You mean bigger impact than working together with the #1 website in the past and the #2 of the moment ?
I fail to see how he could possibly hope to achieve that.
I fail to see how he could possibly hope to achieve that.
I think Lars could get funding from just about any investor in the valley, if he wanted to start a new venture. But Norvig said it best (paraphrasing): "If you want to accomplish interesting things, go where the data is." Right now, FaceBook has one of the most interesting data sets on the planet, possibly rivaling Google's. If Lars wanted to replicate that, he needs to build a product that's useful enough to convince everybody to give him their data. That's non-trivial. It's easier just to join a company that already owns the data and then figure out interesting things to do with it.
I suppose you could have something like the PC revolution, where the industry was still based around manipulating data, but the data lives on your personal property. But that ship has sailed: personal computers have been available for 35 years, so pretty much all applications that rely on one person's data being manipulated in isolation by themselves have already been discovered. The interesting work now is when you collect patterns of data among many users, and that requires that many users be willing to give you their data.
You say it like our personal information is the only data in town.
Of course, any app needs data, but it can be anything.
Personally, the major reason I'm still interested in startups is because I haven't yet succeeded at one. It's the challenge that's the thrill. There's a whole lot of bullshit that goes along with that, though, and if I already had a major success under my belt, I'd be more than happy to go work for the hot flavor-of-the-decade company where I can spend my time innovating and let someone else deal with the bullshit.
I'm sure Lars is well-off as he is, but my understanding is that an order-of-magnitude more money is a real possibility.