Being a reflective Saturday, as an entrepreneur whose $3k leftover family car has required $2076 (i dont have) of new 'used' engine, I'm not off to the Rye vs Crib Point football game (as my embedded google calendar on my blog bottom right sidebar shows) as I had planned, as the ride wont be back to its regular commuting prowess till Monday. Luckily tomorrow I'll be off on the 808am Vline so I can get to the "
Who Cares (dees vs dockers) Cup" with Strawbs. Ma' teams been losing so no1's turning up. So if u've got 6 minutes, strap yourself in for a 1814 word opus.
The reflection today reading the 4 papers and a piece by Aussie blogger of the year
Reasonsyouwillhateme.com, tripleJ brekkie host Marieke Hardy about her involvement in the 1000 strong RuddBlanchett mafia new government time of change
2020 conference, which is not about predicting the box office of Hugh Jackman's Wolverine movie, but sowing the seeds of revolutionary change thru institutionally acceptable grass roots brainstorming - a microcosm of what the davewiners hope barack will instill in that once was superpower.
Funnily, Dave blocked Scoble on twitter. While Scoble is twittering that having reached the facebook maximum member precipice is selling his Facebook friendship for $250, just as
MySpace is selling space in its app directory for up to $100K a week if reports are to be believed.
Friendship costs these days, if it helps the virality of your app. Kinda the modern take on 1.0's raise VC, do a 5 year portal distribution deal, and make a quirky TVC for the superbowl.
Being far enough away in Berkeley, Dave pleaded on twitter to be left alone by the Arrington et kingmakers' cronies so as to not be polluted by Silicon Valley; Bringing me to my Saturday reflection - that of doing something BIG : Said at it's expected most extreme by the based in London Umair on Boston bastion's Harvard Business School's blog :
"
But today's revolutionaries are sheep in wolves' clothing.
They're lost in the economically meaningless, in the utterly trivial, in the strategically banal: mostly, they're cutting deals with one another to...try and sell more ads. That is, when they're not too busy partying. ."
To assess the
Umair/Oreilly perspective it's worth going to the "
authentic" (if mythological) foundations of (the coming out of dotcrash) web2 epoch circa 2003/4 : Where the foundation of big ideas for virtual worlds begat a photo sharing feature flickr, then (like its tagging cousing del.icio.us) was absorbed by yahoo. Flickr under the
peanutbutter manifesto then absorbed yahoo photos and
now 2 billion tagged photos and finally some 90 second video clips later, it's a big idea made good, no question.
While using the same delicious folksonomy approach youtube became gootube and became the flank for google's next 10 years along with the search cash cow and i-g-phone plans. And it only cost them $1.6B and some legal pay offs. Similarly, plans for a deep CMS for pyra-labs created blogger, got absorbed into mountainview, and the next big thing twitter, begat microblogging for burnt out bloggers wanting
L's ambient intimacy, and became a cornerstone of lifestreaming.
So photos, video and lifestreaming, all of which could be argued are big ideas, that have created big consumer usage, but all of which also were absorbed into bigco's and thus not have the same option as the googles, amazons, ebays - which went public and became the
fkr, not the fkd. The acquirer not the acquired. Y
'know what I mean. I think what drives many people's frustration is that bigco's are buying the small innovative ones, and thus not allowing "
the next google" to flourish. Which is why many people see facebook as the only potential google threat, as it has stayed independent.
Ironically it could be argued facebook isnt a big idea; Being a derivative social network, with a range of web2 and rss features combined under one umbrella. As well as recruiting as many xooglers as possible so as to mimic google's back end scalability. So facebook's big idea was to stay independent, and rather than be acquired, ultimately move to a public listing.
The small is not the new big, me-too-ism argument of Umair + Oreilly is also around a cultural critique of The Valley; It questions whether today's Valley innovators are actually such, or are their lifestreams more a quest for 15 minutes of qik fame,
built2flip 2.0. On the flipside, The Arringtons alternate side, believe having the world's best in close geographic proximity and abundant availability of capital to work on cracking the next big thing is the best recipe for success. With the 95% failure rate being necessary and a badge of edge
io honour.
