Disqus - Latest Comments for ebenthurston

Re: Bonuses

Eben Thurston — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 10:38:29 -0000

I haven't heard a compelling argument for why government bailouts were a better solution to AIG's insolvency than to let them file Chapter 11. Bankruptcy served the economy well for hundreds of years. What changed in 2008?

Lehman's liquidation seemed a lot more efficient and less destructive to taxpayers than the handling of AIG. Bankruptcy seems like the best way to deal with bankrupt firms.

Re: When Government Funds Business

Eben Thurston — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 12:47:23 -0000

"The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups."

-- Henry Hazlitt
Economics in One Lesson

Re: My Web 2.0 Keynote

Eben Thurston — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 23:22:12 -0000

Great presentation. Thanks for getting permission to post it and sharing.

Re: Shake Shack Without the Wait

Eben Thurston — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 22:46:18 -0000

And who said Twitter was a waste of time?

Re: Open Systems, Open Data, Transparency

Eben Thurston — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 12:38:03 -0000

TR, I can understand your frustration, but an investor's only objective is to return a profit. It's not philanthropy or gambling. Part of founding a new company or launching a product is picking a market appropriate to attract 3rd party investment if it's needed. Not every brilliant idea can become a company with the kind of growth potential required to warrant VC or angel backing, but there could very well be other sources of funding that are appropriate for your idea. Wealthy individuals with an interest in your space, government or state programs, university programs, etc. The problem might not be the idea, but the source of funding.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Re: Fred Wilson Dot VC

Eben Thurston — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 20:58:38 -0000

Do you ever go fishing from that beach? You could catch big striped bass in the fall right from shore.

Re: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/08/is-geek-tech-go.html

Eben Thurston — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 10:06:56 -0000

There are two main issues I think defines what tech services go mainstream and why. One is age. As some have pointed out many of our 30+ wives have become enthusiastic users of facebook, connecting to friends new and old. My non-tech wife has been on facebook for a few months and she loves it and just last night wondered how she ever lived without it. I have 300+ fb friends and my wife is jealous. My college age cousin however, has several thousand friends on FB and several thousand photos. That's not a function of my wife and I being less geeky, I'm definitely a larger geek than my cousin. It because way more mainstream kids use facebook than mainstream adults.

The other factor is the blockbuster effect. A single tech service taking off with the mainstream is more about product and marketing than the underlying tech category. Facebook's and youtube's success does not mean that social networks and video sites are now a mainstream phenomenon.

Tech services become more mainstream as more tech oriented younger generations grow up but it's still a hit driven market. Individual company iez break out, not entire product categories.

Mobile just makes everything seem more accesable for people who are scared of their PCs but not their phone. By the way, sorry for any typos, I'm writing this on my iPod Touch.

Re: Blogging In The 'Burbs

Eben Thurston — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:29:30 -0000

Fred, do you have a plan for migrating pagerank to the new URLs? It looks like the old URLs still resolve to blogs.com. I think you'd need to put 301 redirects on all the old URLs in order to transfer all the juice.

Re: Live At Leeds

Eben Thurston — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:37:17 -0000

What country has the most robust startup ecosystem outside of the USA? Israel seems to have a lot of activity.

Re: Venture Fund Economics: When One Deal Returns The Fund

Eben Thurston — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 23:57:36 -0000

Or captured leading market share in a bad economy - Google in the post dotcom bust recession.

Re: Venture Fund Economics: When One Deal Returns The Fund

Eben Thurston — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 23:27:21 -0000

That was as entertaining as it was informative.

Re: Top Signs Your Service is Going Mainstream

Eben Thurston — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 22:14:56 -0000

#6 might be the most meaningful of them all.

Re: Venture Fund Economics: Gross and Net Returns

Eben Thurston — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 19:05:50 -0000

These posts and comments are incredibly interesting and informative. I'm looking forward to the rest of the series and conversations. Thanks for pulling back the curtain, Fred.

Re: The New AVC, Same As The Old AVC

Eben Thurston — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:51:54 -0000

Great work Nathan and Fred.

I checked out Nathan's site and I love his design principles. Couldn't agree more:

* Goal Driven Design: Name the two most important things your blog needs to do for you. Design accordingly.
* Do the simplest thing that works.
* Launch, measure, tweak, repeat.
* 90% of good web design is whitespace, contrast, and generous font sizes.
* 90% of good Search Engine Optimization is in your <title>, URL, and writing.

Re: The Lazy and Smarter Web

Eben Thurston — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 09:58:23 -0000

What would a University think about a student using the 'lazy web' to write a research paper?

Re: Avoid David and Goliath (for Strategic Partnerships)

Eben Thurston — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 10:39:45 -0000

Great advice Albert. Visibility and buy-in at the executive level are critical to ensuring the partnership remains in place and productive over time, especially when the going gets tough. Business is relationships, after all. Best case scenario, your startup fully fills a niche need of your larger partner, so you get the exclusive.

