption And Missed Opportunities

DAVOS-KLOSTERS/SWITZERLAND, 30JAN09 - Mark Zuc...Image via Wikipedia
The Chromium Blog: WebP, a new image format for the Web: a single component of web pages is consistently responsible for the majority of the latency on pages across the web: images....Images and photos make up about 65% of the bytes transmitted per web page today.
The engineering accomplishment might be the easy part. Adoption might be the hard part. There still are people whose ISP is AOL. Most people who use IE use some primitive version.
Slate: The Other Social Network:That spring, Goldberg started instant messaging with Mark Zuckerberg. In March, he met with Zuckerberg and Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder and early Facebook investor, at a Starbucks on 96th Street. According to Goldberg, Parker tried to persuade Zuckerberg to acquire CU Community. Zuckerberg didn't tip his hand, but Goldberg says they kept in touch. In June, he says, Zuckerberg invited him to Palo Alto, Calif., where the Facebook crew had moved to work on the site. Goldberg flew out and stayed with Zuckerberg and pals for two weeks. "I think we went to one Stanford party," he says. There was "no crazy partying or drinking," Goldberg says, despite what The Social Network may suggest...... One factor was that Zuckerberg's site had the financial means to expand. Goldberg says he turned down advertisers, including MTV, and didn't seek out venture capital .... He started writing a food blog
The dude should have joined the Facebook team at the earliest possible date. Capitalism.

In The News

CNet: Google offers JPEG alternative for faster Web

Google Social Web Blog: Google URL Shortener Gets a Website: http://goo.gl

The Official Google Blog: Explore the world with Street View, now on all seven continents: everyone can now see places from all seven continents

AP: IMDb turns 20 with a refreshed, video-full website:the site has 100 million monthly visitors worldwide.

Adventures in Capitalism: Did Peter Thiel Make The Single Best Investment In History?:In 2005, Peter Thiel paid $500,000 for a 10% stake in Facebook..... his stake is worth between $2-3 billion. That's a 6,000x return on his capital in 5 years.

The Next Web: Square using social media stats for credit checks and fraud prevention:the number of Yelp reviews a business has or the number of Twitter followers a business has.... Square, which wants to be “PayPal for the real world”



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Monday, May 18, 2009

Bad Time To Start A Company?


The economy is in a bad shape. Banks are not lending like they used to. Investors are cranky. Venture capitalists are nervous. The unemployment rate is high and going higher. If you have a tech startup in mind, is this a time to lay low? Or is this precisely the time to barge forth?

I am going to argue now rather than two years earlier is the right time to embark on a truly ambitious company. Microsoft got launched during the stagflation of the late 70s, as did Apple, and Oracle. Companies launched during the 30s went on to define an era. This is good time. All you need is fire in your belly. Only don't let angels and investors blackmail you.

The Big Money Is Not In Blogging
Cisco's Big Dreams: A Clash Of Titans?
What If The Plateau Lasts Nine Months?
Mideast Peace: Tech Industry Style
Job Hunting And 2.0
Brands Will Still Matter
New York City: Transformed Forever?
Reimagining The Office
Stream 2.0: The Next Big Thing?
Microfinance, Nanotech, Biotech, Software/Hardware/Connectivity
Peter Thiel: Primitive Mind In The Tech Sector
David Gelernter: Manifesto

The United States Of Entrepreneurs
Visionary Entrepreneurs Will Recreate The World
That StartUp Mentality (2)
That StartUp Mentality



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Friday, May 01, 2009

New York City: Transformed Forever?


9/11 happened here. But that was the work of the Al Qaeda. America and the world were transformed forever. The financial 9/11 happened. But that was not the work of the Al Qaeda. The bungee jump phase has already lasted nine months. I think we are about to hit the plateau phase. (That Plateau Feeling) How long will that last? When will we see the take off phase? How soon?

The pain of the bungee jump has been very real. It has been across the board, it has been across the country, it has been across the globe.

There's death to disease, there's death to accident, and there's death to crime. They don't fall in the same category. Children dying to diarrhoea do not fall in the same category as people dying to genocide. Two investment banks falling to the global financial crisis does not fall in the same category to the two buildings falling to 9/11.



This city has lost tens of thousands of jobs that will never come back. The challenge is to create tens of thousands of new jobs. The challenge is to create new jobs, companies, and industries. The basic greatness of this city has not changed. This city still attracts the top graduates of the top schools in the country. This city still attracts people from every town on earth. This city still has money, and people, and the infrastructure. This city has the capacity to create.

