41–50 of 204 posts
Note incidentally that I'm talking about the performance of the IPO, not the performance of Facebook itself. I think Facebook as a company is in a strong position. The problem is simply that Mr. Market ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intelligent_Investor ) doesn't think so at the moment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think Facebook as a company is in a strong position. Just curious, but I'd like to hear your opinion on why this is the case, vs all the naysayers that are betting against the company now. Do you have any specific point you find that Facebook can leverage to maintain success?
I don't think they've even tried to make money yet. They've just been focusing on growth. But they have so many users now that they could do whatever they want. Ideas that would entail a chicken and egg problem for anyone starting from scratch (e.g. marketplaces) do not for them. Plus Mark himself is such a fearsomely effective person. And so young; he's only a little older now than Larry and Sergey were when they st…
This happens every couple of years in tech. I've personally witnessed 3 downturns now. One was real and two were arguably the best time to start companies. Raising money might be harder, but generally only for bad companies.
Three? 2001-2002 was basically nuclear winter in my experience. 2008-2009 wasn't actually that bad except outside tech (although, I was in Iraq and Afghanistan during all of it). Before that, you'd have to go to early-1990s, when I was...12, and some HN readers weren't born.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think Facebook as a company is in a strong position. Just curious, but I'd like to hear your opinion on why this is the case, vs all the naysayers that are betting against the company now. Do you have any specific point you find that Facebook can leverage to maintain success?
I don't think they've even tried to make money yet. They've just been focusing on growth. But they have so many users now that they could do whatever they want. Ideas that would entail a chicken and egg problem for anyone starting from scratch (e.g. marketplaces) do not for them. Plus Mark himself is such a fearsomely effective person. And so young; he's only a little older now than Larry and Sergey were when they st…
For example, even slight change to the feeds, like inserting what vaguely seems like an Ad, raises a huge uproar from people.
In contrast Google had got Adwords figured out (but it was not as widely known) before their IPO.
So here is an idea for an email feature/gmail plugin: 'Semantic Scramble' Basically, any sensitive email that you send to a bunch of people is automatically scrambled (retaining original meaning/correct grammar, just a small shuffling of words) so that each person gets a unique email. Easy to find out who leaked it. You could add a similar unique jitter for sensitive photos/images...
Re: "Semantic Scramble", this was/is used quite successfully in a university course I tutored. Students are supplied with Java code featuring a unique comment style (/ * */). So many students blindly copied code out of another student's assignment and submitted it as their own that we could effectively generate a map of the plagiarism without even looking at the code -_-
For images steganography would work easily enough and for "semantic scramble" see "Practical Linguistic Steganography using Lexical Substitution"[1] from EMNLP 2010 =]
Note incidentally that I'm talking about the performance of the IPO, not the performance of Facebook itself. I think Facebook as a company is in a strong position. The problem is simply that Mr. Market ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intelligent_Investor ) doesn't think so at the moment.
> I think Facebook as a company is in a strong position. Just curious, but I'd like to hear your opinion on why this is the case, vs all the naysayers that are betting against the company now. Do you have any specific point you find that Facebook can leverage to maintain success?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think they've even tried to make money yet. They've just been focusing on growth. But they have so many users now that they could do whatever they want. Ideas that would entail a chicken and egg problem for anyone starting from scratch (e.g. marketplaces) do not for them. Plus Mark himself is such a fearsomely effective person. And so young; he's only a little older now than Larry and Sergey were when they st…
Do you own any Facebook stock?
I read this with a heavy heart, especially after working at Facebook before my current startup. Facebook is an amazing company with some of the best people in Silicon Valley working to make Facebook a once-in-a-generation company. But if Google debuted at $25b, and grew into a $200b company, how can Facebook grow by a similar multiple starting at a $100b valuation? In my opinion, opening at $38/share sucked all the o…
The money that was there to be made in the Facebook IPO was made before Facebook went public in the secondary market. For professional investors that are getting in at the seed round until the C round or so, Facebook isn't indicative of a problem. Those investors can still make money, it's just that they are going to exit via secondary markets now instead of an IPO.
So here is an idea for an email feature/gmail plugin: 'Semantic Scramble' Basically, any sensitive email that you send to a bunch of people is automatically scrambled (retaining original meaning/correct grammar, just a small shuffling of words) so that each person gets a unique email. Easy to find out who leaked it. You could add a similar unique jitter for sensitive photos/images...
Clearly labeling every instance of the information with how sensitive it is also helps (per page or per paragraph).
It's unrealistic to build a separate semi-airgapped network for most business purposes, but email is broken for sensitive information -- some kind of document room/DLP/etc. system is probably a good idea.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think they've even tried to make money yet. They've just been focusing on growth. But they have so many users now that they could do whatever they want. Ideas that would entail a chicken and egg problem for anyone starting from scratch (e.g. marketplaces) do not for them. Plus Mark himself is such a fearsomely effective person. And so young; he's only a little older now than Larry and Sergey were when they st…
Do you own any Facebook stock?