Wow. Right now in after hours trading GOOG is down 55. I think Wall Street is realizing that the online advertising world may be a little tougher then they had thought. It is going to be interesting to see how this all plays out.
Scott has a good post on the question of media profusion that we are in the middle of, worth a read. This is the first time I have read his stuff, I like it. Another reason why I like Memeorandum.com
Rick Segal has a great post about the future of VC in this super cheap dev environment here.
Adsense is testing moving to video and pop-ups and people are getting pissed. It is going to be interesting to see how this all pans out. I think once publishers see how much they get paid for a rich media ad they will change their toon. This is where advertising is going. It just is going to take a little creativity to solve some of the issues. I can’t wait to talk about how we solve one of the major problems in this space. It is going to be fun.
Chris Anderson- one of my favorite scribblers here in the valley- has followed up John Battelle’s NYT op-ed with a short article explaining why the boom that is just starting here is not a bubble. He says everything I have been saying in a short sweet page. Good stuff. Can’t agree more
Om has stuff to say about it here
Nicholas Carr agrees with Chris here
Paul sits the fence here, And may I add that while I like his writing, his adsense looks terrible. That is exactly what we are working to solve for.
Jeff comments here
Fred has a post on personal spam that has me thinking. As someone who sends a lot of emails I agonize over this stuff.
Here is the comment I posted
"I find that as an entrepreneur lots of people I have come into contact with like to hear about the developments in my company every now and then. Moreover some of my best opportunities have come from very random people. But I just don’t have time to ping each person I meet and develop the relationship. So often times I will send the people at the edge of my contacts updates. Yet I can also understand how this might be annoying to people or put them off if they have no interest. I find it a very tough question. The entrepreneur in me wants to turn every stone and follow up, while the people person in me hates annoying people. The only conclusion I have come to be as careful as I can and try to add value like you suggest."
What do you think?
David has another good post here where he talks about how cheap these companies are to start these days. I almost don’t want to say anything so that the teeming masses don’t all come rushing into the space. Between rails and open source it is so cheap and so fast to get to proof of concept. All the money we have raised for Triggit is just sitting in the bank right now and I am not sure where I am going to spend it until we get to proof of concept. Compared to back in the bubble when it cost a couple mil to see if someone’s crazy idea worked this is a very different world. It just changes the entire paradigm on so many different levels.
For the VCs it gets harder. We just don’t “have” to have VC money anymore. We can test our idea and if it works not only are we in substantially more powerful position (revenue and profitability make negotiating financing a whole different ball game) but we have other choices when it comes to scaling our company.
For the entrepreneur it gets harder in some ways and easier in others. No longer is the first goal to get financed and then worry about things from there (that is for those of us who don’t have VCs begging us to take their money). Now we have to execute from the very beginning and prove that we have what it takes to make a real viable product and company. That makes things very hard for those people who come from big company backgrounds where throwing money at problems is the usual solution. For those of us who like the execution part of the game where we have to make something out of nothing this is a great thing. We no longer have to ask permission, we can just do. Trust me, that is very cool. I hate asking permission.
For the big companies –G,Y,M,AOL-etc this is going to be an interesting time. Remember 90% of Google’s revenue comes from the fact that they have a better search engine. All that has to happen is one of us crazies out here in the wilderness makes a better search engine and Google is in big trouble. You saw how fast Google replaced Altavista and company. Now speed things up ten times. That’s how fast a better Google will take over. Yahoo seems to be in better place since it would be awful hard to build a competitive media entity in one go, though it may die a death of a thousand bites as all these little companies like Kayak attack its most profitable parts. That’s the problem with conglomerates like Yahoo, the competition concentrates only on the most profitable portions and can focus all their energy on one thing while the conglomerate has to focus on it all. Tough stuff. In general this is going to be an interesting spectacle to watch.
In all I think we have entered a pretty cool era in the online space. Lucky us.
For those of you who know me, you have seen how much I love to meet new people. Throw me in a room full of people I don’t know and I am at my happiest. I really think one of the best ways to combat the limitations in context that derives from our myopic existences is to meet and try to truly understand new people. Thus I was very happy to see Brad Feld, who writes the first blog I every started reading regularly-that was back when I thought I wanted to go in venture, silly me-has a short post on how meeting random people works well for him. Bravo, I agree wholeheartedly. Though the concern he expresses about the disruption it can cause in our normally focused pursuits is something I have also been working to come to grips with. Just one more thing that must be balanced.
Now that things have really started to take off I have been doing a bit of thinking about blogging and starting a business. Needless to say the more successful we have gotten the shorter time has become. In the beginning when it was just me and my crazy idea it was pretty easy to sit down and read the sphere and bust out a post or two. Now I am lucky if I get a chance to peek at meme and see what Gabe has dug up. I find it really sad. But like everything I do, when I make a quick estimation of the value that blogging creates for our company at this stage it comes up very short compared to the time spent. At least I think so. It will be interesting to see if my opinion changes.
On the upside I do think it is going to be very important to blog heavily once we launch as a CR tool so I will get to inflict people with my ghastly grammer and syntax again soon on a regular basis.