121–130 of 288 posts
Totally unrelated, but what does I interviewed at DE Shaw when Bezos was there and turned them down for 1/10th of their salary offer mean? I'm having trouble parsing the "for 1/10th of their salary offer" part.
This post is full of anger, desperation and disdain, but of the exquisite kind, and the kind I agree with, so it's great!
Fantastic mini example of the point the author makes about TLDR's I started reading your comment (first 9 words), nearly stopped reading it thinking "they don't get it," carried on for some reason and 5 words later it showed that I agreed with you completely!
What I suspect though is Yahoo desperately needs new users. We know that most Yahoo visitors use Yahoo out of habit from the 90s. Where are the new users? Having a young man with penchant for both technology and publicity be the public face of Yahoo the same way as Marissa did with Google gives Yahoo a slightly better edge.
I expect Nick to be groomed for bigger things. Congrats.
What this really underscores is that conventional capitalism provides little incentive for fundamental innovation. All this stuff we're gluing together is the product of state-funded research, mostly from the cold war era. DARPANet, the web (CERN), DARPA research on "augmented human intelligence," etc. Stuff like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY (I bet you thought Xerox PARC invented that stuff, right? Or…
If those PhD are really so smart, they should have had the foresight to be born to Morgan Stanley executives, like the Summly kid.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>the founders didn't do anything really noteworthy 1M+ downloads for an app with licensed technology is noteworthy.
A million downloads of a free app is not really that noteworthy. My friend made a simple, free iPhone game in a weekend where you tap on a soccer ball and keep it from dropping and routinely gets 10s of thousands of downloads a month with absolutely no marketing.
As a fellow 17-year-old, I have nothing less than respect for Nick. You're obviously doing something right if you sell your company for $30M before you're an adult. Who cares if he's not an AI researcher? The scholar who wrote this article can't bash this kid's product until he actually builds something useful. If he came up with a revolutionary AI theory, great. But the people who take an experimental idea and see t…
> The scholar who wrote this article can't bash this kid's product until he actually builds something useful. What kind of logic is that?
Yahoo shareholders might disagree on this point.
What this really underscores is that conventional capitalism provides little incentive for fundamental innovation. I'm not as convinced as you may be, but there certainly seems to have been a decline in past decades, in terms of private funding for basic research. At one time, Bell Labs, Xerox, IBM, HP and others did quite a bit of basic, fundamental research. IBM still do, last I saw, but here's the question... if i…
The monopolies were broken up. Now companies have to fight for their market position today rather than their position tomorrow.
Given a claim of such technology, an investor doing 'due diligence' has to evaluate it. Then if the investor is a venture partner (VP), they have to consider the 'guidelines' they agreed to with their limited partners (LPs) and for the investment maybe 'explain' to the limited partners. Then the LPs have to 'judge' the accuracy of the due diligence. But, the VPs and LPs don't like to do, or get involved with, such things. Instead they just prefer to "let the market decide".
Are the VPs and LPs wrong? From some data posted recently by Fred Wilson at his AVC.com, apparently they are wrong: The numerical data seems to say that in recent years the 'venture capital asset class' has done significantly less well than an index fund or the S&P.
For more, the financial value of the coveted, honored, respected, celebrated "unique, new, powerful, valuable technology" in IT doesn't have such a great track record at least in the sense that it's not easy to find the yachts. Can take this situation as either a slap in the face of the hopes of financial gains from research or as a great, wide open field, free of competition, for such gains from research.
One argument for the research is that what the venture partners are looking for is exceptional; if a venture partner gets 2000 contacts from entrepreneurs, evaluates 100, and invests in 3, then clearly they are looking for something exceptional. Well, looking for value in "unique, new, powerful, valuable technology" from research should be a promising place to look for something exceptionally good (in ROI).
However, look at two more points:
First, what does it take to evaluate research? For one important case, we know well: In school mostly it takes a Ph.D. committee that, for each Ph.D. granted, spends maybe hundreds of hours in close work and evaluation. Then after school, for a submitted paper, there are reviewers, editors, and editors in chief, and they all play a role. To get to be an editor in chief is, from a Ph.D. and a good research record, maybe a 20 year effort. So, how are venture partners, rarely with a Ph.D., who don't really do research, going to do the work of reviewers, editors, and editors in chief, not just in one narrow field but in everything that might land in their in-box? They can't. Could they 'outsource' the evaluations? Maybe, but there would likely be risks there.
Second, the VPs and LPs seem to be highly concerned that somehow 'the market' is some unpredictable, chaotic, inscrutable swamp where even the best research results can get laughed at and die.
So, apparently so far in IT the investors just concentrate on 'let the market decide'. If 'the market' means that Yahoo writes a check mostly just for reasons of buzz, publicity, internal inspiration, etc., so be it.
Could there be something else? Perhaps: (1) Get what one VP calls a "big ass problem" (BAP). So, if can get a good or much better solution for this BAP, then there should not be much question about virality, 'traction', happy users/customers, or 'product/market fit'. Or there is Sequoia's optimistic remark, "A huge market with customers yearning for a product developed by great engineers requires very little firepower.". (2) Do some research to get the solution. Or to modify the (1)-(2), get a list of BAPs and a list of research results likely can achieve or build on, and then pick a pair of a BAP and a research result that provides the needed solution. This pair picking is part of 'problem selection' and widely viewed as important for success. Then do the evaluation of the solution, possibly presented just on paper, e.g., much as in a journal article, but with a better organized approach than the peer-reviewed journals use.
So, can such pair picking and evaluations lead to success? For success in the market, recall the BAP. For the success research promised, yes. Examples of this last? Sure: What the US DoD has done, with batting average much higher than the VPs, since about 1940. E.g., the USAF's GPS was the second version; the first was by the US Navy, with crucial early work at the JHU/APL in Maryland. The work was proposed essentially just on paper, and the rest is history. For another example, when the U-2 was shot down, the US wanted a replacement -- Mach 3+, 80,000+ feet, 2000+ miles without refueling. Kelly Johnson drew a picture, and the rest is history, right, the SR-71. Net, it really is possible to plan projects with "unique, new, powerful, valuable technology" and execute the plans successfully. VPs, LPs, listen up.
Net, likely a better solution would be for researchers to talk of the value of their work at media parties on their yachts, 250+ feet long. Or "money talks". Or, the VPs and even the LPs have been known to rush for 'the next big thing'. Well, a few IT researchers with $1+ billion exits could be a 'next big thing'.
Funding for such work? Well, just do an MVP by licensing some code from SRI or some such, put a mobile app in front of it, get a lot of publicity, sell out for $30 million, and then use that cash to fund the real project. So, that would be a $30 million Series A where the VPs get 0% for a project without yet even a single dollar of revenue, user, or line of code!
Researchers, believe me: When your serious project is the next big thing and you are worth $1+ billion, your little MVP $30 million weekend will be forgiven!
Whatever we do, currently we are crawling like a snail and, instead, very much need to get going, and VPs and LPs need to be part of it for all concerned including themselves.