When Quora announced that it was raising $50 million at a whopping $400 million valuation, I wondered out loud — why? Of course that prompted someone to ask on Quora of course, why was I bearish on the company. Of course some wonderful commentary ensued and one response from James Hirtz in particular got a lot of votes. I got around to responding to his comment and the question in general. Here is my answer if you don’t want to deal with Quora.
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My bearishness of Quora is pretty clear in the post I penned on GigaOM.
As for your argument about me being worried about Quora-based content as competition – I dont think so. I link to a lot of stuff on Quora. I am a firm believer that everyone should have their own platform to publish – whether it is a blog or Facebook page, a twitter feed or Quora account. In other words, to each their own.
I used to be an old school journalist who embraced the Internet in 1994, long before it was hip, cool or famous. I embraced the Internet first and the web later. I am the Internet journalist who embraced the blogs in 2000, long before they were hip. And I am the blogger who embraced Twitter in 2006 and Facebook a little later.
I am also the guy who likes to link to other people and actually spends an incredible amount of my time finding stuff that is great and written by other people so that more people give attention to those words. I believe that writing is only part of my job. Here are three rules I follow everyday I write and how I define my duties as a blogger/writer/whatever label you want to put on me today.
- be unique,
- create value to my community.
- curate and help find community the information/resources they might need.
Those are three principles that are not defined by what platform I write for, or what tools I use. Those are guiding principles, independent of platforms Quora, Pinterest or whatever.
Quora has a lot of nice content, it attracts lots of smart people and I quite enjoy using it, though don’t feel compelled to answer or partake in all conversations I am asked to participate in. That is the service. let’s separate the service and the valuation. I think service is good, but the lack of traction for the service makes the valuation impossible to justify – at least to me. Clearly, the VCs who have invested in the deal feel differently.
On a more personal note, Quora has lost a lot of simplicity and design elegance and ease of discovery that I found useful in the early days. I believe they need to simplify.
Did you hear that Benchmark Capital is opening an office in San Francisco. In the Tenderloin District to boot. Peter Fenton, a partner at the fund announced the move via a blog post. He outlined his reasons but what got to me was the wrapper of the “civic duty” and helping San Francisco message.
The fact that Benchmark is opening a SF office is great news for the city’s startup ecosystem. However, to couch it in civic and economic development message is just poppycock. Yup, that’s right – I said what it really is.
“That a prominent venture capital firm is expanding from Silicon Valley to San Francisco demonstrates how strong San Francisco has become as a center for innovation and talent,” Mayor Ed Lee told the San Francisco Chronicle. Lee, hasn’t met a press opportunity he didn’t like. And like any other politician, he loves a easy money backer!
There have been many funds who have invested in many startups long before he became Mayor Tech-Lover. He needs to get a clue and find those long term believers and laud them before championing the new opportunists. Seriously, who is Lee’s press secretary! Unlike the tech-industry supporters of Lee, I see him for what he really is a faux-believer on whose watch we saw a functioning and thriving startup greenhouse, Pier 38 put out of business to make way for some expensive real estate.
The same space that produced my company and also Instagram (that made a shit load of money for Benchmark, by the way) has not been replaced. The local business community has suffered. And the startups have withered in the wind, and found homes in more expensive locations, which of course means that there is need for more investment dollars. Circle is complete. In my book, actions speak louder than words. So unless Lee and his team can reverse this cycle by say offering no-strings attached real estate for any pre-funding startup below 5 people with a nominal/affordable rent, they should stop calling themselves friends of startups and technology.
So what it really is about? Deal Flow – plain and simple. San Francsico has been emerging as a center of new web startups for nearly a decade. Over past few years, numerous blog posts have been written about the changing epicenter of web startups from Palo Alto/Mountain View to San Francisco. David Lee of SV Angel noted on Twitter that ”For first time in 20 yrs, most of SV-based @svangel companies are in SF instead of Peninsula. Watershed moment.” SV Angel opened an office in San Francisco, five years ago.
“The business moved, and we’re all waking up to the fact that this is a monumental shift. These forces are long term, and we’re making a bet consistent with that.” Two-thirds of Benchmark’s deals since 2009 have been in San Francisco, he said. [SF Chronicle]
Lewis Cirne, one of my favorite founders who has been backed by Fenton says, “Benchmark is capitalizing on a trend, and it signifies them being ahead of the curve.” Ahem, edit/rephrase. My question is what took them so long? I mean if some of Benchmark’s top investments — Twitter, New Relic Instagram, Zendesk are in San Francisco then it is has taken them three years to figure out the trend. Or is “the new office now” is simply an extension of Benchmark strategy – swoop in to make an investment when a startup/service is starting to gather momentum.
Actually Benchmark isn’t the only VC looking to commit to San Francisco. I have met and talked to at least four other large funds – some from Sandhill Road and some from out of town who are looking to set up shop in SF and try and capture the lightening in a term sheet.
