Troubled Startup Color Loses Cofounder Peter Pham | Hacker News Reader

Troubled Startup Color Loses Cofounder Peter Pham

techcrunch.com

184 pointstbgvi94 comments

I would love a chance to see the Color founders doing office hours with pg! Or even just pgbot. I can see it now:

  Color guy:  We're building an app that lets you share photos with   
  your mobile phone, with people within 100 feet of you, but it uses 
  your social graph to make sure you see stuff you're interested in.

  pgbot:  WTF?

  Color guy:  I mean, it lets you share pictures that you just took, and   
  people within 100 feet of you will see that you just shared a picture.

  pgbot:  What problem does this solve? If they're 100 feet away, 
  wouldn't they have seen the same thing you saw, or even taken the 
  same picture anyway?

  Color guy: You don't get it, it's mobile... pictures and mobile, 
  together.  Like peanut butter and chocolate.

  pgbot:  Who wants this?

  Color guy:  Well, erm, I mean, erm, that is, aaahhh... um, you 
  know... like, um, aaaghh... well... uhhrrmmmm... college kids.  And 
  hipsters.  And hipster college kids. 

  pgbot: You mean the two classes of people least likely to either A. have 
  money, or b. spend money, unless it's on cheap beer, crappy clothes, 
  or Apple hardware?

  Color guy: But, but...  

  pgbot: Who's going to pay for this?

  Color guy:  Aaaah, well, you see... aaah... umm....

  pgbot: I worry, I worry...

I find strawmen to be tasteless and unimaginative. I am not sure their idea has merit, but I would like to hear the supposed merit from their mouths.

I would too, and hopefully they'll post in this thread. In the meantime, or if they don't, I find it rather amusing to imagine how an interaction with the Color guy and pgbot would go. YMMV.

I don't see why you think that's how an interaction would go. Do you assume you have them all figured out, and they have nothing new to tell you that you haven't thought of?

Of course not. I think you're taking this way too seriously. It was an imagination of how an interaction might go, with a dash of hyperbole mixed in, designed to both amuse, and make reference to pg's flair for directing people to focus on those important, fundamental questions like "Who needs this" and "what problem does this solve?"

Color may yet turn out to be wildly successful, I don't know... I'm no fortune teller. <shrug />

I'm with you. $41MM or no, Pham is still an entrepreneur trying to build something he believes in. In that sense, he's no different than many here. It sucks to leave something you tried so hard at, something you believed in. Some ideas work out, most don't.

If they had something new to tell us, you'd hope they'd have done it by now via the product. Time's 'a wastin'.

satire != strawman.

Well... no. I'd say satire is strawman expressed as art.

Sequoia should definitely hire pgbot to keep them from making blunders like this.

All joking aside, imagine if pg did try and build a real expert system combined with a chat-bot style interface, that could represent his expertise. He could probably sell access to something like that for a few bucks.

Who wants this?

um, you know... like, um, aaaghh... well... uhhrrmmmm... college kids. And hipsters. And hipster college kids.

Didn't the AI winter teach us that rules-based expert systems can only get you so far?

I can just see pgbot turning down Google because its founders were too weakly committed - they wanted to sell the whole thing for <$1M and go back to their grad studies.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that no one could have predicted the success of Google simply by looking at the founders and what they had at the time.

It was their 2nd invention---highly relevant advertisement that made them an explosively profitable company.

But some people did - Andy Bechtolsheim, David Sheriton, Ram Shriram, Ron Conway, Sequoia & KPCB. And given their track record on other investments, I don't think this was due to pure chance.

I'd posit that people like the investors mentioned above have a highly intuitive "pattern matching" system for finding promising startups. The lack of any one quality won't disqualify a startup; rather, they can unconsciously evaluate the whole startup as a package and decide whether it's likely to be a winner.

Hence, the win of probabilistic AI systems over rule-based ones.

I think you overestimate the prescience of these investors. They are probably very good at increasing their chances by investing in a lot of stuff and letting the winners run.

All you had to do was use it, and you were hooked. As to the eventual size of Google, maybe not. As to the product, yes.

(And that might be a lesson to those guestimating future valuations.)

They did invest in YC.

Sorry for the ignorance but could you please explain what is pgbot? I searched in google but could not find a reasonable explanation.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598026

Hilarious, thanks! Sounds like an interesting project to do just for kicks.

pg = Paul Graham, pgbot = Paul Graham AI program that would answer like he would in a YC interview

Thanks! I imagined it was something like that but I wasn't sure.

I see the value prop though. At parties, weddings, events etc, where you'd likely be in a picture, you'd wanna see what everyone else shot.

Haven't you been to a party where everybody took pics and you couldn't wait till they uploaded the pics on FB or something to see what they shot?

