Facebook knows what’s best for you, sometimes before you do. That’s the meaning of a new “Likers Gonna Like” inspirational mini-poster printed by the Facebook Toronto Office. If you don’t approve of something Facebook’s doing, fine, there’s millions of other people who do. And just as with the launch of the news feed, if you hate some change to the Facebook interface, wait a few months, and you’ll probably end up Liking it too.
It’s a cavalier statement, one based on several old hip-hop songs including “In Da Club” by 50 Cent, where he raps “If [they] hate then let ‘em hate and watch the money pile up”. It’s a mentality that has gotten the company into privacy trouble. But the idea that Facebook and its visionary CEO Mark Zuckerberg should push forward with bold ideas because “Likers Gonna Like” is what’s let Facebook move faster than its older rivals, and kept it from being disrupted these last eight years. → Read More
Tomorrow Facebook will sell shares in one of the biggest tech IPOs in history. New investors will gobble up the stock to get a piece of the global phenomenon famously started in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room in 2004. But while owning the stock will have quantifiable value when it trades on the open market, few buyers will be able to say truthfully that they understood the value of the company just a few years ago.
Ask yourself candidly, what did you think of Facebook the first time you landed on its homepage? Where you blown away? Could you see how it would fill a gaping need in the lives of nearly a billion people? If you’re honest with yourself, and you’re not Peter Thiel, your answer is probably, “No, not really.” → Read More
Although introduced in 2009, we’ve only seen glimpses of what Facebook Credits will become when it grows up, and Facebook is about to kick off the training wheels.
So far, Facebook has done little to promote the virtual currency of Facebook Credits and it’s been used almost entirely in social gaming. But even with this limited exposure and promotion, Facebook Credits’ fees already represents $557 Million in revenue or 15 percent of Facebook’s entire 2011 revenue. Even more remarkable is that less than two percent of Facebook users bought virtual goods with Facebook Credits in 2011, yet it still represented 15 percent of Facebook’s revenue, primarily from just one vertical – social gaming. One vertical and two percent of members represented 15 percent of Facebook’s 2011 revenue! → Read More
Facebook’s IPO story is a lot about mobile, international growth and Asia.
I am not Asian by birth but have been living there for a dozen years and researching key Asian markets since before Facebook was created. Here are my views on Facebook’s prospects.
From Facebook’s S-1 filing:
“In countries such as Japan, Russia, and South Korea we estimate that we have penetration rates of less than 15%; and in China, where Facebook access is restricted, we have near 0% penetration”
While that sounds like a lot of room for growth, let’s look at the reality of it. → Read More
One of the things I wish I had done in both of my companies (Excite.com and JotSpot) was to take a piece of advice that I now give most entrepreneurs I meet. That advice is: “Right after you sign your term sheet for your Series A, write the fantasy deck for your Series B (complete with whatever metrics, graphs and customer lists you would love to have).”
I say this because of the way I’ve both done fundraising and seen it done. Whether we like to admit it or not, the way it’s usually done tends to be very haphazard and bottom’s up. It starts with… → Read More
Winning TechCrunch Disrupt in 2011 was an unforgettable experience that will undoubtedly remain a highlight of my entrepreneurial career. After winning the prestigious Disrupt Cup and Audience Choice Award, we signed up thousands of cars, had over 150 news stories published, and closed a $3.4M seed round.
As we approach the one-year anniversary of our win, we’re now operating in 4 major markets with many more on the way. In case you’re wondering what it takes to WIN Disrupt, we’ll let you in on our secrets: → Read More
Authors no longer have to impress stodgy English majors to get their book a quality review: new research from the Harvard Business Review shows that the aggregate rating of Amazon reviewers are every bit as good as professional book critics.
Professional book critics, on the other hand, suffer from nepotism: critics give more favorable reviews to their colleagues, authors who agree with their ideological slant, and if the book has been given an award by other critics. The result, implies this new research, is that Amazon has democratized the book reviewing process, with consumer reviewers less beholden to special interests and more representative of the book-reading masses. Perhaps most importantly, it rebuts critics who have claimed that Amazon is nothing more than a cauldron of corrupt and uneducated opinions. → Read More
I must say that I have been a little bit disappointed recently in the many, many, many analysts who have been knocking the Facebook valuation with very limited insight into what is going on with their advertising business. Their revenue potential is as strong as it has ever been and the social network continues to grow its users and roll-out innovative advertising products.
While there are many things that Facebook can do to drive revenue related to display, search, and mobile – let’s take a look at three immediate steps Facebook could take to ramp up revenues from its 500 Million+ monthly active users on mobile devices. → Read More
The biggest ecommerce opportunity today involves taking offline services and offering them for sale online (O2O commerce). The first generation of O2O commerce was driven by discounting, push-based engagements, and artificial scarcity. The still-unfulfilled opportunity in O2O today is tantamount to tacking barcodes onto un-warehousable services by standardizing and normalizing the units being sold, something I call “Service as a SKU.” Just as Amazon figured out how to build the best warehouses and technology in the world for delivering boxes, somebody will do this for “unboxed” services, with customers driven not by discounts or scarcity, but rather by the Internet’s hallmarks of customer experience and convenience. And unlike how “ship stuff in a box” ecommerce seems to be gravitating towards a few winners, Service as a SKU is still a wide open playing field. → Read More
Remember Jitterbug, the big-buttoned phones for seniors that made using those confusing, new-fangled cellphone thingies so much easier to handle? Well it looks like someone has gone out and built the equivalent for the iPad. Which literally made me laugh out loud when I read the news, because the iPad is the first computer I’ve ever seen seniors adopt in droves. But hello anyway, Family Ribbon.
