I have therefore taken the following actions: (1) during the last 10 days, I have purchased approximately 59 million shares and share-equivalents of Yahoo; (2) I have formed a 10-person slate which will stand for election against the current board; and (3) I have sought antitrust clearance from the Federal Trade Commission to acquire up to approximately $2.5 billion worth of Yahoo stock.
Here's the complete text of letter to Yahoo!.
I have been thinking more and more these days, for a number of reasons, about hosting servers in the cloud (read Amazon EC2 instances). How about one more reason to do it in the cloud and not in a data center:
Peter Gabriel's Servers stolen from the data center!
Can you believe it? Apparently there are more cases of high profile server theft in Chicago and London. I know, hosting in the cloud for physical security is a stretch, but I have admit I did not expect an IDC "rubbed"...
Yesterday I walked to our little front yard where my wife was gardening: "Latest News: The deal is off". She looked at me for a few seconds, wondering which deal I was talking about, and then a big grin appeared on her face. "So what about Microsoft going hostile? They said they'd do it." And I explained to her that they could not agree on the price - Microsft at $33 and Yahoo! at $37 - and Yahoo!'s stand is that if Microsoft goes hostile Yahoo! will do a bigger deal with Google. That's something Microsoft is very concerened about, and therefore Steve Balmer in his letter has asserted that they won't go hostile.
So, finally. I guess market and financials aside, a lot of people were emotionally involved in this drama, not wanting Yahoo! to be taken over by Redmond.
A good summary of everything can be found on TechCrunch.
No comment!
These days one usually gets the picture of entreprenuers being young, in-college, fresh-out-of-college, or college-dropout people, and that image is sort of amplified by seed funders such as Y-Combinator. This study says otherwise. I guess there's still hope for the rest of us - as long as it's not tainted by a midlife crisis!!
Some interesting interviews and commentaries:
Interview with Google's Eric Schmidt by CNBC
Interview with Google's Larry Page by Fortune Magazine
Future of the Web - commentaries by ten visionaries via BBC (a couple of them with more details here)
Here's full coverage of the 2008 Y Combinator Startup School:
http://www.justin.tv/hackertv/97554/Startup_School
The vide gets jittery sometimes and there are skips, but it's usable. A better version (but it's not complete at this point - will take time to finish) can be found on Omnisio which syncs videos with the slideshow of the presentation, so it's much nicer. Also the questions from the audience are captured and captioned on the video:
I have followed Jingle's Free411 service (1-800-FREE-411) since they are a voice service like Frucall's initial voice based comparison shopping. They have done an amzing job, specially given the competition from Google (1-800-GOOG-411). At this point they have about 6-7% of the US directory assistance market, and they are processing about 20M calls per month.
The company had raised two series of financing before and the valuation was around $150M in 2006. They just announced a series C round of about $13M with existing investors.
The amount is low compared to the valuation and their series B, so I'm not sure what exactly is going on. The company has just reached profitability, and their market share and call volume is great. I would expect a larger amount for aggressive growth and capturing more market share. I hope this is not a down round for them for unknown reasons. Most probably their estimates about their expenditure have been off, and they are running out of money sooner than they think so they are doing an internal round.
The biggest challenge a web start up has is acquiring users. Without users technology does not matter. It is easy to "assume" that you can get 300,000 users in the first year because flickr could do it or delicious could do it, but it's easier said than done. Depending on the nature of your service (how viral it is), clarity of your messaging (how easy you can communicate to the user why they should use your service), your business model (do you charge your users or you provide a free service supported by ads, etc), and the demographics of your users (who's the target of your application) things can be very different and very undeterministic as to how you get users and how your user base grows.
That's why as an entreprenuar you need a "go to market strategy". And that strategy cannot be "I'll hire a VP of marketing to figure that out". If you are starting a business you should be more than an engineer. You should have a sense of why people should like your service and how you get the word out, and who's the right audience.
You need to think and document how you want to get the first, say, 1000 users, and how you want to grow it to 2000 users, 5000 users, and 10,000 users. If I were an investor and you were pitching to me, I would be very interested to know how you get up to the 50,000 user mark. If you get there then hopefully a VP of marketing can help you grow it more. Otherwise your technology might be nice, but it does not build a business.
Since this part is not engineering work and is not exact science it's very hard. That's why it's a big challenge, so give it time and think about it. Imagine you have your product ready and, say, 100 users who are your friends who were kind enough to listen to you and try your service. What's next? That's the big question.
