The views and opinions expressed in this blog by Kyle Brady are solely his own, and do not necessarily reflect those of Intuitive Industries LLC, their clients, the sponsors or advertisers of this blog, or other employers Kyle may have.
You might be interested to know that there's two different kind of posts on this blog: "Thought of the Day" and "Normal". The "Thought of the Day" category is a once-a-day random tidbit, usually a funny video or picture, and the "Normal" is just what you'd expect from a blog like this:
Unicorn-Butterfly Soup.
--Kyle
p.s. the subscription options to the left (psst! <---- that way) reflect the same content options
(Me) One of the many people who don’t like you, and find your “startup” attempts pretty worthless.
(Jason) 1. Clearly you don’t hate me, you’re obsessed with me. Why else would you email?
2. Your advice is based on what success exactly?
Best j
(Me) 1. No. I emailed you because I like getting the people I’m offending riled up.
2. a) I’m 20. You’re an old man. I have time.
b) I’d rather have no success than the “success” you’ve had. Training a bunch of monkeys to manually type in the results from Google is not running a startup- it’s a low-level temp agency for manual data entry. And I wouldn’t even begin to call Mahalo, or any other number of Web 2.0 startups, a success.
Not the best.
(Jason) Blahblahblah….
Now consider this: Jason thinks of himself as a god among men, with lots of experience and success that he can rain down upon us from his own slice of Heaven. But when you respond as defensively and immaturely… doesn’t that ruin your credibility?
Just a little.
posted on October 10th, 2008 at 1:58 pm by Kyle - Comments
It’s the Four Horsemen! I wonder if they sign autographs…
So here are some tips on how to cut your Web 2.0 Startup’s costs!
Tip 1: Cut the Crap
You know all those company indoor-skydiving events? Or huge launch parties? How about huge spacious warehouse offices in “posh” San Francisco that you don’t need, and only fill 20% of?
Yep. You guessed it! Stop spending your precious (or not-so-precious depending on how “smart” and “intelligent” your “great idea” is) money on stupid and wasteful things. What happened to the “startups are rough” culture? I remember hearing rumors of working out of garages, the “company” being all of three people, and not having time to do anything but product/company development (including socializing).
Nowadays there isn’t a “wonderful startup” in the Bay Area that doesn’t have “I’m a cool hipster!” office space, 2000% more employees than they actually need, or the “employee mood improvement” accessories like nap pods or free espresso to the end of infinity.
“Oh, man! We are so cool.”
But you probably don’t have to do anything about that, do you? Because all these things are important to the startup culture, they’re critical to success! You obviously can’t make a widget for viewing your zombie pokes on someone’s blog without having hundreds of well rested hipster caffeine robot employees.
So now you have to find a way to make money. Let me suggest not responding with “Google AdSense!” or “We’ll get sponsors!” because you and I both know that won’t work either. You need to find a real way to make money, if that’s even possible.
Even Cartman figured it out.
In the real world, real companies make real products and sell them to real people. Did you know that even happens online sometimes? Or they use their products as a middleman vehicle for other people’s products, or a different one of their own. Again, who knew?
But this probably also doesn’t apply to you either. Not only is no-one going to pay for a “pro” account on your Facebook-but-for-dogs site (Flickr is the exception, not the rule), but you can’t charge people! That goes against all the principles of socialism and Web 2.0! It would be tantamount to treason, probably.
Tip 3: Stop Being Stupid
This third tip is probably the best of them all, and the most valuable to you and your company: fold up shop. Call it quits. Pack up. Go home. Let the fat lady sing.
Whatever euphamism you want to use, I’m suggesting you stop doing what you’re doing. Maybe you can change the world with your Javascript-based social network TI-83 calculator replication website, but then again, you aren’t The President of the U.S. … despite what your mommy told you when you were little.
I made this one myself. Pretty talented, eh?
It’s time for Web 2.0 to die, and I’m all for it. There are some companies that will remain, and some of those may even have a right to (RockYou, Slide, etc. … you don’t even qualify as real companies). But the rest need to go away, even if it 6 months for them to burn through their millions in funding by continuing “growth” (hiring their friends) and “development” (creating APIs).
