blader

Tencent is the second largest Internet company in the world, and it monetizes primarily through virtual goods, including blog themes. Chinese users don't buy software, but they do pay for online services.

A good idea well designed. Kudos!

It's no harder than "build a faddy social network thing that's slightly better than MySpace", or "build a slightly better search engine than AltaVista" to other untrained eyes, I guess.

Executing on this idea as successfully as they have is far from easy.

It's pretty clear to me that if I were to Google for something, I'd want to see the original source of the content over a link to a page on an aggregator site.

On the other hand, if I wanted to see an aggregator site like Huffingtonpost or Digg, then I could Google for a site like that, or even Google for a keyword about a discussion that happens on the aggregator site. That seems legitimate to me, but showing up when I'm googling for something related to the original source is obviously not.

Or:

D.) Like the chorus of voices who were scoffing at MSFT's investment at $12 billion a few years back, you're not as prescient about valuations as you think you are.

"Games like Farmville are a fad, like Rubix cube and Cabbage Patch Kids."

Well, sure they're fads. But toys aren't a fad.

LOST might be a fad, but entertaining content aren't a fad.

Farmville might be a fad, but Zynga is in the content business, not the Farmville business.

Advice from a guy who's gone through this a few times:

1. Monitor your retention. Are people coming back or just checking your site out once? You can go viral very quickly but tank just as quickly once the initial interest dies down.

2. Start thinking about a business model. Highly viral sites that don't retain well could really hurt your bank account if you're not monetizing. If you can't can come up with an interesting one, throw up some ads to tide you over.

3. As soon as possible, get your database on dedicated hardware. Your bottleneck is going to be the database: so memcache, add the right db indexes (get a backup db so you can hot-swap while you do this), and add lots of RAM if needed. You don't want to be scrambling to migrate your database once you hit the limit.

It's more that prophecies tend to become common sense 25 years in the future (Jobs first spoke of this in the early 80s).

So does this mean this is the year people will finally give up on calling Facebook a "fad"?

The people at Zynga are many things, "idiots" would not be one of them.

"Okay, we need the new chewy coco grove coconut tree special item out by next Monday. So that means everyone's coming in on saturday."

Surprisingly accurate portrayal of actual meetings here though.

Congratulations Jessica! It's looking AWESOME.

"Then again, we are talking about one week later. He had to know that he had other irons in the fire and probably wouldn't be involved in the company much longer. So, yeah, this actually does sound kinda nasty."

The side project was a Facebook application. It grew from about 10,000 users to more than a million from interview time to the week the season started (about a month). By the time the season started I had my doubts (along with my cofounders), but I thought I could tough it out and do both. I was wrong and made the hard choice to leave.

It was far from an easy decision and I never felt great about it. This is fair criticism and I accept it.

However, I don't feel the same way about your original response. The side project wasn't mine to share, and calling it "treacherous" takes it way too far.

Wow, this really stings coming from someone I respect so much. This is what happens when you leave without an explanation from YC I suppose.

Paul, I agree I should have said "we got in the second time, but I dropped out a week later". I apologize for not being clear but I don't accept that there was anything wrong with what I said.

To be clear, the side project of mine which took off was co-owned 50% by my another founder who was not involved in YC and didn't want to join, so it wasn't mine to simply share with my YC team.

There were 3 cofounders who went to the YC interview - there were 2 cofounders remaining after I left. I was transparent with both of my cofounders and we remain friends to this day - they had zero involvement in the side project from beginning to end. I specifically asked each of them if they felt I was behaving unethically - they responded that they don't believe so and would have done the same in my shoes.

I was rejected the first time, got in the second time, but dropped out a week later to run a different company. We were profitable at 32 employees and got acquired by Zynga last month.

You guys rock. Glad to have had your help on ops.

I just googled for that option and I couldn't find it. What's the option supposed to be?

Split test it and measure the actual impact. Don't guess.

Couldn't agree more.

Wow, what recession?

It depends on how you leverage 10 top notch engineers. I'm guessing they wouldn't have done the transaction if they figure they couldn't get at least $50M in value from these guys which at Facebook's scale isn't that hard.

Wow, when will stuff like this end? I've been hearing this since 2004, when they were like 1% their current size.

... or pretty irrelevant.

Yes, because that's what a liquidation preference is.

You get your full investment back in a liquidation event before common stock gets paid off.

To illustrate, if LSVP was the only investor in Ning (which it isn't) at a $15MM on $750MM, then if the company gets sold for just $15MM, LSVP would still get $15MM back, and nobody else would get anything.

This is correct. It's REE - mod_rails has almost nothing to do with these results.

REE alone halved our response times and our memory usage across our Rails cluster. We're stll on mongrel/nginx.

This is fantastic.

Just curious - did you run any tests for statistical significance?

They also have 300+ FTEs in addition to 200+ contractors.

16, SAT instructor at Kaplan. I hated my life that summer.

"I see vision, not monetization."

You see years of great PR, not reality. Most founding myths are the result of gross simplification and made-up mythology which the are designed to be interesting and consumable for mass media. (see Amazon, eBay, YouTube, PayPal etc).