Netizen

Sunday, November 25, 2012

Facebook's Sad IPO's Wide Toll

I think Facebook's sad IPO was a wakeup call to many. The mobile trend is unmistakable. But I don't think it is wise to write off the web. Mobile is hottest, true, but the best applications will be platform agnostic.

Fred Wilson: What Has Changed

VC funding of consumer web and mobile companies is down 42% in this first nine months of 2012 (vs the first nine months of 2011). ..... google, facebook/instagram, amazon, microsoft, apple, twitter, ebay, yahoo, AOL, craigslist, wordpress, linkedin together make up a huge amount of the time spent online, particularly in the english speaking world ..... tumblr and pinterest have risen a lot in the past couple years ..... the consumer is moving from desktop/web to mobile/app ..... most new consumer internet startups need to build for iOS, Android, and web at the same time ..... distribution is much harder on mobile than web and we see a lot of mobile first startups getting stuck in the transition from successful product to large user base. strong product market fit is no longer enough to get to a large user base. you need to master the "download app, use app, keep using app, put it on your home screen" flow and that is a hard one to master. ...... We are small on purpose ... We want to invest in a tiny slice of the early stage ecosystem where our thesis collides with great teams and unique and differentiated products. ...... we are seeing fundraising challenges everywhere, even in our very best portfolio companies .... it is a tougher time for early stage consumer internet companies than I have seen since the 2001-2004 time frame. And I think we are still in the early innings of this more challenging environment. ..... the wind that has been at our back for 7-8 years in consumer internet is no longer there

Wall Street Journal: VCs Still Chasing Web Companies, But With Less Cash

Overall the amount invested in consumer information services was off 42% in the first nine months as the difficulties of newly public Internet companies such as Facebook and Zynga cast doubt on the business models and valuations of social media companies.

Dave McClure: What Hasn’t Changed: The Internet Keeps Getting Bigger.

most VCs switching from consumer to enterprise are clueless about why they’re doing so ..... The number of recent internet services that have grown from nothing to hundreds of millions of users is frankly rather astonishing – Pinterest, Instagram, Groupon, Zynga – all of these took less than a few years to get to hundreds of millions of users and in some cases billions of revenue. ..... what we are seeing with the smarter funds – they’re waiting until Series A or B when companies have clear traction before they jump in, when they may require larger amounts of capital to finance growth. ...... many companies can get to break-even without raising big rounds of venture capital, and may simply choose to operate on their own cashflow, or perhaps debt-based financing. ..... monetization keeps getting better and better, and exits are getting earlier and more often. ..... as online payments and monetization improves, again we will see less need for venture capital to finance customer acquisition for successful internet businesses. ..... There will be thousands of small wins, but larger funds can’t handle the scale required to do so many small investments. Maybe we need something like the SBA small business loan equivalent, but on the the equity side

Om Malik: Who Says Startups Are Easy?

The economics of attention is much more ruthless and unforgiving than the real economic underpinning of a product. Just as it is hard for a movie to recover from a bad opening weekend, today’s “apps” lose if they don’t make a good first impression.

Nexus 4

Saturday, November 24, 2012

StartUp Ideas

Image representing Rajat Suri as depicted in C...

Image via CrunchBase

Paul Graham does not blog often. But when he does he churns out an instant classic.

