RobPfeifer

Take a look at the Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley - pulls together a lot of these historical thoughts but focuses on people/texts that haven't become so popular they've lost meaning or been misappropriated.

The founder Dileep George was a founder/advisor at Numenta. I believe it was his paper on HTMs that led to its founding. He left in 2010, but curious as to how Recursive Cortical Networks differ from Numenta's product, which is moving waaay more slowly than they would like.

I think the real takeaway here is: "Email is a better marketing channel then Facebook"

Wait, her husband was "married" to a guy for 10 years before they got married? How often does that happen?

"Before his marriage to Ms. Pao, Mr. Fletcher lived in the Dakota with Hobart V. Folkes Jr., his partner of more than 10 years, according to a New York Times article in 2004 on Mr. Fletcher’s philanthropy."

Is this really true? seems like the early and late stage guys are doing pretty well raising funds. - Summit closed 2 funds with a combined 3.2bn in January - NEA is raising 2.5bn - AH raised 1.5bn - General Catalyst is raising around $500m - Accel has raised Big Data and India funds in the last year

Also from that article: "The dollars raised this year may equal or surpass 2011 levels – but the number of funds managing that capital will almost certainly be less. "

It may be true a lot of follow-on Sand Hill Series B and C guys are struggling, but a lot of them haven't generated returns in forever and should have been out of business years ago. Won't they just get replaced?

And don't founders tend to get the upper hand when capital is easiest to come by and optimism is at its highest?

I didn't see the original article in the Atlantic anywhere here which is where I heard about this first. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-poli...

It's considerably more indepth and worth reading for a fuller view. I came away from it originally thinking it was worth a shot

Most of the venture funds are actually investing the money of pension funds and university endowments, not "rich people". "Rich people" - meaning recent tech multi-millionaires are driving an increase in angel investing, but they are not who's driving these 50x revenue multiples for later stage companies. If were to give anyone credit for these multiples, it would be Facebook. They've definitely inflated the value of companies that went out before them (Zynga, Linkedin, Groupon, Pandora) and have helped push up valuations of Dropbox and others. When $100bn is your ceiling for a "private" company value, psychologically it allows for much more aggressive private valuations. And it's likely that Facebook private valuation is an extreme outlier, not a "new normal", which will lead to a boatload of companies that have their highest valuation ever before they go public.

We're working on it :)

Forecasting, pricing and marketing analytics roles are all good transitions. Lots of excel still necessary - all you really need to learn is some SQL and maybe R/SAS.

In my experience, click-through rates aren't that great and conversion is really pretty bad. I've worked at 2 decent size ecommerce companies and the CPO hasn't ever really been profitable for social media ads especially compared to Google and Bing ads. Their advertising is really more comparable to traditional display or remarketing ads at this point which are generally less efficient for marketing spend and hence less profitable for FB's customers.

3 of my top 4 as well! I would add new criterion as well

They're here: <a href="http://imgur.com/5YeNq><img src="http://i.imgur.com/5YeNq.gif title="Hosted by imgur.com" alt="" /></a>

I saved this when I came across it a while back. Also, they had $961mm in net income the year they went out

This: “My guess is that at some point the music stops and we find out that there’s not just one less chair but hundreds of thousands of less chairs, and we’ll have thousands of kids who haven’t learned anything because they’re all expecting to learn from each other,” he said."

A lot of people are going to come out of this boom with less useful experience than is commonly assumed.

One things they're missing is a major university. Not sure that would ever work in Vegas.

I've met the CEO a couple of times, and I'd say he basically brags about exploitative they are.

Have to say I'm shocked at how many tech savvy people use them. Didn't realize how convincing Danica Patrick is I guess.

Go to Buck's in Woodside for breakfast (http://www.buckswoodside.com/) and try to identify who's a VC and who's a CEO. Great rich people watching. Plus the food is good.

Does anyone have any idea how to figure out what their "energy per Pound to orbit" is and how it might compare to their competition? Would be curious as their relative efficiencies.

This is similar logic to PE and VC funds who actually look at Multiples of Money rather than IRRs. At the end of the day, turning $100mm into $700mm is meaningful even if timelines differ by a couple years.

Cody, just one note on your website - I couldn't tell at all what Famigo offers without clicking on something. Instead of having "Famigo helps families find and manage mobile games and apps" in a hover-over pop-up, have a similar tagline somewhere people can see easily.

This. The fb platform is fine for small start-ups who don't have any expectation of SLAs, or huge partners like Zynga who drive their profits or traffic. But I'm at a $600m ecommerce company and we've found their platform to be a disaster. APIs don't work, questions are answered months later by interns who know next to nothing. I know they spend a ton of money/time on it, but it's seems mostly internal facing at the moment.

Probably something similar to what's described here: http://bit.ly/qAb7nM

Perhaps they've changed their tune, but early on Zynga had a questionable ethical reputation

Would you trust FB with that data? I certainly would not. Nor would I trust ancestry.com.

Thanks - was wondering what class this matched too. Will probably do this instead of the Norvig AI class.

Reminded me of trainspotting:

"Ah wonder if anybody this side of the Atlantic has ever bought a baseball bat with playing baseball in mind. Sick Boy, "Blowing It: Deid Dugs" (Chapter 4, Story 3)"

As Sportsguy says, it's all about reps. I'm increasingly impressed but only because I've seen the money put into coaching and seen those guys since they moved to PA. He's learned well, but if your startup grows organically you get to practice (and sweat) all the way up.

And let's be honest, I know some of those guys and am amazed at how they've grown and what they've accomplished. But we're the same generation and we can do so much more. Don't forget, money is for poor people.

Open doesn't always win - check out Tim Wu's book the Master Switch. It traces the history of telephone, TV, radio, film (and the Internet, though I haven't gotten there yet). Theodore Vail and AT&T essentially created a massive closed network and David Sarnoff at RCA/NBC did the same with radio & television. They eventually lost their grip on their monopolies, but the government was involved in both. While this isn't a perfect analogy, the imperialist nature of their founders sounds familiar :)

One interesting question: If Facebook and Twitter are NBC and CBS, who will be the cable provider for social networking?

This article seems like bull shit. I mean, have you been to Woodside?