Never met him personally but I have been following Sridhar Vembu’s companies for quite some time. First time in 2003, during my first startup project (AssuredWeb). Back then I was amazed by the business model of delivering network management products. Component factory model combined with easy to buy, low price convenience. He build cash generating machine with that model. There were many other product/companies AdventNet was directly/indirectly involved with. vTiger, Zoho and some database management company I am forgetting the name. I am sure there will be many more.

Thing I like about this story is that smart, scalable and successful businesses can be build without spilling testosterone out of your ears. Key difference (and this is a very big one) comes from having the right temperament to hang in there for the long haul.

Flip-it-and-keynote-it is a recent invention otherwise startup road is long and lonely. Intellectual freedom is a big plus of the job. I doubt Sridhar Vembu will sell out soon.

“Companies always need to separate valuation from strategic and performance issues, and this is obviously a valuation we need to grow into and we hope we will, But we know it is an aggressive valuation.” - Jim Breyer.

[Hat tip Kara Swisher]

Technorati Tags: Facebook Breyer Valuation

As if too much of a success has to be a cause of concern. Is it in our nature to doubt and hit our head whenever we see too much deviation from the average?

I think answer lies in the unfulfilled promise of web1.0. John Doerr spoke too early when he said “The Internet is the greatest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet”. Google is just methodically executing on that promise. Not all the dominoes are down and many verticals are still standing tall. They will soon face information economy’s biggest weapon - advertisement driven attention arbitrage.

There is still lot of scope for Google to grow. Search is a numbers game and just wait for land of potentially infinite keyboards to join the internet. China, India and Russia. Whenever we will see blowblack, then Google’s scale and distributed computing will really shine.

That doesn’t mean they cannot screw up. Their execution risks are of different kind. I would put government intervention right at the top. As they sit on more and more of user data and become central to all communication channels, they will be both target and partner in all government schemes. Move-on ad controversy is just one example of that. They will be getting caught more and more in ugly political cross firing. They have power base which can deem them as a virtual political party, or virtual nation or may be a new age ideology.

Other risk they have is in staying true to their culture. In many ways Google’s culture is of quirkiness and boldness. They get free PR because of that. If they loose that culture then there will not be much to differentiate between Microsoft and Google. They need to make sure they keep throwing outrageously bold goals. Anything which dilutes that culture is a huge risk.

Also I doubt there is any threat from search startups. Tell me how many companies beat Microsoft by writing a better OS? Zero.

What matters is how many companies are tying their destiny with the adwords/adsense ecosystem and there are many. If Facebook can build better ecosystem, probably there will be some nervousness around it.

Reality is not many companies are trying really bold ideas. Most of them are playing catch up to Google.

So I would say follow their boldness graph. Any talk of “margin protection” or “capital efficiency” by their triumvirate should be a sign to sell. Till that time enjoy the ride!

Dave Winer says people who are using “social graph” term are sounding like monkey.

In the wonderful echo-chamber called Silicon Valley there are some fine folks who need to wield baton and show everybody what meme-cops are capable of.

To begin with, Brad you cannot  conceptualize anything in the public space now. If you think you got some new representation of new online reality then go somewhere else and release your innovative thinking in some non-indexable digital-land.

Having followed all the hoopla around F8 right from the begining I can say this is a beginning of a new type of startup building. Call it Startup-dgets (along the lines of widgets and pronounced like startup-jets). Speed of start to exit is amazingly fast.

I have been taking notes on how application writers go about doing the development, feedback, funding, support etc and my take is that Facebook application development methodology is something entirely new. This is like taking extreme programming and dumping it along the sides of TQM, Waterfall and Corba etc. They are doing expedited extreme, if that makes any sense at all.

Some of these app writers were hand-holding user right from day one and developing/evolving by talking to them over Facebook group. Very very capital efficient.

This model is not going away anytime soon and will be formalized in specific market niches.

Filthy rich as compared to 99% of the world, but still managing to carry everyday concerns which can put Communist era Soviet citizens to shame.

I am tired of using word “WTF” while listening to complaints of some of our friends who are just sticking around in the valley to hit some imaginary number before they can leave for more sane place.

Jumping around from opportunity to opportunity in order to position ourselves in the right-time/right-place coordinate, we find life in valley settling for less colors. Folklore includes comedy of mis-judged coordinates and armchair punditry- “Dude I had this YouTube idea long time back”

For me the idea of “The lone and level sands stretch far away” is a daily reminder and helps to stay in balance. Remember in the end even the fittest won’t survive.

