Firespotter, a Google Ventures funded incubator

"Firespotter isn’t an incubator. We aren’t looking for ideas or teams to back. We will instead be building products that we want to use ourselves and quickly get them out into the world."[1]

[1] http://www.firespotter.com/blog

The video on their 'Contact' page is particularly well done:

http://www.firespotter.com/contact-us

The narration is a series of excerpts from the 'Wave Speech' passage in Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, written about the hippie movement in San Francisco. Apropos.

Kudos to Alex Cornell, who apparently made it.

Instead of 20% free time, it's 100% free time, and they get to own a chunk of what they make. Smart way to outsource R&D by pre-owning a stake in what could be the next big thing, without the complexities and competition of acquisition.

I think they should just build what's getting funded at the time, and not get too crazy. A fast (and better) follower mentality.

The TechCrunch article gives a lot more detail about what they're doing than their own site does:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/04/google-voice-ceo-craig-walk...

How do you guys think this actually works in a sense of equity? Google Ventures gets a stake in Firespotter. What happens if they spin-off one of their ideas into a new company? I take it Google Ventures is still involved then, right? Why invest otherwise?

There really is an unwritten law somewhere that Google must and will expand into every possible web-related business category. They look more like Yahoo and AOL to me. Jobs says it best: People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the 100 other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.