Startup One Stop

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. Read More...

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. Read More...

Good morning, All,

Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion. Or $16B, depending on how you’re doing the math. Tomatoes, Tomahtoes. Peter Shankman made some good points about the deal. Everyone else chimed in as well. One of the reasons why Facebook bought the platform was because they were hemorrhaging the youth market. You know, those people who hate being tracked and advertised to. You know, those things FB likes to do.

Question: whatever happened to doing due diligence before the deal went through? FB had its reasons for the acquisition. Hope they understand WA’s audience and this just in: no sooner had the announcement been made that 1M users fled to Telegram. As well as to six (other) alternatives to WhatsApp ,now that Facebook owns it. Didn’t help that WhatsApp came under new scrutiny for its privacy policy and encryption gaffs. Read More...

Good morning, All,

Not everyone is good at public speaking, and hasn’t Tim Armstrong proven that time and again. OK, when he quite publicly fired the creative director at Patch, he did warn the guy to put the camera down. That was insubordination. But when he mentioned distressed babies while explaining why employees 401(K) benefits were changing, his remarks were taken out of context, and he would have been better served had he paid more attention to WC Fields, who never worked with animals or children. Probably not the best idea to mention them while trying to make justifications to employees, who are not predisposed to liking what you’re saying in the first place, not to mention the media being what it is. Let’s face it: it made for great headlines and a lot of ink, justified or not, during a more or less quiet news week: we couldn’t be totally absorbed with the Olympics or even #SochiFail 24/7.

Tim Armstrong should have had a better speech coach – or some executive coaching, period. Or a speech writer. Or even a better, a competent corp comm staff. The story managed to escalate so quickly, AOL back-peddled rather than to even attempt to do damage control. Or maybe Armstrong fired the wrong person when he set his sights on the creative director of Patch. Read More...

Good morning, All,

No sooner had reporters arrived in Sochi that the problems began – and the twitterverse went nuclear. #SochiProblems (a personal favorite and great comic relief or is this that mysterious ‘half bath’ NYC residents often see listed) and #SochiFail quickly went viral. In fact, @SochiProblems has more followers – and climbing - than does the official @sochi2014 account.

This, on the heels of Twitter’s stock losing 25% of its value – that same day – due to a lack of mainstream adaptation (twitter has 1.2 billion users, and a very high abandonment rate). Not that the mainstream press has ever been a big fan of twitter. In fact, in most cases, try to tweet one of their stories, using the twitter icon they themselves provide. It usually doesn’t work. Dear Mainstream Media, this just in: software is eating the world. Learn how to use it. Or stay a dinosaur and don’t shoot the messenger. In times when there’s an event that captures the world’s attention, the world turns to twitter. It’s the great equalizer and sorry, Wall Street, but we don’t believe it’s going to disappear any time soon. What news outlet didn’t feature #ScochiProblems in some article/report somewhere in the past few days? It’s a news breaker. Learn to use it properly, or it could be a deal breaker. Then again, Twitter isn’t Facebook and should not be measured using the same yardstick. It more a global IM platform than it is a social network, and again, we’re reminded of the words of Beethoven, when the maestros of the day complained to the composer that they had a difficult time with his music, to which the maestro responded: “I did not write if for you.” Read More...

...Don’t really give a damn about what other people think. Good morning, All,

In this industry, we talk a lot about disruption and innovation, but as much as the two are used interchangeably, there’s a chasm between them. Disruption is that a-ha moment. True innovation is seldom recognized, unless you have the vision to see 20 minutes into the future.

We read a piece this week called How to stop giving a f@$% what people think. Just one key bit of information missing. Going to as many panels as we do, where investors are often there to give their feedback, we notice that people who are both pitching and attending listen with rapt attention. Sometimes the feedback is valid. Depends on the panelist/investor, of course, and note: many a times, the investor will be someone who made a killing during Web 1.0 – the halcyon days of technology when traditional companies were snapping up web based companies, whether it made any sense or not. We call it acqui-hiring now. Only the names have been changed to deceive the clueless. Sometimes they did it to have a New Media Presence. Not all of those instant millionaires were the visionaries or founder. Quite a few were simply in the right place at the right time and lucky them. Many of them are even good investors. Others are doing now what they were doing then: making it up as they went along. Which may go far to explain the lemming mentality of investors. Always consider the source, and at the end of the day, good idea to keep your own counsel. Especially if you are doing something truly visionary. It may only be 20 minutes into the future, but it takes the world a long time to catch up. And catch on. Onward and forward. Read More...

