Startup One Stop

We were gutted by the news from Paris on Friday evening, when over a hundred people were slaughtered, and hundreds injured, including a hundred critically wounded, in a coordinated terrorist attack. All, in the shadows of a suicide bomber in Beirut who killed 43 and the explosion of a Russian commercial airline that killed 224 people.

While the world stopped to react – to mourn, sympathize, reflect, and express its outrage and heartbreak over the attacks, the world did not stop. People tweeted their condolences. French flags appeared across Facebook profiles – again - in sympathy and solidarity. And tech and other news was reported, even as the social media pipelines exploded.

Bill Gates decided that representative democracy is a problem – in the name of climate change - and announced his plan to spend $2 billion of his own wealth on green energy, calling on fellow billionaires to help make the US fossil-free by 2050 with similar philanthropy,   According to Gates, “the private sector is too selfish and inefficient to produce effective energy alternatives to fossil fuels…If you’re not bringing math skills to the problem,” he said with a sort of amused asperity, “then representative democracy is a problem.”’

We take no sides in the climate debate, but since Gates brought it up, let’s do the math. Bill Gates is a Harvard dropout and one of the world’s most successful - and wealthiest businessmen, and he may be right that capitalism cannot save us from climate change - certainly not with people like Bill Gates calling the shots. Here's a look at the Gates Foundation's record: Report: Gates Foundation Causing Harm with the Same Money It Uses to Do Good. “the Gates Foundation’s humanitarian concerns are not reflected in how it invests its money. In the Niger Delta, where the foundation funds programs to fight polio and measles, the foundation has also invested more than $400 million in companies like Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron… which have been responsible for much of the pollution many blame for respiratory problems and other afflictions among the local population.

It’s comforting to envision a tech utopia, where our homes know our wants/needs; where our cars are self-driving and hot meals show up on our doorstep. Startup L Jackson referred to the on-demand economy as assisted living for the young, and no, this is not about Millenial bashing. This is a wake-up call.

In case you missed it: US Senate passes CISA, a very bad spying bill dressed up as a cybersecurity bill. We understand that it’s not law yet, that it has yet to pass the House, and for the record, the president is very much in favor of the bill.

According to an article in Wired: ‘…privacy advocates and civil liberties groups see CISA as a free pass that allows companies to monitor users and share their information with the government without a warrant, while offering a backdoor that circumvents any laws that might protect users’ privacy. “The incentive and the framework it creates is for companies to quickly and massively collect user information and ship it to the government,” says Mark Jaycox, a legislative analyst for the civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “As soon as you do, you obtain broad immunity, even if you’ve violated privacy law.”’ Read More...

Once upon a time, you could buy this device called a television, plug the power cord into the wall, hook it up to the antenna, turn it on, and entertainment appeared. It offered a variety of content, across channels. Oh, and there were commercials. That’s how broadcasters/content providers made money. It was referred to as a ‘revenue model.’ It worked well for a very long time.

Then cable TV came in, for which you paid a monthly fee, but at least there were no commercials, at first, but that didn’t last long. Suddenly, you were paying for cable and being subjected to commercials.  Some of us were being charged nearly $200/month for the privilege of being shown commercials. And you wonder why people started untethering en masse and turned to services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, et al.

Now we’ve entered a new age of tech and online shopping/search/social and it’s all about Big Data. People are being tracked, scrutinized, targeted, marketed and advertised to – and discovering that all is not fair and equal in the online world, when it comes to pricing. Try ordering an airline ticket. Come back an hour later, and the price has gone up. Try it! Read More...

Airbnb's first pitch deck has been circulating of late, and while it's a great lesson in how to put together a deck and launch not only a company, but a viable business (Lessons From Airbnb's Investor Pitch Deck), remember - seven investors passed on it. Quelle dommage and for the record, we first heard about the company not long after it launched, when an early adopter frequent-traveler British friend put it on our radar. We thought it was a no-brainer (only couchsurfing had been around before that, which might have been their closest competitor, but that company had no revenue model. There's a non-starter for you).

Good morning, All,

In case you missed the reference (doubt it), the subject line was the title of an episode from the original Star Trek series, about adorable, harmless little creatures called tribbles who procreated ad nauseam and gorged themselves to death – without giving away too much of the episode.

