Technology

Startup Paradox – Get Rich or Die

August 17, 2009 By Dan Perlman Leave a Comment

From a Y Combinator dinner talk. In startups, you get rich if you don’t die.

What do you have to do to live?

“Whereas if a startup regularly does new deals and releases and either sends us mail or shows up at YC events, they’re probably going to live.”

It’s true, in my career with startups, I’ve done both. There was DASCOM – get rich; RoverLive – die.

Unfortunately for snaptalent.com, a Y Combinator portfolio company – they’ve just announced that they have died due to “market conditions”. They had tried a couple of strategies in the job recruitment market – not a good place to have been in the last 2 years.

Filed Under: Technology

Ever been in a Google trance?

August 17, 2009 By Dan Perlman 2 Comments

Seems that the feeling of excitement that you can get from searching and then searching again is wired into our brain. One researcher called the behavior “seeking”. It seems “the pictures inside our skulls show that the possibility of a payoff is much more stimulating than actually getting one.” So we just keep Google’ing and reading Twits. That the thesis of Emily Yoffe on Slate.

Read the Slate article.

Filed Under: Technology

Jake goes to 2.0 today

August 12, 2009 By Dan Perlman 1 Comment

Happy Birthday, Jake! He’s 2 years old today.

See that happy smile. He’s Trader Joe‘s biggest fan.

Filed Under: Off-topic, Technology

Whoa, Ning has a $750M Valuation

July 23, 2009 By Dan Perlman Leave a Comment

It seems that Ning, the guys that let you roll your own social network, has taken an additional $15M in investment.

The story as told over at BoomTown is that Ning wasn’t looking for funding, but Lightspeed Venture Partners wanted to participate in Ning’s funding because of Ning’s amazing growth and Ning was okay with it because they liked the idea of getting dough from a high profile VC like Lightspeed.

Win-Win.

Please take our money, we know it’s only $15 million but please take it. Okay for you, we’ll take it. We don’t really need it, you know.

The new $15M investment brings to $119M total funding taken by Ning — remember the founders of Ning are Marc “Mosaic – Netscape” Andreesen and CEO Gina Bianchi.

Who says the bubble has burst? The new funding round makes Ning’s valuation a whopping $750M.

So far for Ning, monetization has meant advertising — they’ve been using Google’s platform, but are working on their own. They also charge some modest usage fees for customizations like using your own domain name for you Ning network.

Filed Under: Funding, Startups, Technology Tagged With: Advertising, Business, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Monetization, Ning, Social network, Venture capital

Chris Anderson’s new book Free, available, well, free

July 7, 2009 By Dan Perlman Leave a Comment

free-cover Don’t ask me why, but Chris Anderson seems to annoy people.

He’s the editor of Wired Magazine and has written a just released book called Free that makes the argument that the ever reducing cost of technology has made it possible to be successful by giving away products and making your money on some aspect of the popularity of the free product. That would be how Google gives away search so that they can sell targeted ads on the search results page. The book was based on a Wired Magazine article by Anderson published last year.

A minor firestorm over Free started when the well-respected writer Malcolm Gladwell wrote a review critical of the new book in the New Yorker.

Prompting Seth Godin, marketing guru, to write in his blog

Malcolm is wrong

I’ve never written those three words before, but he’s never disagreed with Chris Anderson before, so there you go.

Godin makes the point that like it or not Free is the world we already live in.

Then, John Gruber, the well known tech blogger in appreciation of the Gladwell review wrote

“I’ll preface my recommendation of this book review by telling you that I’m a big Gladwell fan, and that I think Chris Anderson is a hypocritical blowhard who tells you to give your work away for free while he earns enormous sums selling decidedly-not-free books.”

Which Anderson answered online by stating that he may be a “blowhard” but not a hypocritical one and Free would be available free as both a text version and a full audiobook. I’ve posted the text of the book below and a link to the audiobook. Read/listen for yourself and decide whether you buy the argument.

Resources

Chris Anderson’s first article on Free in Wired Magazine

Malcolm Gladwell Review of Free in The New Yorker

Seth Godin’s Malcolm is Wrong piece

John Gruber in Daring Fireball calling Anderson names.

Free as in free

Go here to download full free audiobook of Free.

FREE (full book) by Chris Anderson