Sequoia To Color Labs: Not Since Google Have We Seen This
blogs.wsj.com
blogs.wsj.com
I'm sorry, but this is the biggest line of bullshit I've seen in a while. Here's the thing: no one saw Google early on. Google happened, more or less, organically. They implemented a better algorithm and gained a lot of users by providing better results.
Color appears to be Instagram + location awareness. Awesome. I can't wait to use it, but to call it "Google" is just ridiculous.
I'm skeptical that this product is even going to be a success -- if I'm 150' from someone, why not just walk over to them, snap a group photo, and post it to my Twitter/Facebook/Whatever -- and even more skeptical that someone like Facebook won't clone the idea, roll it out to their 500 million users. Instagram already supports location detection. How long until "near me" shows up as a feed option?
Here's the real rub. Currently, there are 143 one & two-star reviews in the App Store. There are 49 four & five-star reviews. That's not good. Anyone claiming this is the next Google is either straight up lying to generate interest (It's the Next Google!™) or has no idea what they're talking about.
In short, dont be so hasty to judge.
Part of $41mm is because of the team, but I'm betting most of the money is because of the long term, ambitious vision they have for it. But to get there, they have to release a decidedly short term vision product and build from there. This is probably just the launching pad.
But still, $41mm before any sort of traction or any proof of a userbase is really crazy
The infrastructure of Facebook and YouTube and Twitter could be replicated by a small team of smart developers in a matter of months, probably costing only a few million dollars. The only thing they have going for them is network effects, which are less powerful than we think when there is a viable competitor (e.g. MySpace being overtaken by Facebook).
Twitter might still not have a viable business model, but they can experiment (now that they have a huge user base and data) and try to find one. While its not easy and obvious at times to find a viable business model, just reaching the sheer distribution scale as Twitter's is a huge hurdle in itself that very few incumbents will ever reach.
Maybe it's just cause I live in SF.
Also, keep in mind the context of the quote.. it's not referring to the current state of the product. There's probably a lot more we haven't seen from this article.
"They told us that every 10 years or so a company and a marketplace and an opportunity come together that’s transformative"
What if you're all at a concert taking pictures of the band and crowd? Or you're at the beach and many people are taking pictures of the same beautiful sunset? You now have access to multiple photos without having had to coordinate with the strangers around you.
It actually seems like a somewhat compelling tool for capturing events.
> Currently, there are 143 one & two-star reviews in the App Store. There are 49 four & five-star reviews.
My guess is a lot of angry geeks, since they're all who know about it so far.
Actually I think it's the fact that the app seems to be a buggy POS according to a large number if people. I think there are a lot of people in the startup/geek world who aren't happy with the extremely high valuation and the all the hoopla around them, but I doubt they would sabotage their app rating intentionally.
However, I think most of the people who know about Color are hackers and startup junkies, who all seem to have a negative inclination towards using it. So it still wouldn't surprise me if the bad reviews were overwhelming from that crowd.
... Google Wave, that is
The integration of all the sensors and data to automatically determine your connections and maintain it for you with no work could be huge! Don't be fooled by the fact that it started with photos - that's a convenient vector to start with and fuel growth, but there's nothing stopping them from hooking into phone and sms messages to make the implicit social connections more robust.
I'm not bullish on Color, but I'd take Color with $41M over Path, Instagram, or any of a zillion other sites with their raise. They have a huge chicken-and-egg problem, but isn't that what the money is good for?
This just made me think that Color's best use of that money is using 10M to pay 1M people 10 bucks to use their app for a week.
Then there's the problem voiced elsewhere that intentionally collating all that data is just a bit too creepy, and I say that as someone who couldn't care less about Facebook privacy settings and thinks CCTV in public places is generally a good idea.
Can 9 women produce a baby in one month?
I'm as skeptical as anyone about this insane valuation, but I don't see your analogy applying here.
If they keep getting killed in their App Store reviews, no amount of employees or money will speed up adoption.
Businesses can certainly scale with more people. But this isn't a business, and to loosely paraphrase Andy Bechtolsheim at startup school this year, throwing money at problems is lazy, you should be throwing minds at problems. $41M in the bank will almost certainly be harmful at this stage of Color's development.
Also, even $41M is not going to (noticeably) speed up the surrounding ecosystem.
It is well established that certain work scales almost linearly with more people. But it is also well known that a lot of other types of work do not at all scale when you throw more people in. Usually it is intellectual tasks, like programming or turning a startup into a profitable business, that don't scale well.
Try reading the mythical man month.
There is some limiting rate for iteration...
I'm really surprised that Color is using Sequoia's brand for PR on WSJ, Techcrunch without ensuring that what users see on Android is not just plain awful.
I was / am really excited for this product, but this seems like a botched launch to me. Thoughts? Would it have been better for Color to delay launch? Will this have a negative impact on Color's brand? Sequoia's brand? Or will Color simply fix the Android app after a few iterations and provide a better and better user experience in true startup fashion?
working to build out the infrastructure necessary to
manage photos and videos **from what it hopes** will be
hundreds of millions of users.
They've been tricked by their investors that they've already succeeded. That they already have won the market for photosharing apps, yet all they have is a domain name, a crummy unfinished product and a lot of PR. How can they possibly NOT get those millions of users with this kind of marketing hype and capital?
I've installed the app and still don't get it.
I have no idea what problem does it solve?
I've seen http://view.io during SXSW - didn't work that well (not many people were using it). Concept was very similar - pictures of interesting things near you taken by other people with some descriptions. Nobody was declaring this app the next google.
Social network for mobile phones that is the next big thing???? I'm sorry but I don't buy this. Facebook will clone this using their location service + photo sharing functionality and there you go. 41mlnUSD down the drain.
$41M, I can clearly see how that would fund a face/shape/... recognition engine, reconstruct some 3D models from the images and then play with them.
Frankly the iPhone app just seems to me like a cheap way for them to get a bigger image dataset and begin telling users that all their photos will be public anyway.
> Color Labs Inc. founder Bill Nguyen visited the Dow Jones office in New York last week to talk about a big new idea backed by a $14 million round of funding.
Later, the story says:
> With Sequoia’s $25 million, $9 million from Bain Capital and $7 million in venture debt from Silicon Valley Bank, Color has closed a $41 million round of Series A funding before its product is even available in an app store.
Per TC yesterday & the WSJ in the same article, it's a $41M round.
[edit]
The author writes in the comments:
> Ty McMahan wrote: @Frank – The had secured only $14M as of last week. Sequoia came in with an additional $25M and SVP added $2M more.
My version: "Color" + "PhotoSynth" = "OMG-level 3D world modeling"
Hype a critical mass of interest, throw a lot of CPU cycles at the data, port the results to Google Earth ... yow.
How revolutionary is this? Meh.
Sequoia is just talking their book to the greater fool. Nothing out of the ordinary here.