April 2008
23 posts
Gasoline Pandering
I understand that the high price of gasoline at the pump is hitting some folks hard. But the federal gas tax moratorium proposed by McCain and Clinton is a terrible idea for addressing the problem and amounts to the worst kind of pandering. We want people to use less gasoline not more and high prices are the best way to achieve this. Yes, people will drive less and that will mean lower sales at...
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Email Fame and Expectations
I have been reading Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody.” While I was cringing through the chapter on organizations and transaction costs (which manages to ignore the 70 years of economics of the firm that followed Coase’s paper), I loved the chapters on how personal web publishing is changing the very nature of journalism. In those chapters is a real nugget in a...
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System and Organizational Scaling
Many of the high growth companies in our portfolio have run into scaling issues. There is a lot of information out there on various technical approaches to scaling. What most of those leave out is the interaction between the choice of architecture and organizational scaling. Some architectures lend themselves much better to organizational scaling than others. A horizontal approach with a Data...
Impressions from Web 2.0 Expo
I spent most of yesterday afternoon on the Web 2.0 Expo floor. If the ‘Web 2.0’ moniker ever made any sense (and that has been amply debated), it certainly no longer does. Most of the companies present on the show floor are essentially traditional software or service businesses. By that I don’t mean that they sell stuff on a CD that you install on your desktop or server. But if...
Blogging Break
I will be taking a few days break from blogging for a family vacation. Back shortly.
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Google Defies Gravity, For Now
As everyone knows by now Google released results that exceeded expectations for both revenues and earnings. Analysts have attributed Google’s strength to folks shifting advertising from display to keyword because it is more effective. But there has definitely been some slowdown in Google’s US growth. Google claims that this was due to its improvements in search quality. Both of these...
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Google's Gift to NYC
For many years when New York City startups were bought by West Coast firms they were forced to relocate (Yahoo and Microsoft being the biggest offenders here), because the acquirers did not have a sufficient New York presence and almost certainly had no engineering presence here. Google changed this dramatically by building a large engineering team and overall presence here in Manhattan. ...
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Large Hadron Collider is a Sucker's Bet
CERN is getting ready to start operating the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). A couple of guys have sued in Hawaii (for lack of funds) to stop it. They have been depicted as kooks and they certainly are not renowned scientists. But even though I am a technology optimist, I believe they have a point. Most of the coverage has focused on scientists disagreeing on the likelihood of various disastrous...
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Traction Revisited
In his latest essay Why There Aren’t More Googles, Paul Graham writes that one reason is that VCs are waiting too long for startups to have “traction.” He suggests that VCs should invest earlier and less money. Paul writes: Whoever the next Google is, they’re probably being told right now by VCs to come back when they have more “traction.” and Instead of...
Being Right Vs Being Effective
A good friend of mine likes to say “it’s more important to be effective than to be right.” I have been thinking about this a fair bit recently. John Adams on HBO is depicting him as someone who struggled with this a lot. When he felt something to be right he would come on strong even if that turned the very people he was trying to convince against him. The idea here is not that...
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In Favor of Forced Transparency
A group called SpeechNow.org is suing the Federal Election Commission to allow individuals to contribute as much as they want to the group’s effort to buy TV advertising. Their argument, loosely paraphrased, is that billionaires can spend as much as they want to on TV advertising, so why shouldn’t “ordinary” folks be allowed to pool their money in donations of more than...
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Clouds over Simple Paid Apps / Services
This is the third post in my “clouds over” series, which points out areas of the current IT landscape that will be affected by the inexorable move to cloud computing (the first post was on hosting, the second on DB software). Today’s edition covers simple paid apps and services, such as hosted blogging platforms. Exhibit A is of course 37Signals’ Campfire, for which google...
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Clouds over DB Software
Two days ago I wrote about how Google App Engine and cloud computing more generally will put pressure on traditional hosting. Another major area of the current IT landscape that will come under pressure is DB software. Sun recently (inadvertently) marked the top of the market for traditional DB software by paying $1B for MySQL (apparently this was 20x revenues). Storage will be a fundamental...
YHOO Past and Present Errors
The fight over Yahoo will have many unfortunate side effects if any of the combination outcomes currently being considered come about. How did we get here? Back when Terry Semel was first announced as the new CEO, I thought it was a huge mistake (wish I had started to blog a long time ago so that I could now link to that). My reasoning was that conceiving of Yahoo in terms of media first rather...
Clouds Over Hosting
Google’s App Engine is the first major cloud forming over several key segments of the current landscape . In today’s installment of this multi-part series: hosting. GoDaddy has a very profitable business (paying for Superbowl ads out of cashflow) in large part because many people put relatively small sites on shared hosting, charge it to a credit card and forget about it. Over time...
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Google's App Engine
A big step forward towards cloud computing and a potential breakthrough in scalability for startups. I (may) have found a new platform.
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Covestor
Just announced our investment in Covestor.
21 Review
Saw 21 last night. It was reasonably entertaining. Knowing Ben Mezrich from college, I was not surprised to hear the main character called Ben (the character is based on Jeff Ma and was called Kevin Lewis in Ben Mezrich’s book ‘Bringing Down the House’ from which the movie is loosely derived). But the movie could have been so much better simply by ironing out the many minor...
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Interviewing Job Candidates
Hiring is maybe the single hardest thing for any startup. Marc Andreesen has had a number of great posts about it. He covers interviewing in some depth, including the importance of planning out interview questions in advance. Something implied in Marc’s post but worth spelling out is the following — make sure to (1) have a decent number of candidates, (2) schedule interviews close...
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Who Will Be My New York Times?
I used to read the NYT every morning as a way to get an overview of what was happening in the world, find in-depth coverage and investigative reports, and see opinions on politics and the economy (I also used to do the same with the WSJ). But increasingly I find that I only skim the paper and then head for my computer to read techmeme and the Huffington Post. Both are great at what they do, but...
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Recession and Startups (Cont'd)
Is it a good or bad time to start something new, with the economy tanking as it is? I believe the answer depends entirely on your personal financial situation and risk profile. If you have a family to support and only have enough savings for a few months, then it’s a terrible time to start. If you can afford to fund yourself and maybe a few others for a least 6 months and possibly much...
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Recession and Startups
There is a high probability that we are in for a recession and many folks think that it might be a fairly severe one. What does that mean for startups and VC funding? VentureBeat today has an article suggesting that funding is slowing down both from VCs and angel investors. For startups that are already well funded this is great news because they can focus on building their product / service...
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Unified Personal Media Management (aka Nirvana)
Personal media management and consumption are a mess. For instance, I use Picasa for photos and short video clips coming off my camera onto my laptop. But given the large number of photos and video, I then move everything to an EasyNAS RAID array. Pictures from my mobile phone go to flickr. For music and video downloads I use iTunes on my laptop, but in my living room I have a Sonos. My PVR...
