Good morning, All,Yahoo’s back and Marissa Mayer seems for all intents and purposes to be on a buying spree. Last week it was Tumblr and now they’ve thrown their hat in the ring to acquire Hulu. They supposedly bought Tumblr to attract a younger audience, and it is highly unlikely that they took the time to view this infographic before they dropped $1.1 billion to close the deal. Yeah, right. At last week’s CM Summit, Yahoo CMO Kathy Savitt reminded us of something that we had forgotten: that it was Yahoo that first made the web a daily habit. All of those websites out there and there was no way to find them, unless you knew the URL. Yahoo was a game changer. When they went public, they went on a buying spree and tried to be all things to all people: broadcast.com, geocities, to name two. They missed out on eBay and tried to build their own. Remember Yahoo auc...

Good morning, All,When you’re starting a company, everyone tells you what to do – put together a deck, talk to customers, talk to investors. We’ve seen the lists ad nauseam, but what about a list of what not to do?1. Produce a product or technology that no one wants. It’s called ‘buy-in’ because the idea is to get people to buy. 2. Not have a revenue model from Day One. You might not implement it immediate – but it better be there. 3. Spend all of your time fundraising and not enough time on developing your product 4. Build a pitch instead of a business 5. Listen to investors, chapter and verse. We all go to pitch panels and get investor feedback. Question: how many times have you attended one such event, heard an investor sing the praises of the company - and witness him/her write a check, or heard that they wrote a check not long afterwards? Thought so. 6. Not listen to investors. Some do know what they’re talking about. We k...

Good morning, All,We’ve heard it ad nauseam: the VC model is broken. There is certainly no shortage of posts on the subject. At TechCrunch Disrupt, Fred Wilson called the VCs sheep, saying they all wait, then jump into a deal together, usually when it’s too late. Most VCs, said Fred, are not forward looking. Question: do they really know the industry?Investors are usually: 1. Entrepreneurs who made good 2. Entrepreneurs who got lucky (right company at the right time – early hires as opposed to key players: we know a junior project manager who went to a startup. It was her second job out of school; eighteen months later, the company was acquired and she was a multimillionaire before her 25^th birthday) 3. Investors who invested well or again, were in the right place at the right time. 4. Those born with lucky sper...

Good morning, All,Is it OK for multimillionaires like Zach Braff to panhandle for money on Kickstarter? “Crowdfunding has helped countless creative projects get off the ground, but if we continue to allow it to be hijacked by the rich and famous there will be no chance left for the little guy,” the piece begins. Remember: donors get nothing; if the film is successful, the producers get yet another opportunity to show up at a restaurant and take that table that you’d been waiting an hour for. Braff already had a financing deal in place. But he felt it was more important to take the $25 from that kid in Brooklyn. He’s disrupting the Hollywood system. We understand that. He’s also disrupting a system that might otherwise produce the next Stanley Kubrick – someone whose vision is so far afield, it’s way beyond the scope of the traditional Hollywood financing clique. How long wi...