How To Get StartUp Ideas

The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself....... The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way. ...... the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has. ..... you can either build something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter. ...... Microsoft was a well when they made Altair Basic. There were only a couple thousand Altair owners, but without this software they were programming in machine language. Thirty years later Facebook had the same shape. Their first site was exclusively for Harvard students, of which there are only a few thousand, but those few thousand users wanted it a lot. ....... The founders of Airbnb didn't realize at first how big a market they were tapping. Initially they had a much narrower idea. They were going to let hosts rent out space on their floors during conventions. They didn't foresee the expansion of this idea; it forced itself upon them gradually. All they knew at first is that they were onto something. That's probably as much as Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg knew at first. ....... You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. .......... It was not so much because he was a programmer that Facebook seemed a good idea to Mark Zuckerberg as because he used computers so much. If you'd asked most 40 year olds in 2004 whether they'd like to publish their lives semi-publicly on the Internet, they'd have been horrified at the idea. But Mark already lived online; to him it seemed natural. ....... Live in the future, then build what's missing. ....... Drew Houston realizes he's forgotten his USB stick and thinks "I really need to make my files live online." Lots of people heard about the Altair. Lots forgot USB sticks. The reason those stimuli caused those founders to start companies was that their experiences had prepared them to notice the opportunities they represented. ...... anyone reasonably smart can probably get to an edge of programming (e.g. building mobile apps) in a year. Since a successful startup will consume at least 3-5 years of your life, a year's preparation would be a reasonable investment. ..... software is eating the world, and this trend has decades left to run. ..... not absolutely necessary (Jeff Bezos couldn't) .... The Facebook was just a way for undergrads to stalk one another. ..... Live in the future and build what seems interesting. ...... It's no coincidence that Microsoft and Facebook both got started in January. At Harvard that is (or was) Reading Period, when students have no classes to attend because they're supposed to be studying for finals. ...... Worrying that you're late is one of the signs of a good idea. ...... Whether you succeed depends far more on you than on your competitors. ...... The search engines that preceded them shied away from the most radical implications of what they were doing—particularly that the better a job they did, the faster users would leave. ...... Most programmers wish they could start a startup by just writing some brilliant code, pushing it to a server, and having users pay them lots of money. They'd prefer not to deal with tedious problems or get involved in messy ways with the real world. ...... The unsexy filter is similar to the schlep filter, except it keeps you from working on problems you despise rather than ones you fear. ..... Hotmail began as something its founders wrote to talk about their previous startup idea while they were working at their day jobs. ...... The next best thing to an unmet need of your own is an unmet need of someone else. ..... When Rajat Suri of E la Carte decided to write software for restaurants, he got a job as a waiter to learn how restaurants worked. ...... Traditional journalism, for example, is a way for readers to get information and to kill time, a way for writers to make money and to get attention, and a vehicle for several different types of advertising. It could be replaced on any of these axes (it has already started to be on most). ....... after Steve Wozniak built the computer that became the Apple I, he felt obliged to give his then-employer Hewlett-Packard the option to produce it. Fortunately for him, they turned it down, and one of the reasons they did was that it used a TV for a monitor, which seemed intolerably déclassé to a high-end hardware company like HP was at the time .. And the reason it used a TV for a monitor is that Steve Wozniak started out by solving his own problems. He, like most of his peers, couldn't afford a monitor. .... ..... The prices of gene sequencing and 3D printing are both experiencing Moore's Law-like declines. ..... Live in the future and build what seems interesting.

Friday, November 23, 2012

My Public Facebook Page

My public page on Facebook. 77,000 people reached this past week. 2320 likes as of now.

Monday, November 19, 2012

Off Season April Fool Joke On Yahoo Facebook Search Deal

This is not the first time respectable media got it wrong. Actually the media routinely gets it wrong. But flat out wrong is a little rare.

Yahoo Facebook Search Alliance Would Be Interesting
Yahoo and Facebook Not in Search Alliance Discussions

(Speaking of movies, I am sorry it took me so long to get to this, but I was seeing the final “Twilight” movie with some All Things Digital staffers. I can report that the sparkly vampires of the film are also not in search alliance talks with Facebook.)

I guess the implausible part is that it perhaps is truly hard for Yahoo to walk away from Microsoft on search, and if the idea is to compete with Google, Bing is not a bad ally, it is number two. Heck, Facebook teamed up with that very Bing.

Yahoo wanting to go back to fight the search wars would be like Steve Jobs wanting to go back and fight the PC wars.

"The PC wars are over. Microsoft won!" is what Steve Jobs wisely said when he took over Apple. Marissa Mayer is better off looking in the mobile direction. That is raw territory.

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Yahoo Facebook Search Alliance Would Be Interesting

I think this is the most intriguing move by Marissa Mayer since she took up leadership at Yahoo. But so far this is just a meeting between two powerful women in tech.

I have long advocated Facebook should go into search. And I thought from day one Yahoo outsourcing search to Microsoft was a mistake.

Facebook's Search Option
The Facebook Search Engine
Facebook Could Do Well In Search

This move is audacious. I'd be interested to know what kind of timeline we might be talking about.

But it would be a mistake to think of this in terms of a political alliance. When Yahoo and Microsoft teamed up, two plus two did not equal four. They together lost share to Google.

This is about if you can innovate. I think these two might be able to.

Marissa Mayer: Biographical Details
Marissa Mayer's Gameplan
Marissa Mayer: Photos
Sheryl Sandberg: New Yorker Profile

Yahoo! plots alliance with Facebook in new search deal

Facebook has already said it plans to boost its web search facility, with founder Mark Zuckerberg noting that the social network is “pretty uniquely positioned to answer the questions people have”. ...... Yahoo!, which started life as one the first major search engines but is now dwarfed by rival Google, would benefit from Facebook’s vast army of more than 1bn users. ..... Working with Facebook would also allow Yahoo! to piggyback on the social network’s brand cachet to help it recruit top-tier computer programmers ..... An alliance between Facebook and Yahoo! will pose a major threat to Google and stands to reorder the hierarchy of the world’s biggest technology companies. A senior figure likened Yahoo!’s position to that of a minority party in a hung parliament, with the power to act as kingmaker by choosing another party with which to align itself. ..... she and Ms Sandberg, who is also a former Google executive, are expected to use their combined might to launch a serious competitor. ..... Google dominates the market with around a 66pc share. Bing has had some effect at the edges, with just under 16pc of all searches taking place on the platform.