The sad truth about Facebook

as opposed to products that are conducive to a quick sell to the angels and VCs.

Build a product that can potentially make money on its own merit. A 2 million dollar series A round should not be considered as a sign of a successful startup.

This article does raise some valid points (regardless of the intentions of the writer). Strike the part about Intellectual Ventures because it unfortunately overshadows the main point.

Running Hackers and Founders SV, I think I have a pretty decent picture of what Silicon Valley is like on the ground floor, and as far as I'm concerned it's pretty frigging amazing.

There's tons of small teams doing amazing things with Big Data and real time analytics like Factual (making Open Data easier to manage and use), MixPanel (Real Time analytics for applications). There's a number of companies doing really interesting things with cool languages like Clojure and Erlang, even if they are "silly companies".

There's companies like Justin.TV which is the largest real time video streaming company in the world. Real time video streaming is very, very hard to do at scale.

AirBnB is revolutionizing the hospitality industry, and last I read are the largest provider of rooms in New York.

There are amazingly cool companies working on SSD database appliances, and on databases optimized specifically for SSD's. SSD add on cards for your PCIE graphics slot that give you 6x the throughput of a SATA port. Those companies don't exactly make for exiting reading in Newsweek, so they don't get a lot of press, though.

Yeah, there's a lot of people making Facebook apps. Sure, you can mock twitter because on it's surface it seems silly and trivial, but they have invented an entirely new communication protocol which companies like StockTwits are leveraging to allow individuals to broadcast their recent stock trades. And, not only that, but the article says that Twitter hasn't figured out how to make money yet. In fact, Business Week reports that they were profitable in 2009: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2009/tc200...

Sure Zynga makes somewhat whimsical addictive games, but if you stop and crunch the numbers, Farmville's digital economy is probably mlarger than the real world economies of many developing nations.

So, if you'd like to believe that Silicon Valley has lost it's way go right ahead. But, from where I sit, things are just beginning to get interesting. Silicon Valley is just starting to fire on all cylinders since the tech bubble popped in 2000. If you want to know how I'm seeing Silicon Valley: I'm strapping in and getting ready for a great big ride.

"His company, Intellectual Ventures, intentionally runs counter to the prevailing trend in Silicon Valley."

By, uh, patent trolling?

O_o