As a VC, how is a $41 million investment in Color justified? | Hacker News Reader

As a VC, how is a $41 million investment in Color justified?

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35 pointspclark31 comments

I really enjoyed Yishans answer if for no other reason than it was positive about Color.

I wish Hacker News members, who have zero vested interest in other people's startups, would be a bit more optimistic when it comes to publishing comments. Between Color, and various YC startup launches here - the place feels rather mean spirited, frankly.

Not mean spirited; realistic.

You can't call it realistic unless you know what the investors know. I have a hard time thinking that Color could be so amazing that it warrants such a huge early investment, but it's not realistic for me to say that Sequoia wasted their money because I don't know what they know.

You don't need all the details to be unimpressed by creepy data mining operations.

I think I understand where you're coming from, but I don't think people you are referring to are the mean spirited haters you make it seem. I think people are just curious and are honestly just trying to figure out what is so ridiculously special about Color that they were able to raise that much money.

I don't think it helps anything that they've had tons of press and the only things that have come up are 1) Bill Nguyen is awesome 2) they recreated some technology from the Dark Knight. If Bill's such an awesome leader, and they have 27 awesome people, and $41M, why is the app still horrible (interface, experience, data mining, etc.) at launch?

I'd honestly be happy for them if it takes off and it's the next big thing. And Sequoia usually gets it right, so I think everyone's just curious to know what's so great about this company and this app. But, we just aren't convinced yet.

We have a vested interest in their product because we were supposed to be it's users. Our optimism has been replaced with pessimism when they were honest about what their product does and why they created it(data mining). We're not mean spirited. We're frank and honest.

People on HN have no problem being optimistic. I was optimistic when I tried the product. I spent a good hour or so with several people on several devices in different locations using the app. We encountered problems, no instructions, confusing UI, the inability to see photos from users you were sitting next to, and in general we all felt that there was no useful feature in the app. We didn't get the app, then when we heard about the $41M in funding... we REALLY didn't get the app.

Speaking for myself, my comments were based on my experiences of using their product, the information they released to the press and my opinions based on the words of their employees. I don't think anyone could ask for much more from a group like HN.

Thank you. All this negative criticism about Sequoia's investment is kind of like berating a friend for buying a project house. It might need work, it might be a failure, it might be a success. Let's just all sit back and enjoy the ride, whatever it may be.

So first, I don't get the analogy of Sequoia as a friend in this scenario. Especially when the project house is a data mining application.

Second, I found it difficult to enjoy the ride when the product, as released, was buggy and difficult to understand in both UI and user proposition.

Sorry, that was probably a bad analogy. Either way, the ride can be enjoyed as a bystander. If you don't like it, don't use it. I totally agree that the UI is so unusable I uninstalled the app, but I am still interested in seeing how things turn out.

I agree. It's kind of a bummer.

That said, they set themselves up for it-- I'm amazed that (through a combination of common sense and user-testing) they couldn't anticipate the backlash. They should have either launched something that amazed/delighted users or stayed stealthy until they could. A private beta, some user testing, and a survey or two should've alerted them that they had an app that would confuse/alienate users. The funding or 2-star offering wouldn't have resulted in this kind of backlash alone, but together... Ugh.

They've now got years of runway-- Here's hoping the hole they've dug is small compared to the mountain they're going to climb.

This seems reasonable, except that the #1 rule of investing is that past performance does not guarantee future results.

If the team is so great and VCs are investing in the team, then why is the UI/usability of Color so bad?

I think the reason startup people are so down on Color is that they believe that $41M distributed among many different startups would be better for the tech ecosystem/community as a whole, resulting in more innovation and progress than a single photo sharing app.

I am not sure your opinion on the #1 rule of investing applies to Venture Capital considering the primary focus is on the team. Mind you, perhaps this is a reason as to why Venture Capital on the whole has been less than stellar at times.

I believe what happened to Color is that they got tunnel vision on their ideal environment for their product, ad optimised around that - rather than the initial user experience. Specifically, I mean they were using Color around dozens of other users, whereas most new users today use it in their bedroom miles from a second user - so a lot of the UI elements are confusing when no additional data is avaliable. People do make mistakes.

I highly doubt that real "startup people" are that socialist (ie. we should distribute Seqouia et al.'s $41M among many 2-3 person startups vs. a single team of ~30 people).

> $41M distributed among many different startups would be better for the tech ecosystem/community as a whole

In what ways? How would that be true? It's a free market - you get what you can get. You can argue fb doesn't deserve its valuation either, but there doesn't seem to be same amount of disbelief and schadenfreude-seeking.

