Yammer CEO predicts Silicon Valley is over | Hacker News Reader

Yammer CEO predicts Silicon Valley is over

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19 pointscolmvp10 comments

The famous "everything that can be invented has been invented" quote attributed to Charles H. Duel, a late 19th-century commissioner of the US Patent Office, is apocryphal (http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2011/01/tracing-the-quote-ev...) but remains a comically potent response to this sort of short-sighted bullshit.

There will always be new problems to solve. There will always be better solutions invented to existing problems. And solving problems experienced by a lot of people, and solving them well, will always be worth a lot of money.

I run a 20-person webapp design and development consultancy, with employees all over the US and no central office. Group communication is a constant problem for us: we use Campfire rooms for most project communication, but frequently have to drop into Skype for ad-hoc video calls. I wind up in Google Chat several times a day with employees and clients as well. Campfire is great for realtime-ish team conversations, but if you want to ask a question like "hey, anyone want to go in on a house for SXSW?" you're probably better off sending an email if you want everyone to see it and have a chance to respond. We keep a lot of company docs in Google Docs, stuff which would really be more useful in the company wiki we don't have setup currently. I could go on, but the gist is that our communication tools for project teams, the company, clients, and 1-on-1 conversations are pretty fragmented.

Theoretically Yammer should solve this problem. It doesn't. We've experimented with it in the past, and it's a poor fit in a thousand tiny ways. We're a bunch of geeks living all over the country designing and building software products, not a division at Big Co.

But, y'know, everything's been invented. ;)

Right, the market is full of point solutions that keep focusing in only one aspect of the communication problem. Sort of like UNIX command line tools: great at doing one thing, but loosely coupled with other apps you use.

Yammer is great at microblogging, falls short for the rest. Email is great for 1 to 1 messages. Campfire does chat really well. Asana or Trello do tasks. But your data still lives in a dozen places.

I started a company around the very problem you mention, trying to bring together all the tools I used, and we're now close to 250k business users. And, despite the big guns like Yammer, we're seeing our revenue double every 4 months. Take a look if you're curious, it's called Teambox (http://teambox.com) and it brings together tasks, GDocs, chat, wiki-like notes, etc.

Disclaimer, I work at Yammer.

I'm not going to plug our product's features here, but I'll say this: microblogging is not an accurate portrayal of what it is anymore, and hasn't been for at least one and a half years.

Care to elaborate on what it is? At work we looked at Yammer, some people use it and others don't. However, my impression awhile back was "great another facebook but for work". (I mean no offense to it, I am honestly interested in how you view yammer.)

The idea that big players are Borg-like (#) in their perfect ability to anticipate and assimilate all great and threatening innovations is at odds with my own experience. The current crop of behemoths may be better than their predecessors, but it's still the case that they are much slower and less efficient at deciding and doing things than startups are. They are still myopically focused on current profit centers and fraught with strategy taxes. They are still arrogant and inflexible. (At least in my experience.)

Having helped build a startup (ITA Software) up to 500 employees, I was struck by the degree to which even companies whose leadership tries to do the right thing accrue politics, time-wasting, heavyweight processes, and outright antibodies to good ideas. And don't even get me started on working with other, much bigger companies.

The cost basis argument might be right; maybe it does take more money now to get a fully-formed, defensible product to market. That's exactly the phenomenon that has lead to the consolidation of the video game business; it takes 100+ people to make a AAA title now. I don't see the same thing happening with consumer internet startups, generally though -- in fact, it seems the opposite: with iOS apps, for example, the entry cost is low, but upside is also relatively limited (compared to, say, Google).

(#) a phrase from one of David's own replies

I think he's right for the wrong reason. The Valley has gotten unimaginative, and Mr Sacks is suffering from the ambient lack of imagination.

I think there are other communities waiting in the wings, who don't yet compulsively chase VC funding and TechCrunch news cycles, who have intelligent, creative people who still have some spare time to start new projects (possibly because they are underemployed, unlike in SF where talented people all work at least 40 hours/week)

I'm not so sure.

I think of it like art and artists in the United States. It's too expensive for most artists to live in Manhattan or New York City in general, so many of them will live in places where the cost-of-living is lower. Online showcases, write-ups from art critics, social networks, and independent shows will help them show their works.

However, to continue to grow their name, New York City still has the greatest concentration of buyers, curators, dealers, etc. To get at a high level, the big cities in the world are inescapable.

Likewise, I see other places where it's more affordable to start a startup but ultimately the pool of talent are where the funders are, which is the Valley. And so when the startup hits a certain size where it needs to grow it's team, well it has to decide whether it's feasible to get people to move to their location or to move where the supply already exists.

I constantly hear has-beens saying that because of some personal experience or their general malaise about something, an entire industry/area/field is "over"

Wired wrote about the death of the internet. People write constantly about the death of websites and the rise of apps. Or about the death of hardware and the rise of software being all that matters. Or the post-computer age. Or whatever crap they're trying to hock or stock they're trying to inflate.

They're all wrong. Most of them just come off as trying to blame a changing environment for why THEY didn't succeed. In Yammer's case, it sounds more like "see, we did the right thing by cashing out and becoming a part of a giant corp, because we're just fleeing a sinking ship" rather than "we were getting out ass kicked by other social networks and this was a lifeline".

Yammer's CEO points out 4 problems:

1) Have escaped the attention of major Internet companies. 2) Cost less than $5 million (the typical seed plus series A investment) to prove and launch. 3) Be protectable from being crushed by big companies. 4) Be defensible from patent-infringement claims.

and asked "How many ideas like that are left?”

In my opinion, 1) and 2) are not a problem.

3) and 4) are the difficult ones, and they're what VCs and investment is supposed to solve - get injections of capital to grow before the big bad slow companies get you, and have money to defend yourself from lawsuits and generate your own IP.

Marc Andreesen said in his response:

"An infinite number—human creativity is limitless—which doesn't make it easy, but does mean the opportunity is unending"

Good to hear he's been assimilated into Microsoft culture so rapidly. He'll do great there.

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