Not every toy needs to be inside the house.

I checked on Technorati about the blackout but there wasn’t anything there.

I checked on Twitter, there were lot of near-real time messages about the outage. Infact in a very creative move SixApart used Twitter to give regular updates.

What do you say - revolution will be twittered?

Just received word from Facebook that the company has made its first acquisition: Parakey, a startup founded by Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, co-founders of Mozilla Firefox.  Ross and Hewitt will join Facebook immediately to work on the Facebook Platform.

I have been following Joe Hewitt, specially his work on Firebug and lately on iUI. Both are outstanding projects. Facebook is getting solid talent with this acquisition. Both founders of Parakey are smart dudes.

Still can’t believe why Google allowed Parakey to slip. From whatever I have heard of Parakey, it fits right into the sweet space of Desktop and Internet synchonization. Google Gears is an early attempt in that direction.

Facebook seems to be focused more on being a social-network-of-record for all application developers.
With F8 they came out with smart cloud based platform. Combining Parakey with existing toolbar (which is fairly advanced as far as toolbars go) they have a pretty interesting desktop strategy. One can only imagine how they plan to integrate the two.

If that’s what their ultimate vision is then I wouldn’t be surprised if they followup this acquisition with some more. They need mobile platform as well. By getting Hewitt, they managed to get a guy who is at the forefront of iPhone hacking. Won’t be surprised if F8 gets iPhone compatibility soon.

Great timing as Google gets busy with congress and realizes that too much hiring not only hurts quarterly results but can also result in culture dilution.

Silicon Valley is full of visionaries, pundits and geeks. Lot of these folks provide good enough reason for lot of people to live here and be a part of the guess-the-next-big-thing game. I do that as well and I love it. I most probably fall under “geek” category as visionary and pundit title usually comes as part of the work. It’s something one has to earn. There is no tax in putting this in your resume by the way. LinkedIn takes some time to come back when you search for term  “visionary”. It’s that overused and over-bestowed.

Therein lies my problem with the way Steve approached this domain name thing with me. He called me round about few hours after my wife came out of operation room. She had a c-section. He straight away asked me to give back the domain name to him. I politely told him “I appreciate your work and I will get back to you”. For some reason he thinks I made a bad move by registering this domain name. I didn’t get back to him as I got busy and I thought if Steve is serious then he will discuss the project in detail.

At that time I had this vague idea of a living book which captures emerging  social and economic themes around iphone. (I am a second day buyer and this blog supports iphone theme!). Also I am a big fan of Steven Levitt as well and iphone is not the first term where I have tried applying “onomics”. This word I had thought before I saw Steve’s post. Steve’s post made me rush towards domain name registration. Not only that I put this domain name on sedo to study how irrational this whole thing will get. Watching and being part of domain name chase around iphone was a huge fun and still is. I am a project squatter not a domain squatter. Never sold any domain name so far. Doesn’t mean I wont sell any in future but projects excite me more than just domain names. I have my little lab as well.

This experience made me appreciate the dynamics of coining-terms industry better. In academic world there are clear rules. Either you publish or perish. Sitting in Starbucks and blogging your brains out doesn’t allow rigorous auditing. So when someone comes up with apparently new meme, then there are not many firms or tools to answer the question - who really invented this meme ?  Maybe the lesson here is to adopt a new approach for coining terms. In our new world its the techmeme which holds the key.

It’s good that I already have CognitiveSpam domain name otherwise I will be blamed for that as well.

Jerry Yang has stepped in to fill in Semel’s place. To me this is a great news as Yahoo will now have geek at the top and a founder who can afford to go heavy on the vision. They need that. This move will help them in recruitment as well.

All the talk about Yahoo needing a partner and selling out doesn’t really make  sense to me. Why is everybody so breathless about Yahoo’s future. After all company is growing, with revenue up, stock is not that bad and if you imagine a world without Google then their execution wasn’t that bad.  They are not the only company suddenly looking clueless when compared against Google.

Lets check some basics here.

Jerry Yang is 38
Internet market is still in its infancy
Google hasn’t screwed up yet - They will eventually - Its a Newtonian thing !

We need counter to Google and thats not just in terms of search engine and technology. Yahoo brings cultural counter weight as well. People like Yahoo. For all you know this may be a time to go bullish on Yahoo.