For the Love of GOD who cares about how much money Color raised. It was nice to hear about, oh..the first 4 times here.

Deleting the huge rant I just typed up.

Anyone want to throw in ideas on why Color is such a hot topic? I might be a little blind to it due to my attitude reading it on here so many times.

Because they have done what (almost) everyone on here wants to do, get funding for their idea. The fact that the idea is "obvious" and "simple" means everyone can bike shed [1] it to death.

[1] http://bikeshed.com/

Everyone whose on this "are we still talking about color" thing is starting to get on my nerves. Theres still LOTS of mileage in it - more write ups, VC opinions, yada yada.

Its how the world works. They just raised $41m, one of the largest pre-launch rounds. Expect to hear about them.

Saying "are we still talking about color" doesn't make you cool. Nobody cares if your "over it because your so hooked in to the tech scene".

If you don't want to read about it, don't click on the link.

If there's something insightful to say, sure. But the bubble/not-bubble, talented-team/questionable-product, smart-VCs/dumb-VCs, can't-use-$41m/can-use-$41m debates don't seem to be getting anywhere, as far as I've seen. Not just that it's repetitive, but that none of the discussions, even if they were the first and only one you saw, has a lot of substance. They all seem to be some combination of ridicule and "it's not worth ridiculing but maybe is good" defensiveness, with both sides mostly based on speculation rather than any solid facts.

Am I missing the insightful writeups where this case study can help me learn something about either technology or the technology business? I click to the HN discussion in hopes of finding such things!

This particular writeup said a lot about the strategies Sequoia could be using to protect themselves which I hadn't seen in previous discussions.

I see a lot of similarity between the Color discussions and anything written about Fukushima; a small number of facts are being drawn together to produce wide-reaching conclusions. It is a lot less interesting to say "we don't know all the facts so lets just wait and see how this turns out". These days I find it much harder to find people who are undecided about a topic - everything is polarising.

Because a lot of people on here have a vested interest in it.

Way to go on missing the point. I did ask 'Why' is it such a hot topic.

I was hoping to get a little more of a response about my question than my comment. I didn't want to discount the buzz color is creating.

My thoughts were, I'm not Color, It's not the last ever VC deal in the world(I hope)...and most important, It's not helping me debug this FPGA I'm working on =P.

I was thinking I might be able to get good idea from some of the comments...

Anyone want to throw in ideas on why Color is such a hot topic?

Seems to me a mixture of envy and schadenfreude.

Simple:

(1) spend 30M acquiring bunch of high-usage apps with lil revenue

(2) collect anon user data

(3) license / sell data to ad firms on ad exchanges and more

Most of HN has no idea how crazy the ad exchange business is because they are pretty tightly controlled and require high minimums to play. I wouldn't know if I didn't have a brother working inside day to day.

Suffice to say, there is a flourishing market where anon user data is bought and sold for millions to improve ad targeting.

One great example is rapleaf. When they launched, I was like "meh, another reputation management co." Turns out they are doing alright doing what I describe here. Yet if you simply judged them when they launched or from their consumer front they put up, you'd never know.

A good time to mention the NAI Opt-Out page:

http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp

On the topic of opting out, I personally like that the ads have become a lot more targeted in the past year or so.

Especially the re-targeting stuff...I'd much rather see ads for products I already have some level of interest in than the days of random punch-the-monkey and drugstore.com ads.

Sequoia invested in youtube and it turned out very well for them. Color is more likely the next youtube instead of next facebook.

I haven't tried Color yet, but from what I have read it makes it dead easy to share photos and form social groups. Remember the real breakthrough of youtube was you click on a link and the video starts playing, it was and still is the most hassle free way of watch videos, there were no codecs to download, no heavy flash pages to load just fast and easy. People like easy and Color is making it easy to share photos and form social groups.

About $41 million, yes that is high but now the company can go to work instead of worrying about the next round of financing.

Slightly off topic, but if you're ever somehow lacking for great reading material, just read yishan wong's other answers on quora. Lots of insight, not just about startups, and often hilariously entertaining.

I just submitted a story where you can see a video of Color in action: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2376602

The UX is better once you have a lot of people using it. I can see how it's useful if you're at a concert, basketball game, or any other event.

TL;DR: Sequioa is awesome and invests after due deliberation. Color's next release is going to fix UI issues.

Can anyone name a situation where a company received record funding or major pre-release hype and wasn't heavily criticized for it?

I can see why groups like KickStarter chose to have their funding stay silent while they grew.

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