Honestly, I'm not a very photo oriented person, and I despise having my picture taken (I'm always blinking, or have one eye half open or am making a stupid face, or something right when the shutter clicks)... so it's not something that I personally would get much out of.

That said, I think you're right... for some people it does have value. Whether or not it has enough value, and an accompanying business model, to build a successful business, is TBD.

I think people are mistakenly equating "poor exection" with "bad idea".

And come on, your pictures don't come out THAT bad: http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20071126170543/uncyclo...

It might be slightly useful but I can't see myself ever paying for the opportunity to see the photos a few hours before they'd appear on FB. So it might be slightly useful to some people, but that's hardly a business model.

Twitter?

Are you paying for Facebook now? How is that even relevant?

What? He didn't say anything about paying for Facebook. He was speaking about Color.

And Color costs the same amount as Facebook.

Its relevant because the question is not whether you should pay money but whether color can make money on you.

If you are not paying for the product you are the product.

You're paying with your time, which you're wasting. And that is much more precious than money.

> "Haven't you been to a party where everybody took pics and you couldn't wait till they uploaded the pics on FB or something to see what they shot?"

yes, but I'm at the party for the party - I have no intention of spending the entire party staring into my smartphone and living vicariously through the pictures of the lives of people ten feet away from me.

This isn't necessarily true.

Have you seen how much people spend, and how much trouble they go to for wedding photos?

But typically those are taken with SLRs, which still take better pictures than phones or point & shoots, especially in low light. Plus they are still the only way (with a big lens) to get the shallow depth of field that people like.

Wedding photos are still admired after the fact. There still isn't a use case for "hmm, I wonder what images people are taking within a 100' radius of me!".

There is a use case for, "I wonder what images were taken within 100' of me!"

If the app is on, and tracking photos that were taken, then can resolve it after the fact (and get those photos), I think a lot of people would be interested.

Wouldn't that be in Facebook's territory? i.e., "Hey Facebook, I took these pictures at Bob's wedding. Based on the geotag, can you show me other pictures from nearby at the same time?"

It seems convoluted (not to mention a gigantic drag on your battery life) to do so on each and every device in real-time.

Not quite the use case I was considering.

Your phone knows where you were, when. And says, "Here is where I was, what pictures were taken around me?" I want this information regardless of whether I was personally taking pictures.

Keeping a history of where you are can be done without much drain on your battery life. It can just log a location every few minutes.

Is location really the key piece of data differentiating "pictures from Bob's wedding" from "the universe of pictures", though? I would think some concept of tagging that went beyond mere location would be far more useful.

80% of the time (walking down the street, sitting in my office, etc.), I don't care about pictures that were taken around me. For the 1% of the time that I DO care, I can probably easily name the thing that I want to see pictures of. Location is perhaps a handy filter for "tags that might be important to me", but it's hardly the sole determiner, or even a major factor, in whether any given picture will be one that's interesting to me.

The point is that if you, say, go to a conference, you want to see the random pictures that strangers snapped which you might be in.

And what is the chance that random stranger is using Color? 0.000001%. So why don't you just walk over there and ask him to send you a copy? Social networking at its finest, in real time, at a conference.

Taken on phone cameras?

I have a phone camera and a fairly nice, if not exactly pro, DSLR. I'd never consider taking anything remotely important on the phone; the quality difference is enormous.

Just because you have access to the pictures does not mean you must consume/view them immediately. If many folks are taking pics, I might want to glance every once in a while at what might be going up on FB tomorrow (people, especially women, are very socially conscious, and FB has become the de facto personal brand management tool).

Or if I know someone is closer to the action. Or someone took a picture of me and my wife, or a bunch of people took a bunch of pictures in a group shot. At the game someone might have better seats, at school teenagers could go to town with this.

I think they had a great idea that helped them get $141 million from some of the biggest names in the VC world, but bungled execution badly.

No I've never felt like that at a party. What's the point of being at the party if you're going to spend half the time with your smart phone in front of your face looking at pictures someone took 10ft away? It just seems completely lame and pointless.

To be honest though, it seems that young people are doing just that.

(I'm 31 so an old geezer and I don't know wtf these crazy kids nowadays all do exactly, it's just that when I walk back from my office to home through the bar area in my city, I see many people frolicking about with their phones, taking pictures and doing things with it that suggest it's more than just sms'ing. Also I sometimes see small groups of people standing together, each of them doing things on their phones. It's surreal to me, but if that's how they use their phones...)

There's a certain amount of novelty in seeing what pictures other people took who were once standing where you were. Imagine seeing what your neighbourhood looked like 50 years ago.

Now, whether or not Color is the best place for that to happen, I don't know.

