Just went to the UCLA household chemical recycling facility. When we bought our house the previous owner left his 30 year collection of sprays, solvents and other cancer causing agents. It is great that you can take this stuff to a place that will recycle and dispose of everything properly.
I had lunch with one of the best VC’s in the valley today. At that lunch we were speaking about all sorts of business models. We spoke a little about the MSFT/YHOO deal and how that went. I strongly felt from the beginning that MSFT buying YHOO for even $33 per share (around $40+ billion total) was just an absurd amount of money for what they would get out of it.
Anyway so we came up with something that MSFT can do with some of the money that they were going to spend on YHOO. Create a program that only allows the user to use MSFT products, for example you could only search on Microsoft Live, you would block everyone else. Now why would someone download and use this, because Microsoft would pay them $100 per year to do it. For half the price of Yahoo say $20 billion, Microsoft could pay 200 million people to use its substandard services for a year. Then lets say that they invest $3-4 billion during that year in making there stuff kick ass they might not only keep their paid users but actually gain other users.
With the savings of doing this model (a little over $20 billion) they could then buy up almost every company in Silicon Valley and integrate all of those cool offerings into their core services.
Sort of a joke but when you think about how much $40 billion is, it makes you think of all of the other creative things that you could do with that money.
At PhoneTag and any other business I am involved in I am always very attentive to the money out. I count every dollar spent as $10 since an investor that put that money in expects at least a 10x return on their money. So for example last night when I stayed in the Bay Area I stayed in my favorite cheap hotel, The Cardinal in Palo Alto, it is $80 a night but you do have to deal with a shared bathroom (they call it European style).
Now for stupid. When we started the company we used hosted Gmail. It met our needs and was affordable (free). At some point we decided to go to hosted MS Exchange. Great from the feature side but that $400 bill per month felt just a little too pricey. So we canceled it and went back to Gmail. While you can basically mimic most of the experience with Gmail, it is just not as clean of an integration especially with the blackberry. I have definitely lowered my productivity a little because of it. Since time is equally as important as money, this move was stupid.
Well we will stay on Gmail because we have now all hacked around enough to make it work, but for an annual savings of $5k per year it was not my best decision.
Had a great entrepreneurial fuelled breakfast this morning with a fellow Babson Alum in LA. This is what the table looked like when we left. I love chatting and brainstorming with entrepreneurs it really gets the blood and mind flowing.
It is entirely possible that before Twitter makes its first penny, it will become too important to exist in its current form, and the community will feel it has to be replaced by an open source distributed framework. This should strike fear into the hearts of anyone who decides open their API. While the Open API strategy has clearly worked in terms of adoption, it may have worked too well. In fact it may have worked so well that Twitter may be killed before it has even really made it out of the womb, by people that find it so important that they can’t afford to really have it be a company.
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This is a really interesting post (I suggest you read the whole thing) and it will be very interesting to see how this plays out. I like many tech entrepreneurs I have watched Twitter very closely as they have grown. The openness of the Twitter platform has until now been one of its great strengths but as of late it might be there downfall.
At this point Twitter basically has a bounty on its head. The first person that figures out how to truly leverage the openness of Twitter with the scalability of a distributed open platform like say Skype is going to be a hero amongst the big blogs.
I hope that Twitter survives and becomes as a huge of a financial success for the founders as it has been a success in the market. It would be a shame if all of their work in basically creating the microbloging industry is for no return.
I know the guys over at Pure Pwnage through one of my best friends in Calgary. These guys are Geek TV and they are awesome. Check out the work that they did to beat guitar hero, very cool.
