Startup One Stop

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...

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...