venture capital Archive

Facebook Shares! Get Your Red Hot Facebook Shares!

I wasn't planning to write about the story sweeping the tech blogosphere about Facebook reportedly allowing employees to sell shares, mostly because I thought others covered it well, and as Peter Kafka points out, we're talking about a small amount of money and a small amount of equity.

But I wound up doing a tech roundup post for TechTicker today and started to get into it, so I figured I'd post some thoughts here too. If you know my writing, you're probably not surprised that it's the larger cultural ramifications of the move that concern me.

Cool

It's actually hard to pronounce Cuil as "cool" once you've seen it written. I was so busy trying not to visualize the spelling I had to do the intro to this video about 45 times, but hey, at least it made Aaron and the guys in the control room laugh! Bill O'Reilly I feel your pain!

Needless to say, I'm not a fan of the name, but I hope the new search engine can live up to some of the hype. As I say in the video below, I've been hearing about this company for a while from people I really respect and trust, so I was a bit bummed that the site was down so much today. Also, in my informal tests there were nowhere near the quality of results that are on Google. Although this seems to change moment to moment. I searched "Sarah Lacy" and it gave me zero results versus nearly 400,000 on Google. For a moment I was elated! No record of the tumultuous ups and downs of my Internet life? I searched again and got 77,000. And none of the first few pages had links to my blog or any of the hundreds of things I've actually written. That's pretty sub-par search for something so hyped.

Still, I trust my sources on this one. I plan to continue to give Cuil a chance. For one thing, I like the UI and I love the privacy policies. If they can come close to Google results, they'll build a solid fan base with those features alone. They may never really threaten Google, but it's great to continue to see innovation in this space. Search is so important to our everyday lives and not even Google does it perfectly.

Ooooooh! Maybe Valley Innovation Is about to Restart...

As a Valley-based business reporter I get chills (the good kind) when I read Jim Cramer -- or another of his pretending-to-get-tech Wall Street peers-- say something like this. Because as soon as people say innovation is dead in the Valley, it seems to slowly restart. Among other bon mots, Cramer told an audience at New York's "Hey! Us too!" Internet Week that there was more innovation going on in the Rust Belt than Silicon Valley.

I've been outspoken that there's not a lot of great Web innovation going on right now, but Cramer's statement is a stretch even for me. You know what Cramer misses? (Other than the under the radar work happening in clean tech, biotech, etc. The Valley is a big place after all.) He's focused on product innovation, which has somewhat stalled in the Valley's Web scene in aggregate. But business model innovation is where the Valley is at as Web companies and others in areas like open source hunt to find ways to turn insane audiences into cash. Memo to Jim: That's what made Google worth $175 billion today. The search engine was hardly a new-fangled application.

What I love about guys like Cramer is they tout they were rabid Google bulls "early on." Early = Once the S-1 was filed and we all saw the kind of numbers Google was putting up. Props to them for knowing the stock was worth more than $85 a share. But that's not the same thing as spotting "innovation," Wall Street. Just wondering how often Cramer actually comes out here....because I seem to see him on the Mad Money set just about everyday...or goes to the Rust Belt for that matter...

All snarking aside, I don't usually bash Cramer, because I think he's an amazing showman and knows the public markets better than I do. And I have a total appreciation for the rigors of being on camera everyday. But don't try to play the startup game, pal.

Oh! My favorite part: Cramer says TheStreet.com is one of those lone well positioned Web properties. Because so many young people are flocking there. Yeah, that one doesn't even need a snarky graph.

China Walloping India

Where have I been all day? Looking through VC numbers. Here are a few segments I did for Tech Ticker on yesterday's mixed news about U.S. venture capital in China, and below a piece on today's news about U.S. venture capital in India.

Both regions became the new black a few years ago and billions were invested, offices were opened, partners were relocated. And most VCs I talk to regret it, but at the same time don't feel like India and China are markets they can afford to ignore. I don't think this gets covered enough here, given it'll heavily influence at least the next 10-year venture capital cycle, which you can't divorce from the health of the Valley as a whole. We're in the midst of a huge change in this asset class in a lot of directions and local to global is one of the most pronounced that could make or break firms. It's important enough I plan to visit both India and China in the next year (hopefully!) to check out the startup scene first hand. Enough extrapolating from data!

But for now, back to the data...This quarter we saw some retrenching and refocusing in a pretty major way. Watch the videos for the details. Spoiler alert: China is waaaaay hotter than India. That was a surprise to me because I hear more hand wringing about China anecdotally.

VCs + Crystal Balls = Mobile Boom?

