Good morning, All,
First, our networking breakfast is tomorrow morning, May 14th. Register here and hope to see you there!
Some interesting information we’ve come across lately. A number of publications have been touting the death of the web. As Mobile Roars Ahead, It’s Time To Finally Admit The Web Is Dying. The Web is evolving. Smart phone screens are getting larger. Minis are outselling iPads. A mobile browser was the Battlefield winner at TechCrunch Disrupt last week.
Good morning, All,
Building a web presence is easy. Building a company, not so much. Entrepreneurship is up globally and not surprising: there’s a job shortage. Globally.
There are different forms of founders in tech, and there’s a big difference between an entrepreneur and a wantrepreneur, as Brian Cohen calls dilettantes who live on 'hopium.' An idea is not company, You also need to know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, where you’re going, and how you’re going to get there. Helps to be a subject matter expert, or have one on the team. In other words, someone who lives in the space and isn’t just a tourist there.
Good morning, All,
We’ll get to that.
In case you missed it, Gurbaksh Chahal, CEO of Radium One, ended up pleading to a couple of misdemeanors after having been charged with some 47 felony counts for allegedly having battered his girlfriend 117 times over a period of half an hour. He hired a good lawyer – and he appeared on Oprah, after all, who called him an eligible bachelor. As did Extra. Yes, just make sure you have 911 on speed dial. This was all after the allegations and it’s all bad behavior – as is Jason Calacanis’s basically calling for mob justice, and offering the hacker group, Anonymous, money if they could get the video tape that was thrown out in court. Do we really need to see the video? Calacanis would have made his point had he taken that $10k and donated it to a women’s shelter – or at least matching funds. That’s a statement, too.
Good morning, All,
Not too long ago, there was a whole discussion about the rampant ageism that exists in our industry. We all know that it’s true on the hiring side, and Fred Wilson raised it again last week in a Business Insider interview, where he talked about the young VCs who are raising funds, many without the benefit of having had any hands-on experience at a startup or in the business world. Of course, there was a response, from Mike Rothenberg, who is a Lucky Sperm kid who went to Stanford and Harvard (why not?) and became a VC basically right out of HBS and note where his fund is investing – in the vertical he knows, which is basically twenty-somethings (he’s about to turn thirty, so yes, they do invest in thirty-somethings as well). He doesn’t discuss competencies or specific industry segments – just age and the advantages of the peer-to-peer network.
At #StartupColumbia, Alan Patricof, considered the father of venture capital, brought up the fact that, prior to VCs, it was the wealthy families who invested in new ventures – he mentioned Rockefellers, Whitneys and Phippses of the world. So it seems that the pendulum is swinging back, but this time it’s Tisch, Kushner, Rothenberg et al. The ground is not shifting, as Rothenberg claims: only the names have been changed to deceive the clueless. But they see it as a young man’s game and tend not to take a long view of things. Ah, history: boring. But what man cannot remember he is doomed to repeat.
Good morning, All,
We take absolutely no sides here, but did want to bring up the matter of the pretty much forced resignation of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich over a donation he made that evidently rankled the OKCupid crowd. And quickly mushroomed.
Not too long ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook told shareholders that If You Don’t Believe in Global Warming, Sell Our Stock! Bold words, but what did not seem to grab any headlines is that former Obama EPA Chief Lisa Jackson is now an Apple employee, despite the fact that she was pretty much forced to resign from the agency amid questions about whether her agency was complying with open-records laws. She was also sending fraudulent emails, btw. In the brouhaha of the Eich story, what you might have missed is another story involving that tech executive that hit the news: the EPA was testing deadly pollutants on humans – without their knowledge or consent – during Apple employee Jackson’s tenure at the agency. Where’s the outrage there?
Good morning, All,
Tech companies have been on a buying spree lately, especially Facebook and Google. It seems like it was just last week that Facebook dropped $19B for WhatsApp (ok, so it was two weeks ago) and then shelled out $2B for Oculus Rift. “Mobile is the platform of today, and now we’re also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow,” Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg says.
According to the video cited above, a lot of it has to do with fear and ambition – and the fact that these companies came seemingly from out of nowhere and quickly dominated the zeitgeist, not to mention the global business landscape.
Good morning, All,
"Wouldn't it be amazing if everyone's medical records were available anonymously to research doctors?" said Larry Page at TED in Vancouver last week. "When someone accesses your record — a doctor — you could see which doctor accessed it and why. You could maybe learn about what conditions you have. I think if we just did that, we could save 100,000 lives this year." Page suffers from a medical malady, and by publicly sharing the information, people with similar maladies responded. Page said, “I’m just very worried that with Internet privacy, we’re doing the same thing we’re doing with medical records, we’re throwing out the baby with the bathwater. We’re not thinking about the tremendous good that can come from people sharing the right information with the right people in the right ways.”
Are there two realities going on here on Planet Claire?
Good morning, All,
For those of you who never saw the film and/or missed the Casablanca reference, here you go. And in case you missed it, last week Zuckerberg Called Obama To “Express Frustration” Over Spying’s Threat To Internet Security.
The big tech companies, including FB, knew that the NSA was mining information about their members/users. According to the Washington Post, “the technology companies, whose cooperation is essential to PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley” – FB included. And how many times since then has Zuckerberg met with Obama? Then again, he just dropped $19B on a service with a heavy youth membership, who do not trust him and have been fleeing the service, no doubt tired of getting Zucked over. We take his so-called call to Obama as little more than grandstanding. And an attempt to protect his investment.
Good morning, All,
There’s a lawsuit that hit the California courts, concerning big tech players who were basically price-fixing in the form of colluding not to hire each other’s employees. Which kept salaries in check. “Lawyers for the programmers say top executives from these companies agreed not to recruit workers from each other, which helped limit increases in salaries and benefits for as many as 64,000 programmers. Their class-action suit, which is being argued in federal court in San Jose, Calif., is based on vivid and compelling emails, internal company documents and depositions that undermine the public image of the technology industry, which is widely seen as egalitarian and competitive.”
Founders are a resourceful lot and remember that many investors start out as company founders. That said, we seemed to have moved on from collusion – too many potential legal ramifications. Now we have fwd.us, backed, again, by the big tech players and investors. Ultimately, it’s price/salary fixing by any other name - in the name of appearing to be egalitarian and competitive. Only the language has been changed to deceive the clueless.
Good morning, All,
A man walks into a video store…ok, it was 1997 and there really was a time when you walked into a video store, made your selection, rented it and had to return it in a day or two or face penalties. Reed Hastings rented Apollo 13, somehow neglected to return it for a while and incurred $40 in late fees, which he was forced to pay. DVDs had recently been introduced, so Hastings got together with his buddy Marc Randolph and launched NetFlix, sending out DVDs, almost literally for the price of a first-class stamp (although they charged $2 s/h, plus rental fee). They launched in April, 1998. In December 1999, they launched a subscription service (4 DVDs a month of $15.95 – no late fees or due dates, but you had to return a DVD to get a different title). They didn’t reach 500,000 subscribers until 2002 – but they did have a business model and forged partnerships with studios.
There were bumps in the road: not all of their products were successful (Qwikster) and there was a hue and cry when they announced that a bifurcated offering: one price for unlimited DVDs and another for unlimited streaming. NetFlix might not be a verb but let’s face it: it’s firmly entrenched in the zeitgeist as an entertainment delivery medium.