I have seen this movie before. It was more than a decade ago when web startups were the new black. A lot of VCs showed up, made polite noises. Some of them were giants, some of them were new comers. When the music stopped, they left. Like all fair-weather friends. What makes anyone think that it wouldn’t happen again. But hey, today it gets headlines, brings attention and helps win elections…
It has been fun to see Mark Zuckerberg go from being the awkward college dude to being a mega-billionaire. At the end of 2004, I pitched my editors at Business 2.0 a story on Facebook, which at that time was known as Thefacebook.com. I was super excited about Facebook.
At that time, there wasn’t much interest in the company amongst the editors — after all, it was nothing more than a hook-up service. Anyway I threw a temper tantrum and eventually got a story on Facebook into the magazine. This is the final product from early 2005: Scoring a Hit with the Student Body, and I thought that it is opportune to share it on the eve of Facebook IPO.
MySpace isn’t the only startup to turn a Gen Y-based network into a moneymaking business. Mark Zuckerberg, a computer science major at Harvard, last year created a Web version of the freshman facebook–those student directories that serve as dating aids on campuses everywhere. Since it launched in February 2004, Zuckerberg’s website, Thefacebook.com, has become a beehive for more than 2 million students at 430 colleges.
Why? The site is as sticky as MySpace: Students love viewing profiles of fellow students and finding far-flung friends at other universities. They’re also using the site to sell textbooks or find roommates. Thefacebook has far fewer members than MySpace or Friendster, but it already ranks third among social-networking hubs in terms of monthly visitors–4.1 million in March, according to ComScore Media Metrix, compared with Friendster’s 975,000. (MySpace led the pack with more than 11 million.)
That’s why national advertisers like Victoria’s Secret and Paramount are buying banner ads at Thefacebook. The site also generates revenue with localized ads for specific schools and classified ads placed by students selling books or sending birthday greetings. Zuckerberg won’t disclose revenue figures, but other company executives say the site is already profitable. In April, Thefacebook landed $12 million in funding from Accel Partners, one of Silicon Valley’s premier venture capital firms.
‘What makes it so much better than Friendster is that it’s your peers rather than a random assortment of people,’ says Sarah Williams, a freshman at Berklee School of Music in Boston who finds gigs through the site. And, of course, the network functions as a handy reference tool for cross-campus hookups. The ability to check out a profile of that cute girl in your psych class before asking her out? To many students, that’s a service worth paying for.
For Zuckerberg, it’s a job that justifies ditching class. In March he dropped out of Harvard to become Thefacebook’s full-time CEO.
Business 2.0 is gone. The archives remain. And so do memories!
Joyce Kim and I met a long time ago. And then we didn’t meet for a long time. It took David Prager to come up with the brilliant idea that Joyce should be my co-host on The GigaOM Show that ran on Revision 3 network. And thus began a partnership that turned into a friendship.
When I fell sick, and when my mom and my sister left, Joyce made sure I didn’t fall sick again. Today the two of us are like family and of course, we fight like family too. We are both headstrong and both stubborn. We argue and we obsess. But in the end we keep each other honest. No surprise, I have the same relationship with my other sister, who has played a pivotal role in my life. I am blessed to have two sisters who are so incredible and tenacious and caring and giving.
Joyce is a very accomplished, highly educated and more importantly she gave up a lucrative career in law to follow her heart and became an entrepreneur. She navigated her first start-up that focused on K-Pop (Korean pop, if you must ask) Soompie to a successful exit, took a few months off and went surfing. And then came back to team up with I Can Cheezburger founder Eric Nakagawa to start her next startup, Simple honey. Today she announced her company in a blog post.
I first met Eric in Tokyo (where Eric was living) on the inaugural Geeks on A Plane trip over two years ago. We quickly connected on our shared entrepreneurial history – both of us had co-founded passionate community sites that were not born from a business plan. They developed from a personal interest on a random topic that just exploded: lolcats for Eric and K-pop for me.
I am so damn proud of her. Next time anyone is looking for an amazing female founder role model, just ping Joyce and learn the meaning of perseverance. You just might learn what is refusal to fail. She may not have sold her company to AOL or she might not be the COO of the largest social network. But she knows what it takes to start and grow a business. And she does it without getting angry. She does it with a smile.
I know in my gut they are going to be very successful. I know Joyce wouldn’t have it any other way. Good luck guys and god speed guys.
I signed up for LinkedIn a long time ago. I did so, because everyone kept sending me requests and well, my boss at the time wanted me to write about it. I didn’t find it very useful. That was a lifetime ago. I don’t find it useful now. Infact, I rarely visit the website. There has never been any need for me *personally* to use it.
Infact I get so much unwanted email from the service and from people I don’t know and don’t want to know. Today, I got so frustrated with the whole email thing, that I shut down the account. Done! I will give them full credit for making it much easier than say Facebook to delete my account.
Nevertheless, LinkedIn calls itself a business social network, but much like Facebook it is very asocial — my word for any social service that lacks emotion, empathy and understanding of how real people live and use their offerings!
PS: For the record, I am not suggesting anyone else follow suit and do this. However, as Fred Wilson says, finding your voice is a good way to find yourself and be found.