This is a little delayed, as I wasn't at the event. But here's a video Eric Savitz and I did for Tech Ticker on the Churchill Club's Top 10 Tech Trends event, held last week. Interestingly, almost half of the trends were about mobile. I've also reported on Tech Ticker that some Web entrepreneurs like Kevin Rose also thing real mobile innovation is about to happen. Here's Eric's report:

It's hard to know. Anyone who has been around the Valley has heard the mobile hype before and we have little in the name of real innovation or huge public companies to show for it. Two good things could come out of the current mobile excitement. (It's not quite hype yet.)

One: We will finally see some true innovation in mobile apps. Handsets are great and all, but software is where the magic happens. A bad UI can make the sexiest phone abominable to use. Thanks to the iPhone real software and real apps are possible for the first time on phones. Who isn't excited about that? Even I am and my fingers are too cloddy to work a touch screen keyboard!

Or, two: Companies aiming for the mobile market will get bogged down in regulation and fragmented markets, die a slow death after raising too much money, and we won't have to hear about MOBILE! for another few years.

Let's suspend reporter cynicism and hope it's different this time, that younger people and products like the iPhone will actually make us as mobile-centric as Asian markets-- hell, even European markets. I'd love to have a phone that didn't anger me at some point in the day for one reason or another.

My Own Memo to Zuckerberg: Don't Listen to Any of Us

Just wrapping up my morning of blog reading-- amid a flurry of radio interviews-- and I saw Kara's memo to Zuckerberg. I think she made some good points. Particularly about the pressure he'll get if he turns down a Microsoft offer and the point that there's nothing "basic" about whether Facebook should sell. As this news of Facebook traffic falling spreads, the "sell! sell! sell!" drumbeat Kara refers to is only going to grow louder.

So here's my own memo to Mark: On the very off chance you are reading any of this, stop. Don't listen to any of us. It's your company. It's your vision. If we knew what was best for Facebook, we wouldn't be bloggers and reporters. You've gotten this far without us.

I Still Don't See Microsoft Buying Facebook

Or more to the point, I don't see Facebook selling. New fears by John Furrier and Robert Scoble remind me of that "Googlezon" video that was making its way around the Web several years ago. You remember, we all watched it and shuddered and thought, "That could totally happen!" It didn't. And it looks sillier the farther we get from it.

A lot of things could "totally" happen, and there's nothing particularly wrong with Scoble's logic. Except that Facebook doesn't want to sell, Mark Zuckerberg hasn't even been in the U.S. for weeks, and I'd be stunned if Facebook's end goal was really to break the Web. (Can't vouch for that EVIL EVIL Microsoft!) There are always rumors in the valley, but I simply haven't heard this from a credible source.

More from ZAPPOS!

On the origins of the company:

And on its future:

By the way, my friend Tim points out the environmental toll of all that shipping and returning. The problem with taking away the financial stigma is you increase it dramatically. Since I KNOW Tony reads this, dying to know his response. (As is Tim)

ZAPPOS! CEO SPEAKS!

After the crazy-enthusiastic response I got to this post, I've decided to always write ZAPPOS! instead of Zappos. I also decided to do a few interviews with CEO Tony Hsieh for TechTicker. Here's the first piece. I'm still not sure the economics of ZAPPOS! will work long term, but I give Tony a lot of credit for following his own vision and not giving into the capital-efficiency craze. (And my husband is buying some shoes right now...) At least he's building something interesting which is more than I can say for a lot of me-too Web companies. More segments on TechTicker today.

Enjoy!

Blog-Keeping

Wow. So day after launch and launch party. I am in pajamas still with no makeup on which makes me very happy after a week of press and being "on." I just finished edits on the BusinessWeek excerpt from the book which runs next week in the magazine and online on Sunday with a slideshow telling you little-known-facts about the guys in the book. Not that I've written that slideshow. Saving that to Saturday.

Today I've got a satellite radio interview and a panel to moderate down at TieCon. So if you're there say hi! If you're there and want a book I'll have a few for $20....you know those ones that were supposed to show up for my party? They got waylayed. Thanks for nothing FedEx! In case you don't follow me on Twitter, Yahoo's PR agency scoured the city looking for books and we re-sold them at a loss. Sold out of 40 or so in about 30 minutes. Thinking about doing a low-key happy hour somewhere for people who want a signed copy but didn't get to come to the party or got there too late to get one. Would anyone come? I have 150 books that need to go to a good home. If anyone wants a bulk order of signed books, lmk.

Also, my husband took loads of photos last night we'll be posting on the blog soon. We also had a professional photographer. Here's Wired's write up of the party. A little unfair on the criticism of no one "important" being there I thought. They neglected to mention several entrepreneurs and VCs who did attend like Evan Williams and David Hornik. And Mark Zuckerberg is in India so he gets a pass. And Marc Andreessen doesn't leave the house. Besides, I got to spend a year with those guys. I wanted to spend a night with fans and friends. Everyone at the party was just as much a part of the Web 2.0 movement as the guys in the book. So I couldn't have been happier with how it went!