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Did you hear that 2012 is the year of the assistant? It’s clear: Siri was only the beginning.
Today, assistants can do my bidding for a bunch of transactional, task-oriented use cases, saving me a few precious steps along the way. In the future, assistants will be capable of doing more and more non-trivial things. And, Norm Winarsky is right — Siri isn’t one assistant to rule them all. We’ll soon have a cadre of specialized software agents at our side. → Read More
When I talk to my friends who are not currently at startups, or the Silicon Valley, the perception is that VCs and individual investors are throwing around investment dollars like drunken sailors. Outsiders think that there is a bubble, and that any company with two engineers and an idea will get funded (though there is some truth to that in certain cases).
The reality is, competition has never been fiercer for startups, especially at the seed stage, to close a round. The pendulum may have swung for Y Combinator companies, but not everyone else. → Read More
This post is the third part of a three-part primer on convertible note seed financings. Part 1, entitled “Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Convertible Note Seed Financings (But Were Afraid To Ask),” addressed the basics. Part 2, entitled “Convertible Note Seed Financings: Econ 101 for Founders,” addressed the economics. This part will address certain tricky issues. → Read More
Some people just love Google+ and others just hate the company’s efforts to create a social network and a social layer across all of its services. Google itself seems to be pretty happy with the results it is getting from Google+ so far – or at least that’s what the company is saying publicly. No matter your overall feelings about Google+, though, Google’s new native Google+ app for iPhone is worth a look, especially because it’s hopefully just a first glimpse at what more of Google’s mobile apps will look like in the near future. → Read More
It wasn’t so long ago that Peter Thiel began publicly pushing the somewhat controversial idea that higher education is in a bubble, or launching an initiative to help smart young people “stop out of school.”
For these reasons, Thiel’s decision to teach a higher ed course was unexpected, even controversial. Last month, he began teaching a class at Stanford called “Computer Science 183: Startup.” One of his students, Blake Masters, provides a glimpse into Thiel’s lectures through his comprehensive class notes.
Masters has turned his notes into essays and posted them on his blog, one of which is a fascinating conversation between the investor and Marc Andreessen on the past, present, and future of the tech industry, which we’ve highlighted herein. → Read More
With a $100 billion IPO pending, it’s with confident defiance that Facebook has thumbed its nose at traditional web advertising models. On Facebook, despite their $5 billion 2012 forecasted ad revenue, you’ll see no prerolls, no rich media ads, no “punch the monkeys,” and no interruption.
Facebook is leading the charge for a new generation of media companies who are building their businesses on “native” advertising models, a fundamental shift away from the traditional interruptive ad models that users have learned to ignore. Facebook’s commitment to native monetization signals significant change to come. → Read More
One year ago I wrote an article called “Why The New Guy Can’t Code,” about how the industry-standard process for hiring software engineers is broken, shortsighted, and counterproductive. It remains my most-read TC post. Of course, I was far from the first to say so, and even farther from the last; every few weeks a similar rant bubbles onto the home page of Hacker News.
And yet recruiting remains broken. When I wrote that post I imagined that in the subsequent year some sharp startup would come along and turn the game on its ear — but no. A few have tried: Gitalytics, which tries to use Github data to identify good engineers; Gild, which acquired Coderloop last year and is still going strong; and especially StackOverflow Careers, which leverages the software world’s most indispensable site to match employers and employees. But I think it’s fair to say that all the contenders so far serve as adjuncts to the traditional recruiting process, rather than replacing it with something disruptively new.
All of which adds up to today’s very weird situation: there’s a desperate talent shortage across the industry, but at the same time, employers are so terrified by the prospect of ever hiring a subpar engineer that the recruiting process has become increasingly gruelling and time-consuming, even though there’s little evidence that the standard interview gauntlet identifies good engineers.
Of late I’m getting more involved with recruiting myself. (My day job is at the software development shop HappyFunCorp; we’re hiring.) And, pending the arrival of that hypothetical revolutionary recruiting startup, I have a modest proposal: stop worrying so much about hiring, and start putting your HR energies into firing. → Read More
I have been active in the field of gamification for the past couple of years, working with companies like Badgeville, HealthTap, Gigya, Basis and others on leveraging game mechanics for end user behavior measurement, scoring and shaping. Last week, I participated on an investor panel of at VatorSplash’s Gamification Summit and the group shared several noteworthy points: → Read More
The tectonic plates in the app world have been shifting quite a bit lately, in ways that will significantly impact developers and users. One major upcoming shift is coming from our friends in Redmond–Windows 8– and yesterday, we witnessed another major shift as Facebook announced their new App Center.
After sleeping on it and reading dozens of generic blog posts about the announcement, this is what I think the Facebook App Center REALLY means (complete with lame taglines for your entertainment): → Read More
Shame on you, WriteThat.Name. After more than one personal recommendation, not to mention glowing reviews around the web, I finally got around to signing up for WriteThat.Name, a service which automatically updates your Gmail address book with your contacts’ current information, which it pulls from their email signature lines. To be clear, the service is not new – we covered its $1.55 million seed round in January. But you know how it goes, things launch, you forget about them for a while, then you find them again thinking, “wow, how did I miss that?!” The service sounded amazing, and in the brief period of time I used it, it worked beautifully. It seemed like one of those under-the-radar must-haves that just make life easier.
But something I came across in the settings concerned me. WriteThat.Name wanted me to pay in order to keep it from spamming my friends? What? → Read More
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