This city has the option to reimagine itself, and claim an even more central place in the planet's imagination. (Silicon City)




Reimagining The Office
Stream 2.0: The Next Big Thing?
Microfinance, Nanotech, Biotech, Software/Hardware/Connectivity
Define Social Media
Peter Thiel: Primitive Mind In The Tech Sector
The Stream, The Lifestream, The Mindstream
David Gelernter: Manifesto
The Human Is The Center Of Gravity In Computing
Visionary Entrepreneurs Will Recreate The World
The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream
Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter
Web 5.0 Is Da Bomb



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Reimagining The Office

An image of a lot of cubicles that seem to go ...Image via Wikipedia

Technology will never substitute face time. (Web 5.0: Face Time) But is the cubicle the best way to respect that fact? And if you have to stare at the screen for several hours each day, does that screen have to be in a cubicle?

And if people become so central to the knowledge economy ways, don't sexism and racism and other isms become unbearably intolerable? I mean, if you are trying to get the very best out of each member of your team. You want each person on your team to give the very best they can.

And if it is the knowledge economy and knowledge workers we are talking about, what does it mean to be committed to lifelong education? Education never stops. What does that mean?

Stream 2.0: The Next Big Thing?
Microfinance, Nanotech, Biotech, Software/Hardware/Connectivity
Define Social Media
Peter Thiel: Primitive Mind In The Tech Sector



If the best idea could come from anywhere on the team, what does that do to the traditional hierarchy? Is there a hierarchy? Has the pyramid become a cloud? The best ideas might come from outside the team. What does that do to the team? Could the team be learning?

What would it mean to take a company through one paradigm shift after another, every few years? How long can you keep that startup feeling before you are big but no longer on the bleeding edge?

People will leave. You will ask some people to leave. You will outsource some of your work, you will crowdsource some of your work. What does it mean to have a core team in that sea of volatility? What does it mean to build and enrichen and deepen relationships?

What would it mean to have a company completely at peace with social media?

But there's a flip side to the face time concept. What if geography is irrelevant, as it is, and I can attempt face time with you still? There's emailing, chatting, audio, video, there's facebooking, tweetering. That changes things. You can feel India's presence right here in New York City.

But the new office can't just be a fashion statement. The new office has to make more money than the old office. The new office should get rid of discredited, old paradigms, but it should also breathe new life into timeless values. Profits still matter. Innovation matters. Hard work matters. Playing by the rules matters. Breaking rules matters. Teamwork matters. Out of the box thinking matters. Leadership matters more than ever. Customer service matters. The market is the goddess we worship. Market forces matter. Democracy is the goddess we pay homage to. Doing good matters.

Some things change fundamentally. Some things never change.





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Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Peter Thiel: Primitive Mind In The Tech Sector


Facebook Backer Wishes Women Couldn't Vote Gawker first outside investor in Facebook .... Thiel is the former CEO of PayPal who now runs the $2 billion hedge fund Clarium Capital and a venture-capital firm called the Founders Fund. His best-returning investment to date, though, has been Facebook. His $500,000 investment is now worth north of $100 million even by the most conservative valuations of the social network. .......... all those voting females have wrecked things .......... "The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women - two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians - have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron." ........... The problem with women is that they don't vote like their menfolk tell them. We would have so much more freedom, Thiel suggests, if only we'd deprived women of it. ...... rumors we'd heard about Thiel during his PayPal days, especially while he was fitfully coming out as a gay man. ......... The clubby ranks of VCs are mostly straight, white and male. They instinctively prefer entrepreneurs who remind them of themselves. At best, it's a wrongheaded sense of caution. At worst, it's prejudice with a handy alibi. ...... The effects are hard to document. VCs fund so few of the companies they talk to that it's hard to prove a case of discrimination; there are a hundred reasons why they might pass on any given startup. ....... I think it explains a lot about Thiel: His disdain for convention, his quest to overturn established rules. Like the immigrant Jews who created Hollywood a century ago, a gay investor has no way to fit into the old establishment. ....... Peter Thiel, the smartest VC in the world, is gay.
For those of us who aspire for tech entrepreneurship with a purpose, Thiel's very presence is an offense. I think Facebook should go ahead and figure out a way to return his investment money.

I had never heard of Peter Thiel before this article. Then I read the first few paragraphs and got offended. Then I read a second article on him and found out that, one, he is gay, and two, he is considered a very smart venture capitalist.

I tried to cut some slack. If you are smart, it is hard to fit in. If you are gay, it is hard to fit in.



I have personally encountered people in life who are otherwise losers but who think if only they can talk racist, somehow they will belong with people who think that, well, they are losers. Often times, the formula seems to work.

It is possible Thiel thinks his sexism will somehow give him a sense of belonging. But what exactly is he trying to belong to?

I can understand differences in opinion. I can understand not agreeing on, say, tax policy. I can understand voting for McCain. But what Thiel has expressed is rabid sexism, and racism, and there can not be room for that. The social media echo chamber needs to talk out loud on this one.



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