Fun Times
I’d love to say it’s been a fun ride, but it really hasn’t.
See you on the flipside, where you’re a homeless “idea man”, and I’m not.
p.s. Hopefully this means that alot of the Web 2.0 hypecrowd echochamber dies off. I can always hope that my archnemesis Michelle Failington of TechFlunk disappears soon… maybe even MashablePR too.
— — —
Update (10/11/2008 8:10am PST): I sent an email yesterday to Jason Calacanis to bother him about being qualified for my suggestions, but he didn’t really appreciate it. And responded pretty terribly. So, of course, I made the email public.
posted on October 10th, 2008 at 9:27 am by Kyle - Comments
I’ve been a fan of R/WW for awhile, and have voiced my opinions about you guys going the echo-chamber direction, and I applaud you for avoiding that disaster over the last few months, remaking yourself into something else entirely.
But what, exactly, is the direction you’re going?
You continue to cover startups that have little to no value (to anyone)… mashups of mashups, aggregators of aggregators, etc. And then you have posts like the “Web 2.0 Grizzled Entreprenuers” (or whatever it’s called) that make absolutely no sense… you can’t be in the Web 2.0 world and be anything but happy with sunshine breath, and “riding the economy” is really not important, or even relevant, to these same people. The only thing that matters is where their money comes from, and most of them have enough to go for at least a year, thanks to the investors I’ve previously ridden so harshly for their pack-mentality.
Web 2.0 is dying, and it seems that only a few people are seeing it. Not that it was ever truly “alive”, but the recent economic events have made some realize the insanity of what was/is going on. And this means that your content will change. Again.
So, my suggestion to you is twofold:
Reign in your writers. Just because they have access to a high profile blog doesn’t mean they should go writing whatever comes to mind. Even I don’t do that, and I barely have an audience. The image and brand of RW/W is going to be upheld or destroyed on an individual post basis, and, as O’Reilly proved, one false step in the wrong direction can make a bigger impact than having many great posts.
If you are even remotely involved in the “bleeding edge” of the ‘net, then you’ve probably heard of FriendFeed (I’m not linking to it, find that bag-of-echo yourself). But in case you haven’t, it’s a lifestream aggregator that went a step further and has in-house commenting on every item… it’s the lovebaby of the blogging world right now, and the giant echo chamber it’s a part of really makes me sick.
The pitchfork is intentional.
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned previously that I stopped following my archnemesis TechCrunch (and now Mashable too) because it’s just a bunch of worthless crap, and the names “Twitter” and “FriendFeed” popping up every 3rd post was making me want to vomit. So imagine my surprise this morning when I caught this lovely piece on RW/W, one of my favorite blogs that has been teetering on the edge of echo chamberism.
A service that does what? Repipes FriendFeed? Oh, yes, it’s metadata on metadata!
Data, set a course for Sector 9. Warp speed.
Huh?
To make it simple, when you repipe, aggregate, and comment on an item from any one of those enticing things of Web 2.0 shininess, that’s building metadata around you and that item/object. But when you repipe that, add tags, etc. … that’s building metadata on top of, you know, pre-existing metadata.
Oh Yes Another Interface!
If there’s one thing we learned from Twitter, it’s that you can’t be successful without giving all your data away for free and allowing someone to completely circumvent your UI, and just use you as a database query endpoint. Totally.
Please! Use our phallic-looking API! We implore you!
Which makes complete sense then as to why you would need a filtering system of some sort to put on top of all this aggregating… I mean, honestly, who doesn’t want to see Robert Scoble’s latest Ode to My Awesomeness? Not via his blog though. I want to see it twice-removed from his blog! And I want to see his Twitter post telling everyone he’s got a new blog post!
