Quick! Name the top 10 publicly traded consumer internet businesses in the US. When you woke up Thursday morning, the list was: Google: $171 billion market capitalization (26% annual revenue growth) Amazon: $90 billion (38% growth) eBay: $43 billion (14% growth) Priceline: $26 billion (38% growth) Yahoo!: $21 billion (-24% growth) Netflix: $13 billion (45% growth)… Read More
The United States is becoming a startup factory. It’s a very good trend for the U.S. and for entrepreneurs. But this post is how it must feel different than it once did, when startups were hand-crafted in a basement or a garage, and stayed there much longer than they now do. First, a few numbers…. Read More
It’s fashionable these days to talk about a startup as a roller-coaster, with ups and downs, flips and flame-outs, twists and turns. There’s some truth to that, and even more drama and glamor. But roller coaster rides last five minutes, not five years. And as any venture capitalist will tell you, the average holding period… Read More
I was talking to a friend in Silicon Valley last night who told me about a consumer Internet startup that is generating tens of millions of dollars in revenue, with eye-popping year-over-year growth. What was striking about the conversation wasn’t the revenue itself, but that I’d never heard of the company it came from. This has… Read More
At breakfast earlier this month, my friend Roy Gilbert made an offhand reference to two types of people, knowers and learners. It was a distinction I’d never heard before. But I liked the idea of identifying someone as a learner, just because it’s so hard to make any change to our identity, unless part of… Read More
What’s interesting about this weekend’s debate over Fred Wilson’s contention that “marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks” is that it re-enacts an old battle: engineers’ wariness toward marketing, and marketing folks’ distrust of engineers’ build-it-and-they-will-come naivete. But the truth is that the battle-lines between the two sides just don’t exist… Read More
I just toured a startup the other day and what struck me while making the rounds was the fundamental sameness of the startup vibe: a handsome group of slack-jawed folks drowning out their ADD with 80-decibels of music. Startup offices are supposed to have the buzz a newsroom once had, but often are sort of… Read More
Whoa! Shocking news, guys. An engineer left Google for Facebook. The great Lars Rasmussen, creator of Google Maps and Google Wave, quit Google Thursday to join Facebook. This has, admittedly, happened before. In June, Matthew Papakipos defected from Google’s Chrome team. In May, it was mobile guru Erick Tseng. Even Facebook’s chef, Josef Desimone, was recruited… Read More
Watching Steve Jobs’s primary reaction — annoyance – to the iPhone 4 antenna debacle, it has been hard not to think about it in terms of the decisions Redfin needs to make every day: between going for something innovative or making incremental improvements to satisfy customer requests. Steve Jobs is at such a far end… Read More
Fred Wilson posted a thoughtful essay on Friday, about putting the band from one startup back together for the next. While acknowledging that it was an inevitable tendency, Fred stopped short of deciding whether it was a good or a bad thing, which suggests to me his feelings are mixed on the topic. I think… Read More