Happiness and life

Jim Rohn: "Happiness is not something you postpone for the future; it is something you design for the present." [via: Amanda Rose]

Chris Dixon interviewed, startup life and business models

StockTwits.tv: Interview with Chris Dixon of Hunch. Good video interview with one of the best Internet biz/startup bloggers out there.

The Monster In Your Head: Disappearing into the Fire. "How many of us create companies, create products where our blood and bone fuse with the glaze to create something so exquisite as to never have existed before? How romantically seductive is the image of giving one?s all to the fire? After all, as Whyte says:

"Work is the very fire where we are baked to perfection, and like the master of the fire itself, we add the essential ingredient and fulfillment when we walk into the flames ourselves and fuel the transformation of ordinary, everyday forms into the exquisite and the rare."

I have to understand this viscerally if I'm going to be of service to my clients. But I have to be mindful, too, of the cost. In disappearing into the kiln, the potter created the most meaningful thing possible. But in the end, he ceased to exist."

There are both good and bad days in the world of startups.

Master of 500 Hats: Subscriptions are the New BLACK. (+ why Facebook, Google, & Apple will own your wallet by 2015). "We have largely WASTED an entire web decade of time, energy & venture capital on extremely inefficient revenue models. There have been a few interesting examples of startups acquired in the 00's for large amounts due to amazing growth (eGroups, MySpace, Skype, YouTube) or advertising potential (aQuantive, DoubleClick, AdMob, RightMedia). However, mostly the decade has been an uninterrupted string of uninspiring business models and small-time acquisitions of Web 2.0 startups filled with rainbows & unicorns, rather than those based on simple, transactional revenue models."

Read the entire post for perspective, but I'm pretty bullish on branded advertising for the next 5-10 years. Especially video advertising. For sites that are not traditional media sites (games, services etc) I see user paid growing as it makes more sense than remnant ads.

Chris Dixon: Institutional failure. "The TV show The Wire is an incredibly instructive lesson on how the modern world works (besides being a great work of art). The recurring theme is how individuals with good intentions are stymied by large institutions."

The Wire is an excellent series (watch it if you haven't already), read how some lessons can be applied to startups and big companies.

Health, bonuses and NYC

Both Sides of The Table: The Yo-Yo Life of a Tech Entrepreneur - A Cautionary Tale. "I somehow never really felt stressed during all of this. At least not externally. Immediately following the closing of the round I flew out to a big real estate conference in France to meet with prospective customers. On the trip I nearly collapsed. I felt dizzy and had an aching in my chest. I started feeling panic attacks. I had never had any symptoms like this in my life.

[...]

The doctor told me that while I didn't ever show my anxiety to my friends and colleagues or even acknowledge it myself, my body still went through the stress internally. How had I let myself get to this point? If you're still young I'm sure you think it would never happen to you - you're fit, right? Age and life catches up with you. I was you, too."

Being an entrepreneur is not the rosy story politicians too often tell.

Steve Blank: Incentives and Legends. "Everyone at our startup was working on startup starvation salaries, and Bob had taken a large pay cut to join us. When the Japanese partner deal was done, Bob said, "Steve, I deserve at least a $10,000 bonus. I haven't been home in weeks, and I pulled off a financing even you admit was unbelievable."

I patiently explained that this type of miraculous event was the norm for startups. The engineers were pulling off miracles on a daily basis, we were all taking fumes for salaries, but our payoff will be when our stock is worth something. Until then, tell your wife you'll get $10,000 when hell freezes over. No bonuses in a startup. To his credit Bob said while he understood, he was going to hear about it at home for not being appreciated.

[...]

I said, "Extraordinary work in a startup is the norm, but you performed even beyond my expectations. In my startups that's worth recognizing.

Rewards for extraordinary effort became part of the company's legend.

[...]

In three or so years these cash incentives added up to no more than $50K. While everyone understood the theory that we were working to make the stock valuable (and we did,) the cash reminded them that we cared and noticed."

Good points.


Chris Dixon: The NYC tech scene is exploding. "The one thing we really need to complete the ecosystem is a couple of runaway succesesses. As California has seen with Paypal, Google, Facebook etc, the big successes spawn all sorts of interesting new startups when employees leave and start new companies. They also set an example for younger entrepreneurs who, say, start a social networking site at Harvard and then decide to move."

