from MediaFile:
Instagram’s Facebook filter
The startup had millions of users, but, from the beginning, just one customer.
The predominant way of interpreting Facebook’s billion-dollar purchase of Instagram, in light of the social-networking giant's forthcoming IPO, is that Mark Zuckerberg had to pick up the photo-sharing app to boost his company’s mobile engagement. That would allow him to guard the mobile flank against incursions from Google, Twitter, and whatever other social-media tools might next arise.
That may be true – and it may even be the way Zuck thought about the deal when he swallowed hard and ponied up the purchase price. But that way of analyzing Facebook’s pickup, and the pickup of dozens of other startups, not just by Facebook but by Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and others, is probably not telling the whole story. Here’s a different theory, one that better describes the tech world that we, the users of the Internet, now inhabit: Instagram may have had millions of us as its users, but it was really built for just one customer: Facebook.
Silicon Valley, for too long, has confused the issue of what it means to be a user of a website, service or app, and what it means to be a customer of the app. Intuitively, you’d think they would be one and the same: The person using the app is the person consuming the app. But increasingly, apps are being made to grab the attention of the hegemonic companies in tech. Whatever it takes to get bought.
Sure, startup CEOs are careful to refer to their user bases as just that – users – but even when money changes hands, those users are cattle to be herded toward a cell on a venture capitalist’s spreadsheet, to help the VC decide whether to fund another pivot, engineering acquisition, rack of servers, whatever. Users are just another dart, basically, that startups have to hurl at the bull's-eye and ensure success.
A colleague of mine tells a story: You can tell when a tractor was made to be purchased by a farmer, and you can tell when a tractor was made to be purchased by a corporation to be used by its employees. Tractors whose users are also the customers come equipped with every convenience, from a satellite radio to Wi-Fi to all the cupholders a farmer could dream of. They drive well, and their controls are intuitive, because that’s what the average tractor driver wants, and what the tractor competition provides. Tractors bought by companies, for earthmoving, rock breaking and the like, come equipped with nothing but a hard seat and a prayer. Employees – mere users – don’t get any say on the amenities, or lack thereof.
from Paul Smalera:
Facebook.coop
Facebook shouldn't pay its users. Its users should pay to own Facebook.
“Facebook was not originally created to be a company,” founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote in his letter to investors announcing the IPO of his already hugely successful and profitable company. “It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.”
Facebook has succeeded wildly, despite internal admonitions that its “journey” is only 1 percent finished. Journalists have latched onto Zuckerberg’s statement that Facebook wants to “rewire” the way the world works. In a world of thousands of self-anointed “social media experts,” only Zuckerberg can claim to have basically invented what the world thinks of as social media. He has etched himself into the timeline of human innovation.
Pity then, that Zuckerberg hasn’t turned his talents or attention toward Facebook’s financial underpinnings. After all, an IPO? How ho-hum can he get? If Mark really wants to accomplish his social mission with Facebook, he should share the company’s ownership with the people who helped him create it. Not just his Harvard contemporaries. Not just the programmers. Not even just the venture capitalists.
I’m talking about us. All of us. The users. Facebook should be a user-owned, user-managed company, run for the benefit of users. For the Facebook, by the Facebook. The company should be a cooperative.
Before I explain further, let me lay out the case in four simple points:
For what it’s worth, the largest co-operative in the world, The Co-operative Group, had £11.9 billion in revenue last year and has 6 million members.
How home prices helped kill the first tech boom
The late 1990s was a wild time in Silicon Valley. The NASDAQ was soaring, and seemingly anyone could start a company, stick a .com at the end of its name, put together an IPO and retire a millionaire. The great boom ultimately took on a speculative character that led to wasted investments and the collapse of many poorly-grounded operations. But it was rooted in a surge of not-unrealistic optimism about the potential of the internet to change the world of business.
Among the striking features of the era, one of the most startling is this: the rate of high-tech entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley seems to have been below the national average from 1996 to 2000, according to a recent analysis of business creation during the tech boom. And from the late 1990s to the early 2000s — after the bust — Silicon Valley’s rate of high-tech entrepreneurship actually increased. How can this be? How is it that during the first great boom of the internet era, Silicon Valley was less of a hotbed for new firm formation than the country as a whole?