Good morning, All,

We used to have a poster called C-A-T. It went something like this: “At about 20,000 words, journalist, writers, doctors, lawyers and are credited with having the largest vocabularies. Next come white collar workers and other professionals at about 16,000, then blue collar workers at about 12,000. Laborers have about 6,000 words at their disposal. The jury is still out on art directors.” And anyone who has worked closely or for any amount of time with an art director knows that the truth is, they just can’t spell. SpellCheck helps, but we still do not live in a perfect world.

Tech has a different issue, and it has to do with the terms we use. And overuse. Not only do we love our terms, but we cling to them and repeat them ad nauseam. We deep dive. We drill down. We move things to the front burner. We move things to the back burner. We move a lot of things into the cloud. Read More...

Good morning, All,

This is the year of the Internet of Things, and there are a few things we can do without. If you don’t want Google Nest-ing in your Connected Home, this is how to build your own Google-free Nest thermostat. But we digress. Specifically, we’re talking about the jerks in the industry. There is a preponderance of them, and they suddenly seem to be in the spotlight. Not in a good way this time and they’re no doubt being addressed, at long last, thanks in no small part to Uber and the unbridled ubris of founder Travis Kalanick and his policies, including surge (read: gouge) pricing, and not properly vetting their drivers, despite their claims to the contrary. Of course, SnapChat founder Evan Spiegel is right up there, refusing to apologize and instead, blaming everyone else for the hack that exposed the names and phone numbers of some 4.6 million snapchatters. Would you trust your, er, compromising selfies to this guy?

We have our own theory about these guys and why they’re such jerks: they steal from people, in one way or another, and so they can trust no one. Seriously – same goes for lying. The problem with lying is that if you are a liar and know that you can’t be trusted, you assume that the same goes for everyone else, so you trust no one. Steve Jobs stole from Xerox Parc – as did Bill Gates, just for the record. There’s Zuckerberg and his parting of the ways with Eduardo Saverin, not to mention the lawsuit with the Winklevoss twins. Evan Spiegel is in a lawsuit with his (ousted) co-founder, as we speak. Read More...

Good morning, All,

CES was last week, once again, we did not attend. Shelly Palmer broke it down, hall by hall, if you’re interested. Or, if you’re up for a little more fun, What weird tech trends from CES 2014 mean to the average person, aka, CES seen through the eyes of the twitterverse. CES is always full of the newest/coolest things we’ll all see in the stores soon enough. It’s loud. It’s noisy. It’s packed. It’s exhausting. If you’re exhibiting, it’s expensive. It’s not where you’re always likely to find the Next Big Thing.

TechCrunch did a piece on how MakerBot Is Changing The World and we agree. Although, we knew that when we first saw Bre Pettis with one of his early MakerBots at the Sheraton in NYC in 2009 – when he was lost in a sea of small exhibitors, and no one paid any attention to him. At all. But then, he was a big, gawky, former school teacher – that doesn’t necessarily make for good press and he everything you’d expect a nerd to look like, before Silicon Valley went chic and video killed the radio star: we want our young world-changers in their 20s and mediagenic. We saw the future in the little plastic figures Pettis was creating in his MakerBot – although we saw the possibility for replacement parts for all those parts manufacturers put in that they know will break and charge you a fortune to replace, despite the fact that it costs them pennies. Read More...

Good morning, All,

It’s been an interesting millennium so far. A bit dark and seemingly getting darker. Then we came across this piece (What If the 21st Century Begins in 2014? ) and while we don’t agree with all of the points the author makes, it is true that no real millennial shift begins at the zero hour. Literally.

Not to start off the year as the voice of doom and gloom, but let’s take stock of the 21^st Century, to date: our privacy is gone. There isn’t a way that we can’t be tracked – by our own government, no less, the very people whose salaries we pay, lest we forget. Read More...