Zach Coelius

    Somehow randomly I ran into Steve
Pearlstein, the biz columnist for the Washington post, at the MySpace
party on Wednesday. We had great conversation about Triggit, web2, and
what it’s like to be part of starting a company out here these days.
Quite to my surprise he wrote an article about it on Friday. It is
neat. The only gripe I have with it is the success of Triggit is the
result of the efforts of the team and I was given way to much
credit. But the article was still pretty cool. Check it out Here

In California, a Second Internet Gold Rush

By Steven Pearlstein
Friday, October 19, 2007; Page D01

SAN FRANCISCO

At the Web 2.0 conference here in 2005 — back before Google had paid
$1.65 billion for YouTube and people were talking about valuations for
Facebook of $15 billion — Zach Coelius, a precocious 25-year-old who
had snuck into the hall without paying, stepped up to the microphone
and asked the speaker for a bit of career advice.

Start a company, replied Rupert Murdoch.

Now, two years later, Coelius has wheeled his way in again, this
time to the Internet A-list party at the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, sponsored by MySpace, which Murdoch purchased in 2005 for what now
looks like a bargain price of $580 million. Within minutes, Coelius has
pushed through the throng and buttonholed Murdoch to report on how it
has all worked out — how he had parlayed a “chance” meeting with a
venture capitalist into an invitation to a regular poker game with
other VCs who seeded his new “widget” company with their poker losses
and later with modest first-round financing. Now, with a small staff
and a tested product, Triggit.com is about to launch.

For the next two minutes, the two scheming entrepreneurs traded
stories, the jowly septuagenarian media mogul filling in some details
of how he broke the newspaper printers union on London’s Fleet Street,
the lanky young upstart riffing on the spectacular promise of social
networking. It’s hard to say who was enjoying the conversation more.
But like many in the room, they had the sense that this was one of
those magic moments that comes along every decade or so, when nothing
is certain, everything is possible and anything can be spun into gold.

It is understandable why some see the makings here of Bubble 2.0.
Over the last two years, money has been pouring into budding companies
that have been founded by young, inexperienced entrepreneurs peddling
business plans, many aiming to use similar strategies to dominate
similar markets with similar technology. And the money is coming not
just from venture capitalists, but also from hedge funds and angel
investors who have already made their score with one company and are
looking to do it again.

So far, there have been only a handful of the kind of extravagant
public offerings that characterized Bubble 1.0. Rather, the focus this
time has been on the breathtaking prices being offered by larger
strategic buyers such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Murdoch’s News
Corp., for companies offering rapidly growing revenues, page views and
click-throughs.

And then there are the other telltale signs, like the aggressive
bidding wars for talent and the news that Google has supplanted Goldman
Sachs and McKinsey & Co. as the most desired employer for recent
graduates of top-ranked colleges and MBA programs.

Rents have recently doubled in downtown Palo Alto as Facebook and
Ning have vied for space with growing legal and venture capital firms,
and there are even a few reports of landlords accepting stock for rent
in lieu of cash.

Even some of the industry’s most influential bloggers, like
TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington and BoomTown’s Kara Swisher (late of The
Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal), have worried aloud about
the outlandish valuations and the gold-rush mentality they are
spawning. So deep and widespread is the confidence — that this time
it’s different — that even eBay’s admission that it paid more than a
billion dollars too much in its much-hyped purchase of Skype is
dismissed as an anomaly.

As the founder of Netscape, the browser that launched the last
Internet frenzy, Marc Andreessen knows a thing or two about tech
bubbles. But he’s confident enough that things are different this time
that he’s put millions of his own money, along with $44 million raised
from the likes of Legg Mason, T. Rowe Price and CBS, for his latest
startup, Ning, which provides tools to anyone wanting to set up a
social networking site.

Sitting with his partner and chief executive, Gina Bianchini in his
Palo Alto offices, directly across the street from Facebook, Andreessen
ticks off the important differences.