Stockholm is developing quite nicely too, but more angel investors and some decent exits would benefit the Stockholm web scene.

YouTube monetizing 1+ billion videos per week and Spotify sales are ?50+ million per year

Some data points worth noticing in Midem(Net) Blog's Live Post: Conversation with Spotify and YouTube and BBC News'
Spotify boss Daniel Ek sets out future plans.

- YouTube monetizes more than 1 billion videos per week (for each $1 in average CPM for a mix of overlays and pre-rolls YouTube has sales of $1+ million per week/$52 million per year)
- YouTube sells pre-roll ads in the UK for 15-30 pounds
- Spotify has 250,000+ subscribers (about 30+ million euros per year) and Spotify's "advertising business is in the tens of millions of euros each year" making it sound like it is at least on a ?50 million revenue run-rate and growing)

Mark Pincus and Bing Gordon on Internet entrepreneurship

Really interesting presentation at Stanford by Zynga founder Mark Pincus and former Electronic Arts COO Bing Gordon. Highlights available in shorter clips at Stanford

Themes for 2010 and interesting links

The Big Picture: The Economy's Lost Decade. Eye-opening data on US job growth, GDP growth and household net worth in the last decade. A horrible decade if you look at underlying growth.

Paul Kedrosky: Playing "What If" With $10,000 From 12/31/1999 to Today. Gold, raw materials and treasuries did well in the last decade, U.S. stocks and venture capital did not.

VentureBeat: How Jajah, a little phone company, sold for $207M while everyone else got killed. Somewhat of a post-mortem (some success factors and key events) on VOIP company Jajah's life as a startup from launch to being acquired by Telefonica.

VentureBeat: Hulu?s success stats: 43 million users, 924 million streams, 14,000 hours of TV. Online video is growing quickly as TV shows are going online. Hulu is an obvious U.S. example, but local Swedish ones (TV4, Kanal5, TV3, SVT) are growing quickly too.

Fred Wilson: Areas of Interest. Union Square Ventures' areas of interest for 2010: Mobile, Mobile What?, Gaming, New forms of commerce and currency, Cloud based platforms and APIs, Education and the Energy/Environment.

Fred Destin: Investment and innovation themes from the Defrag conference. Making e-mail better, Making lifestreams relevant, Measuring and monetizing influence, Extranets, Selling data, Meaning is the new search, Breaking up the corporate IT environment, Education, Application Marketplaces, Identity Metasystems.

Chris Dixon: Why the web economy will continue growing rapidly. "Right now there are lots of inhibitors to brand advertising dollars flowing onto the web. Among them 1) most of the brand dollars are controlled by ad agencies, who seem far more comfortable with traditional media channels, 2) it is hard to know where your online advertising is appearing and whether it is effective, 3) banner ads seem extremely ineffective and are often poorly targeted, 4) big brand advertisers seem scared of user-generated content, today?s major source of ad inventory growth.

But economic logic suggests these problems will be figured out, because advertisers have no choice but to go where the consumers are."

On Playahead closing and Facebook's willingness to change

The Swedish community Playahead, which was acquired for 102 million SEK in early 2007 (sv), will be closed down this spring (sv). Obviously Facebook's success has eaten into Playahead, but one should not forget Bilddagboken's impact.

In this context it is worth reflecting on Mark Zuckerberg's willingness to make changes to core parts of Facebook's user experience (news feed, privacy settings etc) about once a year. If one is not willing to change a social service, it will die sooner rather than later.

Google revenue up 17 % in Q4 2009

Google's growth of 17 % to $6.67 billion in Q4 2009 is highly impressive in a slow growth economy.

How to think about Google

Chris Dixon: What's strategic for Google? "Google makes 99% of their revenue selling text ads for things like airplane tickets, dvd players, and malpractice lawyers. A project is strategic for Google if it affects what sits between the person clicking on an ad and the company paying for the ad. Here is my rough breakdown of the "layers in the stack" between humans and the money:

Human - device ? OS ? browser ? bandwidth ? websites - ads ? ad tech ? relationship to advertiser ? $$$

At each layer, Google either wants to dominate it or commoditize it." Read the entire post.