Economists Robert Fairlie and Aaron Chatterji suggest that the answer lies in the extremely tight labor market conditions that prevailed at the time. The tech boom was remarkably good for Silicon Valley workers. Average earnings rose by nearly 40% from 1997 to 2000 — more than twice as fast as the increase for the country as a whole. Non-salary compensation also soared, thanks to the popularity of stock options and the skyrocketing value of equity in tech firms. These generous pay increases made it unattractive for workers to leave established companies to strike out on their own. Entrepreneurship fell because life on salary was too lucrative to risk self-employment.
Why was pay so high? Rising productivity was a big reason, as were expectations (some more reasonable than others) of high and rising profitability across the tech sector. But these factors could just as easily have driven an increase in new firm formation and employment as a rise in salaries. Silicon Valley experienced more of the latter than the former because workers were scarce. During the late 1990s, the unemployment rate across Silicon Valley dropped well under 3%, eventually sinking to nearly half the national level. There was essentially no surplus labor in the whole of the region. Firms therefore had to bargain hard to hire qualified workers, and this meant giving up a substantial share of firm surplus in the form of salary, benefits, and profit-sharing. That, in turn, made it more attractive to be a worker than an entrepreneur.
And this brings us to the crux of the matter: why was the Silicon Valley labour market so tight? If the unemployment rate was so much lower than it was elsewhere in the country, and if compensation was rising so much more rapidly than elsewhere in the country, why weren’t people pouring into Silicon Valley from elsewhere in the country? More remarkably, why were people moving in the opposite direction?
If you can believe it, Silicon Valley’s main metropolitan centers were losing residents to other parts of the country during the Dot Com boom. From 1998 to 1999, for instance, San Francisco and San Mateo counties each lost a net of about 10,000 residents to other parts of the country. Santa Clara County, the heart of the Valley, lost a net of 30,000 residents. For the decade as a whole, the losses were even more substantial; roughly 176,000 more residents of Santa Clara county moved out than moved in during the 1990s. The Silicon Valley labor market was tight because even as wages were soaring, residents were decamping for other locations.
These departures weren’t simply workers without the skills to benefit from the rise of Dot Coms. The tech industry was flourishing around the country. The problem wasn’t an absolute shortage of talent. The problem was that the talent couldn’t be attracted to the heart of the boom.
I do not see the sense in high property tax as a deterrent to speculation. Only a speculation tax can affect speculation, otherwise, the rest of homeowners would be subsidizing speculative activities. My complain with property tax is that it is too high, and gets annual increases even though home prices are falling. A person is required to individually sue for adjustment and bear the burden to prove that home value is less, which of course requires new appraisals and also money wasted on legal fees. The price fluctuations are widespread, not individual, so across the board adjustments would be appropriate. The property owners are being victimized by the greed of local government in the present system.
The death and resurrection of the tech IPO
– Eric Auchard is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –
The U.S. venture capital industry is desperate to repair the market for initial public stock offerings, but reviving the goose that once laid hundreds of golden eggs may not get very far.
The National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) this week set out its comprehensive plan to revive the IPO market and the heady investment returns that once fueled the tightly knit venture capital industry’s success.
From October through March, there were no venture-backed IPOs in the United States — the first time on record of no venture IPO activity for two consecutive quarters.
The NVCA plan is entitled “The 4-Pillar Plan to Restore Liquidity to the U.S. Venture Capital Industry.” Institutions at every step in the process that turns bright business ideas into publicly traded companies come in for criticism for the decline of the IPO market.
But start-up entrepreneurs and their venture capital backers largely have themselves to blame for why public markets have become gun-shy about buying into IPOs.
There is now a noticeable dearth of entrepreneurs building companies with differentiated strategies and sustainable business models. Hot start-ups are now far more often built to be sold to established firms. And when good ideas emerge, VCs flood the market with a slew of copycats, making it hard for true pioneers to succeed.
By the way, I don’t believe in the resurrection of Jesus, Krishna or Ossyrus/Horace. Why would I believe in the resurrection of any financial mechanism or industry. Is the fertility cult of the “Bull” some religious metaphor for “Bull Market”capitalism? Or is it the other way around?
