Fuck the VCs
taptaptap.com
taptaptap.com
Computers are going to become tiny things like the iPhone, and you come home, stick it in your docking station and your desktop pops up.
Apps will have to scale from very tiny screens to massive 30 inch monitors. Things, them are going to be different real soon, like the gospel singers used to sing.
Software will be deployed over the air, just like the iPhone app store.
That's why google has a phone, that's why yahoo is making YUI, that's why google allows everyone use its charts API for free. They are all trying to take control of the API for this new platform. The new world is not just internet based, it's apps built to be completely internet aware and to work with the internet all the time.
Software is changing. It's no longer about writing an FTP client and selling a few thousand copies - when you think of an always on internet, easy distribution, and location awareness, a whole new class of apps will emerge.
It's a big markets, and the business folk can see that.
Does anyone remember 1992? There were basically two huge "next big things" that were supposed to revolutionize everything. WebTV, and CD-ROM drives. Both had massive backing from the major players of the day - Microsoft, Apple, the big TV networks, hardware manufacturers.
Instead, it was the WWW that took off, and over the next 10 years, the WWW subsumed both of them. I don't think that was an accident of history. Huge game-changing innovations rarely come from big-company platforms (though they often come from hobbyists who were inspired by big-company research labs). They just have too much entrenched baggage. Instead, they come from small startups and hobby projects that have the flexibility to become what the market is demanding. The web succeeded, in a large part, because Marc Andreesen didn't listen to Tim Berners-Lee and added support for inline images even though it was totally not the way anchors and resources were supposed to work.
I've got two ideas for what that next big disruptive innovation might be. One, as Mitch Kapor suggests, might be virtual worlds. The other is microblogging, a la Twitter. Any other ideas?
But merging cell phones and computer is the start of a new line. Virtual Worlds are the start of a new line also.
Virtual Worlds are coming, but their time is still some years away. What will really kick it off will be the headtracking and motion detection software that are currently getting better and better with software. And combined with the virtual 3d thing (head tracking where 3d is approximated) and constantly cheaper big ass flat screen TVs, there is another big potential there.
The iPhone is not the game changer. It's the things that are right now being inspired by the iPhone. It's the new devices that will come up that will copy the concept but make it even cleaner, even better, even more powerful.
Are you trying to say CD-ROMs did not revolutionise everything? How much would be possible today if we were still using tapes, or swapping 12 floppies to load a 10MB game?
CDs did change computers, but they got old quick, that's all. But they still stayed longer than the internet in its current form has been around.
And then people discovered you could embed images in these documents. And you could sell stuff by listing the stuff you had for sale and having people send you money. And you could hold auctions with them, once they figured out how to let you update the page automatically. And you could upload pictures of your dog and send them to friends.
And then folks realized that you could include a scripting language on both the client and server, and let computers handle what website operators had been doing. Update webpages through a form. Let people talk to each other on forums without the webmaster getting involved. Automate those online auctions. Display your email. Search for maps and driving directions. Look for the multi-gig files that were previously available on CDs, and download them via BitTorrent.
So, microblogging. Companies are already Twittering product announcements and special promotions to customers. What if the customers could Twitter back with suggestions? What if they could buy it immediately? What if you could Twitter a picture or a song to your followers and they could listen immediately, wherever they were (isn't Pownce doing that?)? What if someone did a bot that monitors Twitter for mentions of your product, then ran some NLP on them and sent you neatly categorized suggestions for improvements? What if someone clustered Twitter users with some clique-detection algorithm and used that to segment markets?
Hot damn, I may've found my next startup idea. Or maybe I should just apply for a job at Twitter. ;-)
To me, the people who are really into twitter all seem to be the same demographic, and that's usually bad news for a technology. It's those same people who used to like Usenet and the IRC that are now using twitter.
Twitter is something that intrudes on your life, and having it does not solve any problems, it adds stuff to what you already have.
But I won't protest too much, because it's possible I'm wrong on this one. I'll just wait and see. But frankly, I still don't see how I could somehow get my mum excited about twitter, even if it had all those features you spoke about.
