How to Defy the Laws of Time and Physics – And (Sometimes) Common Sense

How to Defy the Laws of Time and Physics – And (Sometimes) Common Sense

We were recently asked to give a brief history of the early days of tech in New York. Given the speed of tech, it’s not all that easy to condense even a relatively short cycle into a brief presentation, especially considering internet time: a lot happened quickly, and all at once.

It did, however, strike us that many of the ideas that have made for successful – and not so successful – Silicon Valley companies today were first developed in New York in those early days. We had social networks – Six Degrees, theglobe.com, iVillage – two of which were acquired, while the third (theglobe.com) not only went public, but posted the largest first day gain of any IPO in history up to that date – then crashed spectacularly when the dot com bubble burst.  What also struck us was the on-demand economy. We did have that back then, too, so nothing new and again, what man cannot remember he is doomed to repeat.

In the days of Web 1.0, there was a company called kozmo.com, an on-demand delivery service that promised free one-hour delivery of “videos, games, dvds, music, magazines, books, food, et al, and they would even deliver a pack of chewing gum at 2 am, if there was a call for it – literally. They raised money and lots of it: $250 million, according to Wikipedia, and they burned through lots of it as well: According to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, in 1999 the company had revenue of $3.5 million, with a resulting net loss of $26.3 million. They, too, spectacularly dot bombed. Read More...

Elvis Has Left the Building

Elvis Has Left the Building

In case you missed it, Investor Chris Sacca (announced that he) is retiring from venture capital. The Lowercase Capital founder, whose investments include Twitter and Uber, et al, blogged about his decision (Hanging up my spurs) and what he sees himself doing next, but forest through the trees, he did very famously tweet not too long ago his irritation about the fact that he has no control over decisions made at Uber, and we’d add one-time feather in his cap, Twitter, to that as well.

“That Sacca — who reportedly owned at least 4 percent of the company at once point (and may still) — has “zero say” in how Uber is run has been “frustrating,” he tweeted in February,” according to the Techcrunch article. “In recent years, Sacca has also distanced himself from Twitter, posting to his active Twitter account in March that, “I haven’t owned TWTR for almost a couple of years. When they failed to get Ev involved again, I lost hope. Love the service, hate the stock.”

In his announcement, Sacca said “startup investing is one of my things, but it is not my everything,” and that if he cannot dedicate all his time towards it, he cannot be part of it anymore. Read More...

TIme for the End of an Error

TIme for the End of an Error

Much attention has been paid lately to the ‘bad players’ of technology. The Atlantic asked, Is the Silicon Valley Dynasty Coming to an End? Ethical lapses at some of the tech industry’s biggest companies suggest a chilling reality of what really matters in the world’s most rollicking economy, while Business Insider reported yet another Uber departure, and the company’s long string of problems/resignations of late.

Both are worth a read, but always worth closer inspection is the forest through the trees. In case you missed it, a man was murdered this past week, and it was streamed on Facebook, which has also streamed live gang rapes in the none-too-distant past. In fact, we now have a new category, according to ABC News: Performance Crime. “(Steven) Stephens’ alleged crime has drawn attention to a number of other illegal acts that have been documented on social media. In recent years, sexual assaults, random attacks and murders have been uploaded to social media platforms, sometimes drawing large audiences,” the news channel reported.

While Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg expressed his sympathy to the family, noting that more needs to be done, there is no doubt that there’s a rise in the incidents of violent crimes being streamed on the service, and mea innocentia just doesn’t cut it anymore, especially in a world where the Googles and Facebooks are devouring content, vetted or not, and reaping huge financial benefits as a result. While we don’t advocate blanket censorship, what reputable news organization would allow murder or rape/performance crime, to be broadcast? Again, the Silicon Valley elites give themselves a pass: they’re just providing the medium, with all due respect to Marshall McLuen. Read More...

A Handy Guide to the Language of Tech

A Handy Guide to the Language of Tech

Like countries, industries have their own languages/patois, and tech is no exception. According to  Brian Collins, “Time for an update on painful business clichés. I’ve done my best to burn these expressions – some that I’ve used shamelessly – out of my lexicon. I have not always succeeded.”

He did compile a great list, and despite the fact that Collins comes from advertising, many of the expressions are used/overused in tech, at meetings, in decks/executive summaries, on Demo Days, and in pitches to investors. Those of us who tend to be on the other side of the table can probably repeat the list, chapter and verse, without even reading on.

FYI. Read More...

SiliCon Men

SiliCon Men

Now, that’s a book we’d like to see written and we do want credit for the title.

Dan Lyons put Silicon Valley’s bro culture back on the radar, and speaking of bro culture, Alicia Syrett (Pantegrion Capital) once referenced an article where two identical resumes were submitted to a hiring manager, one under a male name, the other under a female name. The hiring manager opted to meet with the male. Reason: he had stronger, more relevant experience.

What to speak of the fact that Men With 2 Years of Work Experience Earn More Than Women With 6. Read More...

The Rise and Demise of the On Demand Economy

The Rise and Demise of the On Demand Economy

Call it the Sharing Economy, the On Demand Economy, the 1099 Economy, the Gig Economy, or maybe most accurately, the Piecemeal Economy (since the work isn’t necessarily always there) or the Participation Economy (since it seems that anyone can share almost anything these days, including your home, your car, your time, even your Significant Other). But take note: according to Fast Company, The Gig Economy Won’t Last Because It’s Being Sued To Death. Worse, where’s the sharing when The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death.

