You will experience moments of debilitating fear in startups and in life. Fear that hits unexpectedly and with varying intensity. A competitor launches, a deal falls through, or you know what? it’s just been fucking cloudy for the last week, and you don’t feel right. Whatever it is. It will happen. In tech startups when […]
The term “product / market fit” has quickly entrenched in to the lexicon of web startups as a litmus test for having achieved a repeatable, scalable business pattern. This term is so useful, and so ingrained in startup culture today that derivative “fit” phrases have cropped up—e.g. David Lee looks for “founder / market fit” […]
Below I’ve listed the #1 and #2 companies in a sampling of consumer web markets. Facebook No #2 – Myspace effectively died. Google+ has been laughable. Tumblr No #2 – Posterous acquired & shut down (can count WordPress though blogging / microblogging had different origins and compete indirectly). Snapchat No #2 – FB Poke failed Google […]
Generally speaking, there’s a major lack of transparency around startup equity in the tech world. Often the people who can write about options and salary are VCs / founders who feel they are too dirty to share or can’t properly obscure individuals and stories. It feels like most conversations about equity and pay stay between […]
When Google launched Chromecast I assumed it was based on the open source version of Airplay. Seemed logical as a bunch of people are working on standardized cross-platform approaches to Airplay, and the Wifi chip supports these variants. But Chromecast is not using mirroring or Miracast or Wifi Direct. As others have reported, all data […]
Vine is turning out to be one of the fastest growing networks ever. From launch in late January through June 12th Vine hauled in 13 million registered users. App store analytics platform AppAnnie provides historical rankings, which is the chart at the top of this post, but not daily downloads, so I interpolated Vine’s published […]
This post was originally published on Medium. Yesterday there was a lot of idle speculation that a 15 second video format will somehow transform Instagram into a massive moneymaker for Facebook. And that because advertisers may re-purpose ads generated for other mediums on Instagram and Vine, FB and Twitter will start printing money. This couldn’t […]
We all know that the pressure for Facebook to monetize is massive and growing. Yesterday Zuckerberg fulfilled the promise he dropped at TC Disrupt to release a product that will finally compete with Google. To put socially relevant people, places, interests and photos all at your fingertips. The truth however is that the link between […]
Strategically there’s a subtle underlying reason Facebook needs to buy / copy / kill Snapchat within its first few months of existence – it’s not because Snapchat has seen crazy initial success for a new mode of communication (impermanent photos) but because Snapchat is effectively a new social network being built outside Facebook, not on top […]
The exercise below is meant to draw a representation between the WhatsApp network and the value a potential suitor, including Facebook, would agree to pay. According to TechCrunch, WhatsApp has tens of millions of daily active users, the vast majority 1 to 1 messages between 2 people, not group messages. But these numbers are approximations, […]