Re: A VC: Corporate Venture Capital

Eben Thurston — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:47:30 -0000

They're probably looking into VC because their size has made it difficult to keep homegrown ideas, like Friendfeed and Ooyala, in house. If they're doing this just to keep some exposure to products they would otherwise lose entirely, then this may end up being more of an external product incubator initiative than a traditional VC initiative.

That said, at first glance Google doing traditional VC seems like something that could work well, because they already do a lot of investment in tech startups through the M&A side, so presumably they have people with the right skill set and maybe even an edge. However, a big company buying a startup because the startup's products or services can be monetized by the big company is a fundamentally different kind of investment than VC. If Google VC invests in a firm that achieves success what is the exit strategy? Do they buy the firm outright, or sell it to a competitor at a profit? I would think the present value of an investment in a new internal product with a predictable revenue stream is greater than the PV of an investment in an external firm with a necessary yet uncertain liquidity event.

Time will tell how it works out for them, but as a GOOG shareholder, I agree with Fred. I think Google and their stakeholders would be best served by focusing on the online advertising business and leaving the startup investment business to professional startup investors.

Re: A VC: The Death Trap

Eben Thurston — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 10:41:51 -0000

"Killing" another company is a zero sum game. Even if you succeed in killing them, best case scenario all you end up with is what they had. And if a company is susceptible to killing then their model, products, or market must have flaws to some degree, and the killer just inherits the flaws. That story line is good for publisher's page views, but it's backward looking and not very useful for identifying opportunities.

I'd rather focus on what's coming next and doesn't exist now. New products that wouldn't have been possible before the latest innovations in mobile software and hardware, for example, or services that deliver value to mainstream users who are interested in the service not the technology, are where the big opportunities are hiding. The firms that achieve success in new mobile or in solving real world problems with technology will get a lot of attention and hopefully make a lot of money, but they won't have killed anything.

Re: Honesty Is The Best Policy

Eben Thurston — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 14:14:21 -0000

Thanks Fred.

Re: Honesty Is The Best Policy

Eben Thurston — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 12:04:03 -0000

I can see Steve, as a human being, not wanting his health to be the subject of public discussion, but he is Steve Jobs, so they need to find a way to strike a balance. AAPL should probably have done a press release stating a few facts, ie: cancer has not returned, non-life threatening digestive issue has caused weight loss, nothing that will impact his ability to run AAPL, etc. I'm no PR expert, but you need to fend of the short selling rumor mongering hedge funds. Silence is just asking for trouble.

Re: TEN Reasons Digg Not Getting Acquired…Nope, Just One!

Eben Thurston — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 11:55:52 -0000

Digg may get a ton of traffic, and probably makes money, but I'm not sure it would add much value to a larger media company. Judging by the comments on Digg, the audience is not the demographic large mainstream advertisers are trying to reach. Also, based on the difficulty Digg, one of the original and most viewed Web 2.0 sites, has had in selling itself, the traffic for traffic's sake phase is probably over. You need quality traffic to effectively monetize it. Hence Linkedin.com's $1B valuation. Linkedin is used by educated, employed professional with money to spend. Digg is used by a, uh, different group.

Digg's value < $200M
Linkedin's value = $1B
but:
http://siteanalytics.compet...

Re: Our Newest Portfolio Company: Meetup

Eben Thurston — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 00:07:25 -0000

Meetup is a great company. They're an excellent example of continuous improvement. They do one thing, and do it better and better over time.

Re: Discussing Web 2.0

Eben Thurston — Wed, 28 May 2008 09:51:07 -0000

Sounds like a good one. Wish I could make it.

Re: Looking Forward

Eben Thurston — Thu, 15 May 2008 15:23:02 -0000

Great stuff. Thanks for the heads up.

Re: iPhone vs Blackberry - Survey Sample Size of One

Eben Thurston — Mon, 12 May 2008 13:31:47 -0000

I have a Blackberry Curve and an Ipod Touch. I've found the Touch is better for reading emails because it has a more graceful interface and clicking away to links is a better experience. However, the Blackberry is better for sending emails because I make far fewer keypad errors. A few weeks ago I was out to dinner with a friend who owns an iPhone and I was trying to check the leaderboard at the Masters golf tournament. I used his iPhone because I assumed it would be easier, but the iPhone wanted to show me the full webpage which used Flash for the leaderboard. The Blackberry served up the "mobalized" version from Google. After trying unsuccessfully for several minutes with the full browser iPhone I was able to find the scores immediately on the Blackberry. The iPhone really need to get support for Flash figured out before it can claim to be a truly mobile browser experience.