Newport Course Map
OMG - fantastic. Cliffhouse mudslides at the eastern ocean mark…
“YAWNERS™, Yet Another White Paper Nobody Ever Reads” — Product (1st) Marketing (2nd): Driving High Velocity Pipeline - Experience, Engagement and Delivery
Background:
Over the last 5 years, Facebook and a bunch of other web companies successfully moved the funding cycle back one step: Angels took the place of Venture Capital, Venture took the place of Private Equity, Private Equity and Corporate Venture took the place of friends and family IPO, and the FB IPO was filled (25% apparently) with retail investors who got what they usually get.
On the other hand, instead of a large chunk of market capitalization going to IPO underwriters, friends and family, the proceeds maximized Facebook’s take - Google did a dutch auction for the same reason and I’m kind of surprised Facebook didn’t follow that lead, but I bet they ran the numbers with the intent to maximize the FB raise. I read somewhere they were aiming for a 10% “pop”
Speculation:
All of this works as long as each sucker link in the chain, on average, makes more than the prior link based on the higher level of risk earlier links face. The problem is between the credit crash and a whole pile of screwed retail investors, the IPO market will likely be a lot more skeptical of the next web company without a rocking profitable and sustainable business model in place… In essence knocking all the valuations of would be web companies back a few notches… I’m betting Twitter just took a market cap hair cut - 10%? 20%? We may never know, but it’s real money. Breaking: Kayak just delayed their IPO…
All across the valley [edit: I suspect] a giant repricing is underway.
What’s next?
Frankly, I think this is a good thing.* Facebook showed you can use the public market to raise capital without needing a pop while some investors learned to dig a little harder on what they buy.
I loved the FT article that talked about looking at Facebook the business instead of Facebook the cultural phenomenon and Eric Savitz’s skewer of “buy what you know.” Eric maintains you have to know about technology trends, but it’s deeper than that. I told a couple of people that if you aren’t capable of having an intelligent conversation on the private market for web company shares, then you have no right buying the Facebook IPO. Maybe I should have said that louder, although I don’t think it would have made a shred of difference to anyone I care about.
Personally, I’m done with the built to distract and advertise to you Internets. I’m willing to pay for stuff of value that improves my life - especially if the company pledges not to sell everything about me and the dataflows that surround me. I’m still shocked the recession didn’t create more start-ups with non-advertizing business models that are sustainable on a small scale, although with Instagram and Pintrest serving millions of users with 10 to 15 employees and the fact that I just paid Tumblr $2, perhaps we are closer to that world than I have visibility. I hope so.
*Except for that whole selective disclosure thing. That’s BS if it happened.
Heh. I too got the willies when I saw that chart.“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” - William Gibson
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“While it’s true that both Pinterest and Instagram are not making great advances in science and technology, that is more indicator of the easy power of today’s commodity environments rather than a sign of Silicon Valley’s lack of innovation. The numbers are so huge and the valuations are so high we naturally want some sort of fundamental technological revolution to underlie their growth. The revolution is more subtle. It really is just that easy to attain such growth these days, if you can execute on the right idea. Get used to it.” — High Scalability - High Scalability - Pinterest Architecture Update - 18 Million Visitors, 10x Growth,12 Employees, 410 TB of Data (via irq)
(via irq)
High Scalability - High Scalability - Big List of 20 Common Bottlenecks -
Big List of 20 Common Bottlenecks
“Anyone who’s ever run a business knows that hiring more people is a capitalists course of last resort, something we do only when increasing customer demand requires it. In this sense, calling ourselves job creators isn’t just inaccurate, it’s disingenuous.” — The Inequality Speech That TED Won’t Show You - Restoration Roundtable
(via Searching for an SDN Definition: What Is Software-Defined Networking? - Network Computing) Required reading.
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