And we do see a parallel in tech, where the unicorns are starting to fall by the wayside, and there’s even more trouble brewing in River City.  Taking the view from a thousand feet, it seems to us that tech is at a strange crossroads and the rush to market we’ve all come to take as necessary for growth/staying front of mind – even at the expense of the customer – is taking its toll on the unicorn population (Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant).  Here’s The inside story of how $1 billion Evernote went from Silicon Valley darling to deep trouble, and again, it’s to do with the rush-to-market fevered pitch from which tech suffers, even if it means releasing buggy code or code that exposes customers to vulnerabilities (New Android vulnerabilities put over a billion devices at risk of remote hacking). Google aside, this is what happens when you chase valuations over profits or sustainable products. The center will not hold. In Google’s case, they chase newer/faster/’better’ over customer privacy/safety, and that’s no more than the story told differently. Read More...

Good morning, All,

Tim O’Reilly wrote an excellent column recently entitled, We’ve Got This Whole Unicorn Thing All Wrong! With all due respect to Cowboy Ventures’ Aileen Lee, who first referred to emerging companies with billion dollar valuations, such as Uber and Airbnb, as unicorns, with the ever-expanding roster of them of late, we personally have to agree with O’Reilly in his revised definition – as technologies that changes human behavior – rather than as companies that have achieved a wildly inflated valuation that may or may not have any actual justification in the real world. The mark of a true unicorn, in O’Reilly’s definition, is that elicits an a-ha moment: the first iPhones, Siri and self-driving cars are good examples. Unicorns are things that changed human behavior, and for the record, O’Reilly includes Uber/Lyft in this category, as they did accomplish this: people were suddenly summoning cars via an app.

The outliers aren’t always readily apparent – Yahoo! was thought to be wildly overvalued when it IPO’d: no revenue model, and the same was said of Facebook – and the currently-accepted unicorns aren’t always necessarily that: Dropbox is certainly having its problems these days (The case against Dropbox looks stronger with each passing day) and “Steve Jobs famously told Houston (while trying to acquire it) that his company was a feature and not a product. As Dropbox rocketed to 400 million users, Jobs’ viewpoint was easy to dismiss. But as its rivals caught up, and Dropbox began casting about for its next act, Jobs has come to look more prescient.” Read More...

Good morning, All,

Once upon a time there was this thing called ‘sales,’ which were dependent on these people called ‘customers,’ who are now primarily referred to online as ‘users’ - unless it’s an ecommerce site - and once upon a time, customers mattered. It’s only in tech that people who use a product or service are referred to as ‘users’ rather than ‘customers,’ which started us all down a slippery slope. In our opinion, we’re still on the downward slide and do not look forward to seeing what rock bottom looks like. For example, Who Really Owns Your iPhone? It May Not Be You. According to the piece, and depending on your plan, you may not own that new iPhone 6S, for which you might have paid a hefty price: it might actually be the property of Apple or your wireless carrier. Could you imagine if utilities treated customers this way? That you had to buy a new oven every few years – or have your house/apartment rewired, as the utility company upgraded and no longer supported the infrastructure you need? If Con Ed suddenly held that kind of sway over our stove, hey, we’d personally leave it to them to clean it, too.

“But Apple goes a step further,” the article continues. “Even if you pay full price for your iPhone upfront, Apple still asserts an extraordinary amount of control. It alone decides what apps can be distributed through the App Store, which is the only authorized way everyday customers can add third-party software to an iPhone or any of Apple’s other mobile devices.” Read More...

Good morning, All,

A couple of years back, a group of so-called tech luminaries from such companies as Facebook, Google, et al, got together and formed a group called fwd.us, purportedly designed to promote policies to keep the American workforce competitive and to create an easier pathway for foreign workers to enter the US job market.

In fact, “Zuckerberg published an op-ed in the Washington Post describing the group’s mission ‘to build the knowledge economy the US needs to ensure more jobs, innovation and investment.'” The result: well, for one, there’s this – California: Hundreds of American IT Workers Are Replaced by Foreigners using H-1b Visas and Southern California Edison IT workers ‘beyond furious’ over H-1B replacements. Says the article and one of the workers who was being replaced, “The H-1B program was supposed to be for projects and jobs that American workers could not fill. But we’re doing our job. It’s not like they are bringing in these guys for new positions that nobody can fill.” Read More...

Good morning, All,

Apple hasn’t had an easy time of it lately. It's still the world's most valuable company, but the stock hasn’t been what it was, and is still below $120. Which might account for all of the announcements at its event last week: they need sales. Even at the expense of true Apple innovation:

Apple TV: “We believe the future of TV is apps,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook. Well, Roku obviously agrees: they already have thousands of them. As for making the new Apple TV voice-enabled: see ‘Amazon Fire TV.’ No Apple Internet TV service yet. But after the recent launch of its music service, they’d better get it right with this one (Apple Music is a mess, and it's alienating the company's biggest fans). Read More...