Insanity
All of this crap is insanity, and I hope it ends tomorrow. And by “ends tomorrow”, I mean that all these investors will wake up 24 hours from now and realize they’ve wasted their money… the end result being they demand their money back from 95% of Web 2.0 under penalty of death.
posted on July 10th, 2008 at 6:56 am by Kyle - Comments
[aka "Funding != Good Idea" or "Funding Doesn't Mean They're Smart"]
I spoke to a recruiter via phone yesterday who was trying to interest me in getting a job with RockYou. When I politely declined, he wanted to know why, and I said something to the effect of “I have no interest in working for companies whose sole existence is, and always will be, dependent on outside funding and other people’s platforms…not to mention those without any real business plans or actual use value”.
His response? A resounding “I don’t think they would have gotten [insert large number here] of funding if they didn’t have value or a business plan.”
Hm. Yes. Quite.
So, out of that lovely event, comes this exciting installment of “Kyle telling you what should already be obvious.”
How VCs Work
Venture Capitalists are well known for investing in things that have either:
Already been funded
Already been proven successful
This isn’t true across the board, but when you look at the subset of VCs that invest in Internet-based “software” companies, the probability of truth gets much closer to 1.
Oh! Lookz! Ah cat copiez itzelfz!
Don’t believe me?
How many fully-funded Twitter clones are there?
Facebook clones?
“Digg killers”?
“Google [search] killers”?
Web 2.0 Is Not Business
Another widely acknowledged nugget of gold is that most “Web 2.0″ properties are not profitable. In fact, most of them have no idea how they could generate a revenue stream even remotely close to their operating costs, other than “oh, well we’ll just put ads on the site!”
Dr. Juice says “tell ‘em, boys”!
Good Idea? Yeah, Right.
One of my biggest pet peeves of the Internet at the moment is the “me too!” atmosphere. If one person does something that becomes popular (note: popular is not the same as successful), or gets a large round of funding, there’s immediately a gaggle of idiots who want to do the same thing, but with some twist.
Alot of good ideas don’t get funded, or even noticed. Why? Because no-one has done it yet, or it’s “too risky”. The big money would rather bet on something other people have bet on before, because it’s “tried and true”. So these groups of people with original ideas trundle on their own for awhile, and sometimes end up with a startup company that took years to put together while they cooked sausages at children’s festivals.
Where the true geniuses work.
Developer’s Platforms
Newsflash: basing your entire “business” (without revenue) around the whims of someone else is stupid, and roughly equivalent to swimming in the ocean while chewing on a giant electrical line that’s dangling from a satellite in orbit.
Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc. can change their APIs, data access levels, or platform structures at any time, for any reason. You want to develop a way to throw Zombie feet at your friend’s pig farms? Great. You want to create a company, and get funded, so you can do random “social activities” with other people through another company’s platform? Right.
Not entirely relevant.
One of the cardinal rules in running web software is that you should control as much of the user experience as possible. This is why Facebook has massive data centers instead of cloud-sourcing to someone like, say, Amazon S3… and you don’t see someone like Google betting the virtual farm on MySpace’s clunky architecture.
People Are Idiots
If you follow that motto, you’ll see the world clearly. Ok, maybe have alot less friends, but you’ll thank me for it. Why? Because once you realize that people are lazy and want to do the least work possible to get fame/success/fortune/whatever, you are able to see the giant flaws in their plans without falling into the potholes containing many fellow sheep.
There’s only two reasons why someone would assume that having funding equates to a “good idea”, a “great business”, a “revenue stream”, or “really smart people”:
They have no idea what they’re talking about
They’re an idiot
Game, set, and match.
Conclusion
So why, in all that is mighty, would anyone assume that an extravagantly funded Web 2.0 “software” company is going to exist in 5 years, be profitable, or even be remotely valuable to real people?
I have no idea.
p.s. If you want to cry and complain and argue that I “have no sources”, then use what little of that brain you may have to do some Google research yourself.
—————–
Update (6/26/2008 4:00am PST): How fitting! Mashable just put up a story about a major Facebook Application “magically disappearing”, and not due to something the app developers did… it either got “accidentally removed” or banned. Hmmm… [see more]
Update (6/26/2008 1:15pm PST):Valleywag picked this up. Nice! And it seems that people agree with me…
posted on June 25th, 2008 at 2:46 pm by Kyle - Comments