There was a time – and we’re sure that it’s still going on – when startups would present themselves to investors as being the Uber of Whatever, since Uber, an early entrant into this vertical, has long been perceived and touted in the press as the jewel in the crown of the Sharing/On Demand economy. In fact, Handy has been referred to, ad nauseam, as the Uber for Home Cleaning, although, workers pay a price, as the Washington Post reports, since they receive no“workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance, time off or retirement benefits — all the perks and protections of working for a traditional business.” Customer who utilize the service also seem to be paying a price, considering the (latest) lawsuit that the service is facing for not having properly vetted its workers. And theft of property is only one of the issues in the complaint. Alison Griswold of Slate nailed it when she wrote that Almost everything that startups get right—and horribly wrong—happened at home-cleaning service Handy.

The same could be said of Uber, although it’s interesting to note that Uber so successfully initially marketed themselves as Us v the Taxi Cartel/David v Goliath, that they managed to capture mindshare and continue to grab investor dollars (over $5B last year alone) despite the fact that they’re hemorrhaging money; are facing fines for their failure to pay taxes; there are the sexual harassment and sex discrimination issues; founder Travis Kalanick’s unmitigated arrogance; and the company’s covert use of law enforcement-evading software, what to speak of “the continuous onslaught of litigation in the US for stiffing drivers, swindling taxi companies, eschewing traditional insurance obligations, and skirting regulations—or so the drivers, companies, and state or district attorneys say,” according to Wired. More lately, relatively newly appointed president, Jeff Jones, resigned after just six months (all of those scandals do take their toll), and just last week Uber announced that they’re going to Suspend Autonomous Tests After Arizona Accident. Not surprising: Uber’s autonomous cars drove 20,354 miles and had to be taken over at every mile (by a human driver), according to documents, Recode reported. Read More...

A Rip in the World As We Know It

A Rip in the World As We Know It

There’s nothing like an Internet outage to demonstrate precisely how much power is focused in the hands of the few. Two weeks ago, at 12:47 pm EST, Amazon Web Services experienced a 3S outage for several hours, taking websites, apps and devices either fully or partially down with it. “Affected websites and services include(d) Quora, newsletter provider Sailthru, Business Insider, Giphy, image hosting at a number of publisher websites, filesharing in Slack, and many more. Connected lightbulbs, thermostats and other IoT hardware (was) also being impacted, with many unable to control these devices as a result of the outage,” Techcrunch reported. “Amazon S3 is used by around 148,213 websites, and 121,761 unique domains, according to data tracked by SimilarTech, and its popularity as a content host concentrates specifically in the U.S. It’s used by 0.8 percent of the top 1 million websites.”

“Notably, this wasn’t technically an “outage,” since Amazon’s S3 wasn’t not entirely out of commission and some services were only partially affected,” says Business Insider, which, once again, failed to disclose that Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos was a major investor in the publication.

It was back up some four hours later and as often happens with tech, we’re apoplectic when our devices don’t work for a while, but once all is resolved, it’s usually more or less a case of business as usual, and in the case of the S3 outage, it may well have even given a few people a brief respite from the government listening posts. Read More...

The New Normal

The New Normal

The big news last week was the Snap IPO – the biggest since Alibaba – which raised $3.4 billion for Snap, a company which managed to lose $514.6M last year and has lost money every year since it began commercial operations in 2011,” according to CNBC and, forest through the trees, “has warned that it will never make a profit.”

Facebook tried to buy Snap nee, Snapchat, a few years back for some $3B – pass – so they bought Instagram instead, for the now seemingly bargain price of $1B. Of course, Instagram didn’t have the number of eyeballs that Snapchat did at the time, but since Facebook, um, appropriated features that Snap had innovated – Stories comes to mind – Instagram’s popularity and growth has far outdistanced Snap’s. And remember: eyeballs/exponential growth are the holy grail of Silicon Valley investors and the market. We do know that Twitter has come up more than once in articles covering the Snap IPO, as how long did Twitter skate after the IPO, promising continued user growth, which never materialized. Au contraire, but they did go a good long time with nary a sustainable revenue model in sight, and a falling user base, which does go far in explaining the lack of a buyer for the company.

For the record, ‘growth potential,’ ‘eyeballs,’ – this is the language of Web 1.0, when it was all potential, all the time. The potential was there; the timing was off: the bubble burst. That was then and this is now, and we’re at the Too Big to Fail Stage in the history of tech. Read More...

Crimes, Misdemeanors – and Business As Usual

Crimes, Misdemeanors – and Business As Usual

Move fast and break things. Do more faster. These are the mantras that the tech industry, particular those in Silicon Valley, cut their teeth on. Competition is fierce and timing (first to market) – and perception (category killer: think Google and Facebook) – is everything. So is it a wonder that Uber has drawn so much scrutiny and criticism for its practices lately? On all fronts, it seems.

“Has Uber Gone Too Far this Time? Is Uber involved in a Smear Campaign,?” asks Michael Spencer on LinkedIn, referring not only to former Uber employee Susan Fowler’s blog on the sexual harassment she encountered at the company, which was not unique to her but instead, fairly widespread in Uber’s frat boy culture, according to Caroline Fairchild on LinkedIn.

Then there’s the Google patent infringement lawsuit, which is alleging that Uber is using stolen technology which it acquired through its purchase of Otto, to advance its own autonomous-car development (A Stray Email Caused Google’s Waymo to Sue Uber and Otto Over Stolen Tech). Read More...