1. more information about you (location, etc.),
2. relevant & time based local ad inventory (e.g.: 3 pm you are in a mall near an ice-cream store and hence a free 2nd scoop coupon advertised to your phone)
3. much higher click through rates since it's more actionable and more importantly, useful i.e. ads that even hackers click on
4. In some cases might result in much higher CPM's, and a huge increase in ad volumes even for lower CPM's
So, companies like Loopt are better positioned to take on Google than say Cuil, but hey, what do I really know.
It can't even replace my internet bill because of the cost of multiple people on the plan! Where is the new competitor going to come from in a market this is so difficult to break into due to price and monopoly concerns? Without that competitor, where are the drops in prices coming from?
If you had five equally popular search engines, they wouldn't really compete prices down anyway. The number of searches (supply) would still be the same & advertisers (demand) would still be the same.
The only reason MSN & Yahoo (not to mention real obscure engines) still earn less per click is a sort of market imperfection: It's complicated & time consuming learning another system & running parallel campaigns. For an extra 5-10%, it isn't worth it for small campaigns.
Monopoly or not, they are not manipulating the market. It manipulates itself.
Your last essay was rather apt for where we're at right now (just getting into the fundraising waters), but terms like someone reputable are kind of hard to gauge -- especially in the somewhat inbred world of investment when you don't know who's buddies with whom and as such whose opinions are worthwhile. Here a lot of companies seem to be run by serial entrepreneurs, which often seem to be a little too buddied up with investors to side with first-timers when trying to shake out info about what dealing with them is like.
We just tell YC founders to ask us, and that probably is the most effective way to judge a VC: ask people who know him.
In most creative endeavors, quantity leads almost inevitably to quality.
If there is some change in technique, or some application of capital, that would let your company crank out LOTS of apps instead of a few mostly-pretty good apps, then the VC is absolutely right to suggest it. Write so many apps that you can throw away that bottom 50%, and not even notice.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney became expert songwriters by writing an incredible quantity of songs.
There are creative ways to leverage talent. What's stopping all those "mediocre" developers from building apps? I'd bet that at least 1 in 10 of them are better at it than you or they think, or at least, would be with a little practice. How do you take advantage of that?
It's up to you to know how to set up virtuous spirals, not the VC. If you can't do that, then why should they give you money?
http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-photobuckets-sale-to-fo...
To some extent I think the VC might actually be right here. I think some people get too caught up in the idea that there's a tiny minority of "great" programmers who can perform miracles, and everyone else is a mindless drone unworthy of coming anywhere near your code.
I'm not saying that all programmers are equal, but if this guy can't even find _one_ programmer in the whole of Silicon Valley that he thinks is worthy of working on his project (which appears to be an iPhone-based grocery list -- not exactly the most intellectually demanding project in the world) then he might be looking for something that doesn't exist.
I think it comes down to Ambrosia versus Microsoft. The author would prefer to produce software the way Ambrosia does. The VC prefers the Microsoft way.
Especially so if the programmer in question is a Mac/Cocoa programmer. There are few of them around, and chances are they are either working at Apple or doing their own thing.
The only impact that will have on the economy is some investors will lose some money, which happens all the time.
In Silicon Valley everyone seems to think that as long as their starting a company, that VC is always an option. But its only appropriate for a certain types of businesses (high growth, exited focused, etc). I'd put the blame as much on the entrepreneurs who can't tell the difference and not the VCs who look for trends to profit off of.
Besides, is it really that hard to stay "indie" developing iPhone apps? I don't see where the need for capital comes in the first place.
Especially if you can't even find one person that you want to hire.
The cost of development is so low compared to other types of development. I'm the lone programmer at my startup at the moment. However, I just left a team of 35 programmers trying to ship a PS3 game.
I could see maybe 4-8 programmers top on an iPhone application project. There were 9 programmers on the last Sony PSP project I worked on. VCs don't want to fund that type of development either.
They may fund an app that integrates somewhere in the cloud and also has a web interface. That's a bet that is actually big enough for them to care.
Me? I'd hear out the first caller without hesitation.
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"Agreed 100%. And oddly enough I’ve been told precisely this by two VCs! Basically:
1. “if you want to make a massive company, get VC money” 2. “if you want to make more money than 1, on similar odds, play the lotto” 3. “if you want to make money, don’t involve VCs” "
electric guitar riff