51–60 of 90 posts
My mate had a university assignment several years back to come up with an online business idea. His idea was to set up an online "home delivery" service for restaurants (including those that don't do home delivery but do take-away). He got a shitty mark because the lecturer thought the idea was "stupid".
Since we are talking about genius ideas, where is the idea now? (Apologies if this was supposed to be obvious and I did not get it).
Back in 1995, it seemed obvious that any idiot with a text editor could write their own HTML page. Why would they want to pay someone else to do it?
I still cringe when I think that a friend interviewing with a web design agency asked my opinion and I told her that this HTML authoring business had no basis, and she turned down the job.
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It actually wasn't hard to get started with at all. The likes of eDonkey/eMule, LimeWire, Kazaa and Napster all became hugely popular (and some remain popular in certain jurisdictions) precisely because of how trivial they were to use. Then, you already mentioned BitTorrent. P2P filesharing wasn't a terrible idea at all, and BitTorrent is evidence.
It's all relative to the alternatives. P2P was easy by desktop app standards, but concurrently with its development, the web started taking over. With webapps, you didn't need to download a program, you didn't need to deal with your firewall settings (consumer firewalls were just starting to become popular during this time period as well), you didn't need to configure upload/download rates or servers - you just click…
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As of this writing, Twitter's market capitalization is over $23 billion. That's a success by any sensible definition. If you know something the market doesn't, there's any easy way to put your money where your mouth is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_(finance)
That is actually not a bad idea. A business with poor underlying fundamentals must either improve, or lose market cap. I'll have to give some serious thought to shorting twitter. EDIT: It may be too late. It has already had major drops in the last quarter, and is down almost 50% off its highs from 2014.
I think it is a great way to stay up-to date on what happens in startup-land and in open source, the granularity with which you can follow people still fascinates me. Seeing that 95% of what active human accounts post is pretty useless, I don't see justification of a $20bn+ market cap, especially without growth.
PS: They've recently cranked up ads, next earnings report could surprise ...
Instagram. I still don't get it. Vanity filters sure, there were dozens and there must now be hundreds of such apps, but a separate social network just for that?
Similarly, Twitter. Status updates are great, but a separate social network just for that?
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I also thought it was going to be a fad. What is interesting is that everything people use Facebook for day-to-day existed back in 2005. We used email for sharing life updates, various tools for photo sharing, AOL Instant Messenger for chatting, mailing lists for groups, email and evite for organizing events, etc. The novelty of Facebook was profile browsing and poking each other. And if Facebook had just remained th…
It's better to think of and use Facebook as a placeholder for identity and not a platform for expression.
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As of this writing, Twitter's market capitalization is over $23 billion. That's a success by any sensible definition. If you know something the market doesn't, there's any easy way to put your money where your mouth is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_(finance)
Do you own TWTR? I think eventually Twitter will be acquired and integrated into a different social network. As for the OP's original point, they've never turned a profit, and I'd estimate that half of their accounts are inactive/fake.
Current profitability is irrelevant. What matters is net future (discounted) profitability. People who malign companies for not currently being profitable apparently don't understand this, but investors do, and the market certainly does.
Many great companies are massively unprofitable while in their early growth stage, then become massively profitable in their later years, and are valued accordingly. If you can exchange $1B in profits this year for (say) $2B in profits next year, you'd be a fool (assuming current discount rates) not to make the trade.
My mate had a university assignment several years back to come up with an online business idea. His idea was to set up an online "home delivery" service for restaurants (including those that don't do home delivery but do take-away). He got a shitty mark because the lecturer thought the idea was "stupid".
Since we are talking about genius ideas, where is the idea now? (Apologies if this was supposed to be obvious and I did not get it).
https://www.menulog.com.au/ https://www.deliveryhero.com.au/
My mate had a university assignment several years back to come up with an online business idea. His idea was to set up an online "home delivery" service for restaurants (including those that don't do home delivery but do take-away). He got a shitty mark because the lecturer thought the idea was "stupid".
Since we are talking about genius ideas, where is the idea now? (Apologies if this was supposed to be obvious and I did not get it).
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/deliveroo https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/just-eat https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/hungryhouse-co-uk
Not really a start up, but I thought Wikipedia was an extraordinarily dumb idea at first. An encyclopedia that anyone can edit - what could possibly go wrong? I completely missed the value of having decent moderator tools (which no site had back in the early 2000's), and a passionate group of moderators who cared very deeply about the integrity of the site.
There have been a lot of startups over the past decade centred around the sharing economy that have helped to prove that humans can be civil in these situations where one might think that we would default to nefarious activity - Airbnb, Local Motion, etc. to name a few. Humanity is continuing to prove itself as capable of dealing with each other harmoniously and we are seeing great businesses emerge that are benefitt…