Startup One Stop

Good morning, All,

We nearly entitled today’s newsletter, ‘Is Silicon Valley Making Itself Irrelevant?’ but benefit of the doubt to the population out there at large.

“Doctors cannot compete with machines,” contends Silicon Valley uber investor Vinod Khosla. He’s talking Big Data. Medicine may not be an exact science, and it certainly has its problems, most notably, the pharmaceutical industry and that’s as far as we’re going down that rabbit hole today. But technology is not as sophisticated as it needs to be for us to allow ourselves to be diagonsed by Big Data. Nor is it secure enough - nor can we trust Big Government. It’s a dangerous road to take, given the number of hacks we see, even in something as simple as online transaction, and what if this happened in the health care system? Not if, when. Ever deal with an automated help line, even when a simple mistake was made? Imagine if your health data is compromised. One word: heatbleed. Equally importantly, who’s then in charge? The titans of Silicon Valley? We are unfortunately personally plagued with both a science background and an excellent memory. One of Mr. Khosla’s investments was in a company called Unreal Candy, a ‘healthy’ version of confections. They may be 100% ‘real,’ but healthy – far from it. And we defy you to find nutritional information or nutritional comparisons to their so-called unhealthy competition on their site. They also claim to be low glycemic yet their products contain cane sugar, too, which is not low glycemic – and there’s still no such thing as being a little bit pregnant. Bill Gates endorses the brand, but then, he’s an investor. And is as clueless about food science as is Khosla. Read More...

Good morning, All,

That was MSFT Explorer’s tag line, for those of us who remember the days before Safari and Bing.

It’s Internet Week in New York and we’ve attended a number of conferences lately, from New York Tech Day to the DLD Conference to TechCrunch Disrupt, all varying in price from free to expensive. Not just to attend, but to exhibit as well, and while NYTech Day was a lot more affordable to exhibit (it’s startups who are exhibiting, most bootstrapped) and free to attend, the question is: is it worth it? Did you get value from it? Read More...

Good morning, All,

First, our networking breakfast is tomorrow morning, May 14^th. 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. Read More...

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. Read More...

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. Read More...

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. Read More...

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? Read More...

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. Read More...

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? Read More...

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. Read More...