If I want to see pictures taken by other people of a particular location I just use this:

http://www.geograph.org.uk/

On that wedding note... http://blogmaverick.com/2010/09/10/the-fan-experience-at-spo...

What are you going to do? Stand up at the mic and say "They're a wonderful couple aren't they? Congratulations. Now, could you all please start up the Color photo sharing app on your smartphone, or download it from the Apple App Store or Android Marketplace if you don't already have it? I'd like to see the pictures you are taking RIGHT NOW. Thanks."

> Haven't you been to a party where everybody took pics and you couldn't wait till they uploaded the pics on FB or something to see what they shot?

During the party? No. Never. And I go to a fair share of events and weddings.

Normally at parties, we eat, talk, have fun, take pictures for later, take videos, dance, dance some more, drink, drink some more, run after the kids, eat, dance, and talk.

I'm not staring at my phone hoping that someone sitting at the other table across from me or across the room is going to share a picture of an even I just saw from another angle.

Now, let's say we are at an event where I'm not with people I know. Rather, I'm with a few friends or family, and we are doing things. Again, we'll be doing things. Taking pictures, videos, and doing things. Having fun. I'm probably not staring at my phone hoping someone uploads something at the even I'm currently attending. To show me something I could have seen if I wasn't staring at my phone.

I could meet this person. They obviously have the same interest as me: the event, where many other people are. The only other similar interest we share is that we both are using the same mobile app. Oh, and we also prefer looking at our phone rather than hang with our friends.

Or we are there alone trying to make friends. So yeah, I think I found the arget market that would get the most use out of it.

People without friends interested in going to events, not actually participating in them, but taking pictures in between staring at their mobile phone waiting for someone else to take a picture as well. And maybe meeting up. And talking about the app.

Maybe I"m just getting old.

It's a safe bet that if you can't articulate the position you're arguing against, you don't understand it well. That could mean it's such a crazily dumb idea that you would never have thought of it, but it could also mean that they're much smarter than you.

For what it's worth, I have no idea what their plan is, either.

Here's the thing, if you have no idea what their plan is, is it your fault for not understanding it or their fault for not articulating it well? I submit the pgbot scenario provides a third alternative: people can't understand their plan because it makes no freaking business sense.

And whatever that original plan was, I'd bet the pitch didn't include a PowerPoint slide point along the lines of "Two months after we go public, the president leaves and sales really take off!"

I can't possibly be the only one that read your text in a pitch perfect Paul Graham voice, can I?

This fictional talk reminds me of Joey Spolsky's article on "architecture astronauts", people trying to solve a non-existant problem for pure geek pleasure.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html

I admit it must be one of the coolest app to work on these days: it has geotagging, social graphs, it's mobile, but it's hard to see a real use, yes.

I am reminded of the late George Carlin...

"Can anyone explain to me the need for one-hour photo finishing? You just saw the fuckin' thing!"

I noticed today Color have removed the notice on their office that they'd like fellow denizens of Palo Alto to stop by and give feedback.

They've also turned off the projectors showing pictures from the app on their front windows. Very quiet at their office at the moment.

Maybe this is the sort of thing Color would be good for -- monitoring what changes within a 100 foot radius of an office building, scanning faces for lawyers, accountants, M&A people, etc. This the stock market may actually pay for!

The thing that worried me is that the founder said they didn't launch at SXSW because he wasn't a fan of conferences. It was on within a few days of launch and seems like the perfect proof of concept for it. When you have just been funded for so much who cares about your personal preference.

Either that or you need some kind of exclusivity in niches to build a critical mass of users like Facebook with colleges. Google Wave was a great case for the path color has gone down not working, people getting into the app, not seeing anyone else to interact with and forgetting about.

Even having a fake persona in it that you can delete, just to give people a feel for how the app works would be better than what they have now.

Actually, they didn't even know about SXSW.

Wait, what? SXSW is so hip and popular it's no longer hip and popular. It's been written up in Parade Magazine for fucks sake.

Is it just me or does Arrington sound like he got snubbed by color somehow? Did they not show the proper respect through the usual startup TC story begging or deny him an investment opportunity? I know a lot of the community is unimpressed with color and I'm certainly not some big fan, but to me he sounds as petty and bitter as when they run the "yet another yahoo fuck up" gloating stories.

Agreed. In fact, he's seemed a bit negatively opinionated lately in general.

He's probably bored as hell, just waiting for the day when he can cash out the last pile of chips and do something else.

What else could he possibly do? He is the kevin rose of tech blogging. A one trick pony.

He is the non-technical co-founder nobody wants or needs.

Why so disparaging? He's more successful than most silicon valley engineers ever will be, he can do whatever the hell he wants. Go raise emus or whatever strikes his fancy.

Maybe he has just been around long enough to realise theft when he sees it...

(Yes, I know they didn't get the whole $41m up front.)