Take lifestreaming for example as it is called. It's not big in itself or new in that it takes Dave Winer's RSS, and classic RSS feedsnfetching, and allows people to upload their various "
social graph" identities from flickr, qik, twitter, wordpress, youtube and allows '
friends' to
subscribe, consume and comment.There are lots of startups in lifestreaming (some funded, others not - none more than $5m) - And so far, the company with the most traction the exgoogle gmailers FriendFeed, has done in part because they possibly have best team, best funders, and most money, and not because they built a product with the same functionally as competitors : socialthing, iminta etc - It is seen to succeed because ppl prefer to participate there with features as simple as to "
like" an entry and provide a comment.
But this is really secondary. More important is perceived relative momentum and leadership : Once one player in a new segment is seen as the leader : it is linked to, twittered about , and within the early adopter echo chamber, its
#1 position becomes a self fulfilling prophecy : Perception becomes reality for success. Then, as the adoption curves broaden, new consumers are choose the app with most positive noise pushed by the
corvida and louis grays of the day. Similarly, developers too choose which API to choose on such buzz leading Air developers like Alert Thingy to further drove leadership of the FriendFeeds.
The point here is that lifestreaming to Umair and Oreilly may not be substantial enough in solving the issues that Umair starts his piece on : "
Food prices are skyrocketing. The financial system is melting down. Energy, of course, is more and more toxic, and costly. We are all, make no mistake, dancing on the precipice of economic cataclysm."
I dont know about u, but I'm no Marxist, and with 15 years of online work experience, and none elsewhere, I know I'm not going to solve the price of organic fruit + veg in the supermarket or why the rudd government decided to increase the price of smirnoff alcopops 20% almost overnight. And while as
Clay Shirky believes the Triathlon of media (consuming, sharing and contributing) is healthier than its mainstream media forebears, it is still just media. Just as Bill Gates learnt
you cant solve world poverty or Aids by giving away computers.In Australia we have little 2.0 sector specific early stage funding + lots of oligopolies and almost the opposite scenario of that described in the Valley - where there are possibly too many companies and too much funding. So as long as people arent losing their retirement money or houses like has happened in the last crash, or current US credit crisis, or local margin lending induced Opes Prime collapses, I'd prefer over funding of too many companies with not big enough ideas in a particular segment such as lifestreaming. Maybe they can take a little of bit of Valley excess and distribute it to the under lifestreamed nations !
Lets say $50m of funding has been committed into the lifestreaming segment - which is probably a high number, but I'm thinking globally and including larger companies planned expenditure in the space. That exposure is worth it to me in a greater good sense, if I can better distribute my content to those interested; If my time can be better used to cut down on signal:noise inherent in search engines, news sites and rss readers; And ultimately these 'features' will be copied, acquired and licensed by larger companies releasing products to the mainstream consumer web services market in 2009/10. Couture goes walmart as devil meets prada taught us in the Anna Wintour parody.
Which is not to say I don't worry about the lack of '
big things' coming out of the Valley, and in our own little side of the world downunder, none of the next things are going overground. My own business model was predicated on not competing or betting too much on the consumer market. And the most successful Aussie company in the 2.0 space : Atlassian, was formed before the Web2 period; Had an enterprise/SME target market not consumer; And also, it could be argued, was a big idea not a small one. (self service web based collaboration for blue chips) Nor did it sell out to BigCo.
I'm sure its very profitable too ! I remember an
early 2Web crew podcast we did where
Nik Cubrilovic said Omindrive was a '
big swing, going for home run' type play. And Nik as a founder who is an engineer and can read a mean terms sheet too, was highly impressive as the next new thing. But my response in that podcast was my own strategy was '
medium sized swing, medium sized return, with a greater percentage chance of moderate success'.
So hearing Omnidrive is deadpooled on RWW (we'll almost claim Kiwi Richard Macmanus as an Aussie!) is a scary but healthy reminder of what it takes to succeed. I'm sure Nik's next play will be a hit (altho he'll need to communicate effectively with his investors and other shareholders which
doesnt appear to
have happened to date.
Angel Clay Cook's update here.) Also bad news in a way for put on ice Tinfinger, although (unlike Omnidrive) is more akin to Odeo, because their comparable Twitter hypergrowth is
Fanfooty.
And in this case Fanfooty is huge as Aussies love their football. Go Paul.
When you look at the success of Y-Combinator in using small amounts of capital (like the mythologised $6K per founder) :
yc-ventures that go thru lots of hurdles to ensure the team and opportunity have a good chance of success. They show that there can be a balance of big and small ideas. Some imitative fundees like calendar startup kiko, didnt work but got sold on ebay and covered most of the costs, as well as funding justin.tv : with the real time mobile video space ala qik.com and flip handhelds being an interesting and big one; So the small idea died, but payed the bills and funded the next bigger one. Seems healthy to me. It's almost like the modern decentralised organisation rather than an investor, y-combinator.
