Startup One Stop

Good morning, All,

If technology had a mantra, it would be that you’re only as good as your last innovation. Now, imagine being a so-called tech wunderkind or leader, like Larry and Sergei or Mark Zuckerberg, or even Jeff Bezos, and being under that kind of pressure.

Hot off the presses: Facebook released Slingshot (yeah, well, it seems that Snapchat acquisition didn’t quite work out) and Amazon released Fire, their long-expected entré into the smartphone market that’s not likely to ignite any mass exoduses from the Apple platform. Kindle was something of a game changer. Fire? Not so much. Not yet, anyway. No YouTube on the phone? We’re sure that no one is taking that as being a glaring omission on Bezos’s part. Pay attention and eyes right. More to come, you can count on it. Bezos wants to be a media mogul – he already owns the WaPost - and tech always demands more, more, more. Read More...

Good morning,

All, Or so contended economist Dr. Joel Segall. We understand. Uber recently raised $1.2B, which put the company value at $18.2B – making it worth more than Hertz and Avis, combined. Uber is an app. The company owns no cars. Their ‘drivers’ get no employee benefits, since they are not employees, nor does Uber cover their insurance, liability or otherwise. Taxi drivers all over the world have been protesting the arrival of ride sharing services like Uber.

Uber isn’t truly creating massive numbers of jobs- but it is creating income for people who need it. And jeopardizing the livelihoods of many others. On the other hand, there are a finite amount of cabs on the street in NYC, and they all change shifts at the same time – right around rush hour, for the record. A license costs about $250k, and then there’s the cab itself, which costs $800k+. What’s wrong with this picture? Read More...

Good morning, All,

You might have noticed that there seems to have been a proliferation of co-working spaces, especially in New York. Co-working spaces are the new black. Both General Assembly (which is no longer a co-working space, but that’s where they started) and AlleyNYC have investments from VCs. Which doesn’t mean that they’re going to invest in you or in your company, and not all co-working spaces are the same, so choose wisely if/when you decide to take up residence in one and some things to consider:

1. Most spaces allow you to work out of the space for a day as a try out. Take advantage of the opportunity. Read More...

Good morning, All,

Google Glass. Google drones. Google WiFi. Android TV. Now Google cars, which are being touted as cute, cuddly things that could change transportation forever. No steering wheel. No gas pedal. No brakes. No driver. No owner, other than Google. It basically sounds like public transportation, reimagined. Just get in and it’ll take you from Point A to Point B. We do realize that it’s a prototype, but no brakes? What happens when someone in front of you stops suddenly? Or a kid suddenly runs out into the street after a ball? Oops. But it’s like Google Glass: a shiny new thing dangled in front of you, that you’re not likely to get any time soon, (in the case of Google Glass) what, with its $1500 price tag, no matter that they cost $80 in materials to produce. Google Glass is a limited application technology at best, and despite the fact that Google doles them out slowly, making them only periodically available, making them a precious commodity. In the meantime, you don’t notice any bidding wars on ebay, do you? There’s your yardstick.

We do understand that it's early days for driverless cars, but has Google lost it's mojo? Where is Google TV? Read More...

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...