Theft from whom? Presumably the investors who paid them $41M did more due diligence and know more about the company than any of us.

It's possible that this was a bad investment decision, but it certainly isn't theft.

Some startups manage to get on Arrington's wrong side and he goes Perez Hilton on them.

This startup might have gotten too much investment at the wrong time but it is built by the same type of hard-working and brilliant people that apply to Ycombinator, only they had a good track record and contacts with more traditional venture capitalists. I'd like more in depth analysis than shallow criticism because there's as much and maybe more wealth in information that could be gained from what went wrong with their plan.

It's fun to bash something, but I think Color has a lot of chances left. They have a rockstar team and the money to support themselves for several years. Their current product isn't very good, but it's a mistake to write them off or call them "troubled" this early.

Color was a nice way to relive the life and death of Cuil.

From the box about Peter Pham at the bottom of the article:

Currently is the Co-Founder and President of Color.

I understand it can be difficult to keep these things up to date, but at least make sure it doesn't contradict the article it's posted on!

It's techcrunch.

This was expected. I like the idea of a proximity-based social network but the problem is that they didn't do a good job presenting it that way and they were overshadowed by a very negative launch to the tune of 40+ million dollars. Set up to fail from the very beginning.

Color will burn through it's funding and declare bankruptcy in 24 months or less. Anyone want the under?

I find it hard to believe that anyone will lend them money in the next 24 months, so I'll take the over.

Seriously though, how is one expected to deploy that much cash so quickly with something so new and experimental? I can't help but feel there's more to the story.

The only reasonable explanation I can come up with is that they were going to go the service -> API -> platform -> advertiser platform -> data mining -> $$$ route. Or something like that.

I don't know. Burning $40 million for a new venture takes a special kind of ignorance and incompetence when you're surrounded by shaking heads from all corners.

Sequoia believed in them. Maybe they haven't opened the bag of tricks yet. It's too early to write them off.

In 1999 that was normal

Sure, but how much did a GB of RAM, a GB of bandwidth, a Ghz of CPU, and the code to run a basic service on it cost?

All those dollars aren't for equipment or even for salaries, they're likely for marketing/advertising in order to do a big rollout in the already crowded world of mobile social networks.

Further supporting my point. In 1999 you needed millions in the bank just to get the product ready for prime time, and competition was thin. In 2011 you got everybody and their 19-year-old college dropout brother pursuing a lean startup using free open source tools on bargain-basement hosting that can support tens of thousands of users for less than a 1-bedroom rent.

Raising 41m for a mobile app pre-launch is just too many eggs in one basket IMHO. Obviously this has tainted everyone's views of Color, and maybe they actually need the money and have a solid strategy, and I won't lie and say I'm not a little envious of their fundraising power, but mustering all the objectivity I can, I just can't get behind the strategy. Putting that kind of money in the bank on day 1 just drains the hustle right out of the team.

Aeron chairs and tricked out Mac dev systems aren't exactly cheap these days.

$40 million will buy Aeron chairs and tricked out Mac dev systems for >8,000 people.

It seems much more likely that they'll return a big portion of that to Sequoia.

They pulled the Android app from the market and it has not returned. Odd.

It was really, really terrible, but you would have thought that it could have been fixed up by now...

I am still wondering why there is no explanation for this. It's been a couple months since it left the market.

I'll skip how half-baked and confusing their app was, and go to an implication of the idea.

Color relies on having groups of people and really works best in a crowded area. Heck, it relies on two or more people using the app at the same time in an area. I can see it working great at concerts, but it seems to fail at the night out with friends and one person taking shots.

It also seems that it is the opposite of Facebook for rural users. Facebook or Twitter allows people to connect over great distances and see things far away. Me taking photos on Color during my road trip seems like a huge mismatch. It just seems like it cannot be "the goto service", and that makes it vulnerable to never being used.

Lastly, let's assume there was no Twitter at the time of the US Airways Flight 1549 (Hudson plane water landing) and Color was it. Would the wave of information been different? Does that matter to Color?

I don't take any merriment in the fact that things are not going well for another entrepreneur, so I hope they turn things around. I think it's time to pivot. Get over the mode of trying to appear to hipsters who sit around the bar looking at their phones and do something that regular people will enjoy. And this time don't take shortcuts; no more deals like they did with the british paper to have a special page of Color photos from the royal wedding. Go viral this time, win it because people genuinely enjoy what you're doing.

The problem is not necessarily because Color didn't get traction. Entrepreneurs have a great deal of patience and will try different things. My reading is that there is some kind of disagreement over direction (either with the other founder or investors), and Peter decided he had already made enough F* money from his previous venture he's going to walk.

Arrington is clearly enjoying this.

Who all want to say , I told you so ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com