One day we'll get one downunder metarand!Silicon Valley's hypercompetition and me-too-ism is probably characteristic of that region, and there will be a constant balance between incrementalism and revolution. Downunder, we still need to form an identity, and develop some leadership, infrastructure and funding around segments we can incubate and export. My gut feel in the web consumer space we just dont have it (with the obvious exceptions that will come up) -
Whether it's lack of smart ycombinator/union square like funding, slow broadband which limits creativity, or just sheer lack of engineers spending enough hours on the projects (as they are stuck in vwell paying dead end insurance/banking contracts) I'm not sure.
But there is definitely some
success being had in the mobile applications space - whether it be the exporting of
@cathye, the success of mig33's, bluepulses, podmo, and the one with the MTV deal I cant remember... we have a 3.5G superfast NextG network, large global telcos' etc - its not surprising we have some success here, better building blocks in place. But btw, we need an official 3G iphone vsoon, or any legal iphone, before we miss the next wave of location based services. On Msport yday, Brian Taylor said Vodafone are selling them already...
Australia has also shown success as mentioned with the web based hosted services (tools and data) type plays such as Atlassian and Hitwise. We're good at serving small/big businesses, because fundamentally we're nicer than alot of other more cynical nations. So whether that means we're able to improve upon the MYOB accounting type packages with the Wesabes and Mints of this world, Im not sure, but we should be. (again we have big banks and people with global expertise in the space)
I'd also add there's nothing wrong with developing local businesses on established global categories : Just as realestate.com.au, carsales.com.au and seek.com.au did over a decade ago and who in aggregation just these 3 businesses created bilions of dollars of shareholder value (and totally revalued the newspaper business downunder) : And all by doing unsexy consumer applications such as buying/selling a car, job, house or business.
These sites, along with all the verticals within the Yellowpages, will need to keep their features current as consumers are conditioned by the type of features they get on qik, facebook, vimeo, twitter and so on. Or they will lose share to the startups using the Web2 + 3 approaches, and even more so continue to lose share to new and localised goog and microhoo offerings who will continue to buy the new innovative companies.
So not every1's creating the next facebook, or providing microfinancing to third world farmers. A big swing can sometimes lead to a big miss (with the scars providing
learning for the next time), while a smaller swing done well can create a base from which to grow something bigger. As Calacanis says, you need to get your first home run, and usually its safer to swing smaller, then build it up over time.
All in betting I've done before and I always lose. But the Umair and Oreilly call to arms is not to be ignored, as everyday when u wake up u need to question the real purpose of what u r doing, in case it is the wrong thing.
In my space, I never intended to build a blog search engine, but thats what I did, and the business model 2 years later, like sphere and pluck (both recently acquired) we've found is in the syndication and intelligence of the content to enterprises. Luckily we didnt take so much money that we had to be sacked while we navigated this transition. Our future was not to be in consumer advertising even though i have 10 yrs+ experience in it. Similarly, we have a business in providing online community to publishers, which can often be a trap for becoming consultants and webdevelopers. We're still transitioning from that and its hard but necessary to knock back work as we are,
when your car needs to be fixed.But long term I know we need to build reusable technology/building blocks differentiated from the plucks and nings of this world. (altho i will be having one consumer play in 08 where i take all my learnings and develop a new version of gnoos, but i only get the funds/resources for this once everything else is paid for/allocated) And ultimately, if you take out the world changing reasons to get up in the morning, and you also take out the build it and they will come "
platform" approach which VC's want to talk, you need to do whatever it takes to build a valuable growing business that generates revenue, has a positive gross margin position, and can scale technically, peoplewise to produce sizeable net profits.
This then negates the potential blog.pmarca nuclear winter.Because a business that makes profit allows you to have the freedom to do what you really want to with your life, and is an attractive capital asset for potential suitors. Unsexy maybe to Umair and O'Reilly, but coming from kosher caulfield, is the basic tenet of any business, to make money.
The Tim Oreilly Quoted Poem - The Man Walking (extract) : He ended with at his web2 expo talk on this topic :
Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
OK, thats nice Tim, I'm off for a run....
thinking about all that money..... Changing the world can wait for tomorrow, when the Dees beat Fremantle in a huge world upset !
x : "so the market lumps all these digital assets together. we're valued at 3.5 times earnings."
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