Posts tagged “startups”
I proposed the "Techdel test" as a joke, it went viral, and now I feel like a fraud. npm is trying hard on diversity but still gets it wrong constantly. Bias is everywhere and nearly impossible to fully correct for. All I can honestly claim is: we give a shit, and we keep trying.
Great teams produce great software regardless of methodology. Agile changes your release pattern, not your people. Bad teams using agile just release bad software faster.
Mint's $170M acquisition wasn't for their marketing or their tech stack (which was largely Yodlee's). They won because their user interface was beautiful and simple. For web companies, UI isn't a low priority. It's the only priority. You are nothing but your interface.
Ideas don't come from thinking alone, they're accidents born of conversation. The Bay Area's density of geeks means more collisions between clever people, more happy accidents. You don't need to be here to run a startup, but you probably need to be here to get the idea.
Facebook's finances have been leaked and they're ugly: a projected $150m net loss in 2008, with revenue needing to double to $300m just to get there. That makes Microsoft's $15bn valuation look like 300x profit. Good luck selling ads in a recession.
We're seeing dot-com bubble thinking resurface: "eyeballs" are back, business plans are passé, and VCs are burning millions on shaky ideas. I like Twitter fine and think they could monetize easily, but the broader market mentality is genuinely alarming.
Facebook apps are buying each other for $60k with no revenue, no business model, nothing. The bubble is on. I predicted a 24x revenue acquisition in September; Business.com is already tipping at that multiplier. Let's see if my timing is right too.
Private equity just paid $1.5B for NexTag at roughly 19x earnings, higher than recent acquisitions of aQuantive (14x) and DoubleClick (10x). The bubble is inflating nicely. If we hit 24x earnings by September, I'm launching GigaSeldo.
I'm tracking bubble chatter: The Register says bubble, BusinessWeek says "frothy" with an "inevitable correction" while avoiding the b-word. Splitting hairs. A smaller bubble is still a bubble.
CBS paid $280M for Last.fm after Yahoo! balked at $30M a year ago. It's a desperate move by a company with no new media chops, and Last.fm could have found a smarter buyer. Likely to end badly.
We're in Bubble 2.0. The signs are obvious: insane acquisition prices, startups with no business models getting VC, and Facebook thinking it's the new Google. One rule-breaking startup per year makes real money. Everyone else burns cash. I lived through the last crash, but this time I'm on the inside. Here we go again.
Only in London would there be a market for a company that holds your spare keys, because you don't trust your neighbours.
Google's IPO is filed, jobs are back, and it smells like 2000. My brother just started a sports blog too. The boom is back, baby.
A management coup has been attempted at BrainSpark, incubator for my former dot-com employer EasyArt, by the former COO who was once my direct boss. Dot-coms are endlessly entertaining. I almost miss the silly money.
