Posts from April 2008

Y Combinator founder Paul Graham has penned another one of his essays, this time tackling not one but two issues in it. The first is why the best Internet companies are not sold (think eBay, Google, Facebook). Paul’s argument is simple; they would have sold but nobody offered them a price they were willing to accept so they just kept on going:

Google’s founders were willing to sell early on.
They just wanted more than acquirers were willing to pay.

It was the same with Facebook.  They would have sold, but Yahoo blew it
by offering too little.

Tip for acquirers: when a startup turns you down, consider raising
your offer, because there’s a good chance the outrageous price they
want will later seem a bargain.

Then he goes on to to talk about VCs, something I know a little bit about myself. He says that the popular view of VCs as bold risk takers is wrong:

The most surprising thing I’ve learned is how conservative they
are.  VC firms present an image of boldly encouraging innovation.
Only a handful actually do, and even they are more conservative in
reality than you’d guess from reading their sites.

Paul sent me and several others a draft of this essay before publishing it. He asked if he was "wrong" about anything he said in it. I think not. People will always want to debate controversial statements like the ones Paul makes in this essay. But the basic point that Paul is making is that big value creation comes in funny places and many of the people who want that value (VCs and big companies) are slow to see it and take advantage of it. And that is true and always has been and always will be.

My partner Albert has a different take on Paul’s essay and posted his thoughts on his blog this morning.

One of our portfolio companies, Covestor, is looking for a key senior level hire, responsible for all product management and development of the Covestor.com service.

Lead Product Manager

  – 8+ years online product management experience
  – Demonstrated success defining and launching web products
  – Experience initiating and managing a product development process
  – Web community/data rich web marketplace experience
  – Management experience
  – Passion and Drive

If this describes you and if you are happy to work between London and New York, then please get in touch directly with Covestor.

Adobe AIR is a fantastic piece of software that allows you to run web applications on your desktop. You need to down the Adobe AIR client which runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Then you need the person or company who builds your favorite web services to build an AIR version. Once they do that, you can run the web application on your desktop. It’s interesting that many of the AIR clients for popular web applications are not written by the application developer, but by a third party using the web applications’ API. That’s the case with the popular twitter client Twhirl and the new FriendFeed client AlertThingy.

The problem with AIR is that unlike Firefox, which allows for tabbed browsing, there is no way to launch one AIR client and get multiple services. I’d like to have Twhirl, AlertThingy, and Shifd (another cool AIR client) all running at the same time in different tabs.

Imagine if you could simply "attach" AIR clients to each other and they become tabs in one single mega AIR client. That’s basically how Firefox works and I suspect I’m not the only person who wants AIR to work that way too.

I am going to try something new. The only thing that will be on this blog today is video. If a picture is worth a thousand words, maybe video is worth 10x that. We’ll see.