By most accounts Mint.com’s rapid rise to prominence and ultimate acquisition is the quintessential Silicon Valley success story. Yet, the Mint.com acquisition brought to light an interesting phenomenon, one I’ve coined the “Patzer Problem.” Prior to submitting offers to invest, three separate VCs wanted to confirm that we had no intention of “Pulling a Patzer,” modern-day Sand Hill Road parlance for selling too early… investors are becoming increasingly desperate for that single homerun investment that returns $1B or greater.
To me it is not making sure you do not “pull a patzer” it is that you make sure that you stay away from some bloated out of date VC that can no longer live in the real world. Why let their out of date and mathematically incorrect business model get in the way of your own personal wealth creation.
A friend at Wharton, Matt Newberg, did this rap video of Foursquare with his buddies. A much better use of his time, IMHO, then studying as this will get them a better job then A’s will.
Nice job on the video Matt, now get to work and do another one on Phonetag:)
Speaking today at CAA in LA on te future of technology alongside Rafi from Blip.tv. This conference room is probably the most amazing I have ever seen.
It is so true, he really is Forest Gump. From the same article I also saw this today, “Craigslist gets more traffic than either eBay or Amazon.com. eBay has more than 16,000 employees. Amazon has more than 20,000. Craigslist has 30”
Success is typically mix of a few things done right and some good old fashioned luck. When you read about market leading companies in books like Good to Great you see this. When it comes to the great managers and entrepreneurs there are major debates about what skill sets make for winners.
The controversy over the gold medal in the figure skating event in the Olympics is a good example of this. A Russian skater, Evgeni Plushenko won the silver medal, beat out by a American skater Evan Lysasek.
Evgeni has been crying to the press that since he was able to land a quad jump and Evan only did a triple then he deserves the medal. Even though the event is for 4 and 1/2 minutes.
Just like in building a business there is not one single piece that guarantees a win. It is the combination of things executed correctly that create success. If it was only one thing it would be easy, then every skater would just practice the quad jump and whoever could land it would win the gold.
Smith and Wollensky created a really funny website called Steak for Stock. At the bottom of the site is a calculator that you can put any ticker symbol in to see what a share of stock will get you.
Looks like we, Ditech (nasdaq: DITC) need to do better because parsley does not fill my stomach…
I use iTunes and On Demand for all my movies, which is the best experience, no friction.
However when DVD’s mattered (and for me they do not anymore) the above was very true and something that Hollywood overlooked. Pirates do not take content just to save money they also do it because originally for music and movie’s the experience was better.
My first business was building out telecom networks in 3rd world countries which I ended up merging with Nobel. One of my largest projects was in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the city of Kinshasa. During the time I was there 2000-2001 poverty and starvation were out of control, the country was fully at war, World War Africa.
However one thing always struck me as incredible, there were three products basically unaffected by these extreme conditions, make-up, cell phones and beer. All three are wants and not needs.
In some ways it is sad to see a person who is obviously malnourished talking on a cell phone at $0.30 a minute vs. buying some food. From a business side these things are important to understand as they do effect markets, a interesting book around some of these principals would be Predictably Irrational.
Yesterday was the first time I was on a real conference call with a 3rd party where every participant used PoketyPoke. There were 5 people on the call and everyone came in at the same time. For those who do conference calls, you know that with 5 people this never happens.
Most conference calls I do start about 5-7 minutes late, I do approximately 3 conference calls per day so that means I am wasting over 60 hours a year waiting for people on conference calls.
Success can be measured in a variety of ways, most people quickly equate money to success. Money is a decent point system but for me it is nothing compared to the feeling you get when you see a innovation you were involved in working and fixing real world issues.
If you want to try PoketyPoke, just go to www.PoketyPoke.com, for now it is free.
Yesterday Microsoft announced its next dud-to-be operating system on the mobile, Windows Phone. I am negative on the platform because you already have too many big platforms out there getting developer attention and I just do not beleive that Microsoft can come in this late to the game with something attractive enough to developers/end users to make a difference.
Also in reality the Windows Phone operating system already exists, it is just not owned by Microsoft, the Blackberry.
Blackberries are tightly integrated into the windows and MS office world. They are already there and have real entrenchment in the IT departments, just ask Apple, Google and Nokia how hard it is to break Blackberries strangle hold in the enterprise.
So Microsoft it is time to pony up and buy Blackberry. At the current valuation of around $40 billion it would be a stretch but you could probably handle it, in fact you could use that money that you earmarked to by Yahoo a few years ago for it.
This deal would guarantee Microsoft a seat at the big boys table in mobile and help them in defending against Google.
Before I describe the service I have to talk about the name. I am not one to throw stones about bad names, I did have a company called SimulScribe. A few days ago someone asked me if I used Tungle, my first reaction was what I do in my private life is private… when I realized that it was a scheduling service I loosened up a bit.
Anyway I have tried a lot of these online scheduling services in the past like, TimeBridge, jiffle, Scheduly, Doodle, MeetingMade for putting together conference calls and meetings. So far I have hated almost all of them. I typically find them to be a pain to use and that it would have just been easier to chat directly with the people to make a time to chat.
Tungle.me is the first one that really has me excited about the time scheduling space. The site is simple, clean and easy, exactly what you need for something like this. Try it the next time you have a few people to schedule a call with and see how you like it.
This space is a interesting one to follow as I believe there will always be a need for a third party aggregation system to take in all of the calendar feeds and other info like Tungle is trying to do.
The controversy over the gold medal in the figure skating event in the Olympics is a good example of this. A Russian skater, ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=10f28b4d-e8c3-42ad-b4e7-f638c7c2104b)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=c9138688-9b5e-4921-bce0-74b419a013dd)
Yesterday was the first time I was on a real conference call with a 3rd party where every participant used PoketyPoke. There were 5 people on the call and everyone came in at the same time. For those who do conference calls, you know that with 5 people this never happens.
Also in reality the Windows Phone operating system already exists, it is just not owned by Microsoft, the ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=cd9a93ae-7673-4e41-b4b4-9944f66e11be)
