Posts from Web/Tech

This is so good I decided to go with back to back videos this weekend.

Tyrone showed me this video of a debate this past week between the CEOs of WPP, Viacom, and Twitter. I’m watching it now and it’s very interesting.

I went back and looked at the Ten Golden Principals For Web Apps presentation I did four and a half years ago.

Nowhere on this list is Trust. Maybe that was an oversight. Or maybe times have changed.

Take auto photo backup from my Android phone to the cloud. I have two great options on my phone, Dropbox and Google+.

I don’t use Google+ for this and I do use Dropbox for this.

It is not that I don’t trust Google to host my photos. And it is not that I don’t trust Google in general. It is that I don’t trust Google to change the privacy rules on Google+ and instantly expose all of these photos to their crawlers and the web at large.

It’s really Facebook’s fault that I don’t trust Google with this. Anyone in the social networking game who isn’t already default public is trying to figure out how to get there. That’s the nice thing about Twitter. It has always been default public and so you know what to expect when you post something there.

I trust Dropbox to keep the photos I backup to the cloud private. It’s not that Dropbox is more trustworthy than Google in my mind. But it is that privacy is part of the brand promise that Dropbox makes and their business of hosting all of our data in their cloud depends on them being very careful with our privacy expectations.

Going back to why in early 2010 I didn’t put Trust in my top ten – it may be that Facebook’s assault on our privacy and the loss of trust that ensued was just developing in our collective consciousness at that time. And now we live in a more paranoid state about this stuff.

The rise of Snapchat, I believe, is largely in response to this exact thing. With Snapchat, you have explicit control over who sees your photos and where they go from there. That was a feature we did not know we needed four years ago. And it is a feature that built an entire company. And probably many more. Trust is a very important feature these days.

My favorite talks are between interesting people who know each other well. This talk is one of those. Joi and Reid have been friends for as long as I’ve known them, which is over a decade.

Reid is the founder and Chairman of LinkedIn and a leading VC with Greylock. Joi is the Director of the MIT Media Lab and formerly the Director of Creative Commons.

Thanks to Tyrone who sent this one to me earlier this week.

Our portfolio company DuckDuckGo has made privacy a big part of its value proposition. And slowly but surely, their search engine has gotten good enough that people are using it instead of Google.

DuckDuckGo publishes its search volumes publicly. They are doing 6mm searches a day now. This page says that Google does 6bn searches a day. So if that’s right, DuckDuckGo is doing 0.1% of Google’s search volume.

That’s not a huge market share. But DuckDuckGo is growing quickly. A year ago, their search volume was 1.8mm/day. So if they continue to triple their daily search volume each year for the next three years, they would have >150mm searches a day by June 2017. And assuming that Google’s search volume keeps growing at 15% per year, DuckDuckGo would be doing 1.7% of Google’s daily search volume in three years.

So there is certainly a market out there for people who will accept a slightly weaker product in exchange for privacy. It’s not 25% of the market. It may not even be 5% of the market. But I believe it is well north of 1% of the market.

And if that is the case, are there other big product categories out there other than search where privacy could be used as a competitive vector? How about email? How about messaging? How about maps? How about browsers?

I think we are going to see this play out in the coming years. DuckDuckGo is making it work. Why won’t others do the same?

I’m feeling a little out of sorts today and not inspired to write anything. So I’ll take this opportunity to showcase Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends 2014 Presentation. Here it is in all its glory.

Our portfolio company Disqus held a breakfast last week to talk about the subject of engagement. We kicked it off with an interview between Christina Warren and me.

The lights on stage were right in my eyes and so it was tough to look anywhere but down which makes watching this a bit tough.

The interview is about 30mins long. The Q&A, which I think is the best part, starts at 30mins and goes for another 20mins.

Our portfolio company DuckDuckGo launched a new version yesterday. Gabe wrote a short post explaining what’s new.

DuckDuckGo is on a tear and tripled direct searches in the past year.

There are a number of reasons why more and more people turn to DuckDuckGo to do their searches. First and foremost, it’s DDG’s privacy promise:

We don’t collect or share personal information.

But it also the fact that DDG is getting better and better every day. Through DuckDuckHack, anyone can make DDG better. And it is a lot better these days.

I have used DDG as my default search engine on all of my desktop browsers since before we made our investment in the fall of 2011. I would love to do the same on my mobile browsers but cannot do that yet. I used to use the !g extension on DDG searches to route them to Google at least 33% of the time. I find that I am doing that less than 20% of the time now. It may not be possible to do search better than google, but if DDG can do private search almost as good as Google, I think that will turn into a very significant business in time. It already is looking like that’s the case.

Yesterday, on stage at an event hosted by our portfolio company Disqus, it was suggested that I was “trolling Apple” with the comments I made at TechCrunch Disrupt. I explained that I was not trolling anyone and that I attempted to honestly answer a question about the changes afoot in technology. I think there is a fundamental and important distinction between a device focused strategy and a cloud focused strategy.

Carlos Kirjner is an analyst at AB Bernstein who covers Internet companies. I was reading his analysis of Larry Page’s letter to shareholders this morning (the analysis is not a public document and I cannot link to it).

In Carlos’ analysis, he wrote this:

We believe … Larry Page’s discussion about the new mobile, multi-screen world …. is really about the importance of cloud services in that world. This is by no means a trivial statement and we believe goes against a more device centric model favoured, we believe, by Apple.

Many interpreted my comments as anti-Apple and pro-Google and I guess they were. But I was attempting to make a larger point. Which is that a device centric strategy is not a winning strategy in my mind. The big gains from technology in the coming years will come from things like machine learning and collective intelligence. Hardware and operating systems are important but to some extent a commodity at this stage of the game in mobile. Yes, we will see more sensors, better screens, better battery life, and more and more technology packed into these mobile devices. But I don’t think any one company has a lock on all of the device level innovation and I worry that one company, Google, is developing a very large and sustainable advantage in machine learning and collective intelligence that will be hard for anyone to compete with.

So when I look at which top technology company is best positioned for the next decade as I see it unfolding, well that’s an easy answer in my mind and that’s the answer I gave.