Kleiner’s Ellen Pao, the elephant in the room
Kleiner Perkins partner Ellen Pao has unleashed one of Silicon Valley’s juiciest lawsuits in recent memory, alleging discrimination, harassment, and even an out-of-the-box solution to her woes proposed by a colleague: marriage to her harasser.
But Pao didn’t let this awkward legal situation stop her from stepping out to a couple of parties in Palo Alto Thursday night, just days after news of her lawsuit leaked out. That included one held by her employers at Palo Alto’s Reposado, a busy Mexican restaurant, for some of Kleiner’s start-up companies.
There, Pao held court on one side of the room, greeted with hugs and hearty handshakes by a number of start-up entrepreneurs she has worked with. Meanwhile, other Kleiner partners at the bash– including Matt Murphy and Ted Schlein– clutched their drinks and steered clear of their suddenly famous colleague.
At the entrance, two arrivals loudly told the female Kleiner assistants who were greeting guests: “I’m on team Ellen.”
Pao declined to discuss her suit, but did say she was going into work every day and attending board meetings as usual.
Facebook, the most cynical tech giant ever
For all its vaunted idealism, Silicon Valley can be just as cynical as any other area of commerce. The tech companies set up to profit from spam and search-engine trickery are too numerous to count. But Facebook’s short history makes one thing clear: There has never been a tech company that built so much fortune from the exploitation of ordinary people while giving so little in return.
Yes, Microsoft was vilified – and rightly so – for crushing competitors and forcing customers into an inferior operating-system software, but its iron-fisted dominance helped shape an immature and inchoate computer-software industry into a single standard that made PCs everyday devices in offices and homes. Microsoft’s brutal strong-arm tactics were directed at rivals. Its sin against its customers was that its software, for decades, just wasn’t that good.
Facebook, by contrast, built the best social network of its time, so good it left rivals like MySpace in the dust. And that should have been enough to make Facebook a Silicon Valley success story. Once it came time to make money, Facebook exploited its users’ personal data to a degree that no company had ever achieved before.
Over the years, Facebook has curtailed some of its more blatantly exploitative practices, but only after a string of controversies forced its hand. It reluctantly let users control their privacy settings, and then it had to simplify those settings after many found them unnecessarily complex. (Some say they’re still too complex.)
Facebook also backed off changes in its terms of service that allowed it to license users’ data even after they left the site. But even now, regulators are objecting to Facebook’s insistence that users grant the company a “non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license” to any photo, video or passing thought they see fit to publish on the site. Facebook has not only redefined the social Web – it’s redefining the very definition of “sharing.”
Even if Facebook has lost some privacy battles, it still seems to be winning the war on private moments. It has, as one of its earliest backers wished, conditioned users to accept the creepiness of advertisers stalking their personal lives. And Facebook just keeps raising the creepiness bar.
But why must we users be used this way? It’s not because we all long to be closet exhibitionists for Madison Avenue but only because it pays a handsome profit to Facebook and its early investors. We are digital sharecroppers, but it’s not our work lives being exploited for the gain of others, it’s our personal lives. One out of every 5 cents of revenue Facebook brings in goes to its bottom line. We have handed the fruits of our labor over to Goldman Sachs, Digital Sky, Accel Partners and Zuckerberg himself. And in return we get memories that Facebook expects to license and sub-license.
Less TV? Go ahead. Make my day.
The other day Glenn Britt, the chief executive of Time Warner Cable, got on the wrong side of history. He stuck with the television networks. On Monday he spoke out against Dish Network’s “Auto Hop,” which allows viewers to avoid the lifeblood of the TV ecosystem: ads. As Brian Stelter of the New York Times reported (emphasis added):
Mr. Britt said that if such ad-skipping became more prevalent, the reduction in ad revenue would be made up through higher subscriber fees or a lower total amount of production of television.
It got me to thinking. Maybe scaling back should be a promise instead of a threat. Television doesn’t serve social and cultural needs as it did generations ago, but what we get from it should be much better. And we already know how it can be, from the Web- and cable-savvy people disrupting a medium that disrupted everything.
When I was a kid I had access to seven TV channels – which was a lot and thanks to my living in New York City. Most places had at most three: network affiliates of CBS, NBC and ABC. Some places in the United States could pull in only one of them. And – horrors! – they actually went off the air for a few hours every day at around 2 a.m.
Now, we have a 500-channel universe. We have access to hundreds of programs, 24 hours a day, and yet there are no more memorable programs produced these days than in the Golden Age (and some may argue, even fewer). By cutting back on the pursuit of infinite programming, creative people can again do creative things, when the muse hits. TV should be more like the theater: It happens when it happens for as long as it happens.
First, let’s dispense with the fiction that disrupting the business model always destroys the business. We’ve heard all this before, and it’s always been wrong. TiVo didn’t kill TV. VHS didn’t kill Hollywood. Since the advent of DVRs there is more TV programming than ever, and anyone who still thinks that VCRs, DVD players and even torrents have killed Hollywood need only look at the numbers for The Avengers – which will only be multiplied once it goes from theaters to Blu-ray players.
Comcast turns the landline into mobile phone
Comcast, the largest U.S cable operator, is pushing ahead with its drive to transform the way Americans live with a range of new communications and video services launched at this year’s Cable Show in Boston.
The latest is a new service called Voice 2go, part of its Xfinity Voice landline phone service, which offers lots of the features customers have become used to with cellphones.
The new features are based within a new Xfinity Connect mobile app that works on iPhones, iPads and Android phones. It enables Xfinity Voice customers to make free calls within a WiFi network — which is even more useful now that the Comcast and several other operators have enabled a common WiFi network across major U.S. cities. It also allows customers to use the service on 3G and 4G phones without eating up valuable minutes. As part of this it also enables free text messaging.
Another key feature is a virtual number offer similar to Google Voice, so a user can have up to four additional numbers within a home at no extra cost.
All this is great stuff for consumers who find these kinds of features helpful. But it might also help allay fears of regulators, who are examining whether a Verizon wireless deals with Comcast and other cable operators will hurt competition. This way, Comcast is giving them an alternative to signing up with wireless competitors.
ESPN’s John Skipper doesn’t see any benefits in new TV models – yet.
ESPN chief John Skipper is happy to talk to any of the so-called new over-the-top Web video players surfing around the fringes of the cable TV business. But he doesn’t see any major deals happening soon — if ever.
In a conversation with Reuters at this year’s cable show, Skipper was blunt about his skepticism over the idea his network – the best paid in the business according to SNL Kagan data — could work with a new Web partner, a tie-up that may in some way threaten the cozy $100 billion a year cable programmer-distributor relationship which feeds the entire industry.
“We have a significant stake in maintaining the current model. There’s no advantage to us in new models that undercut what we have today,” said Skipper, speaking from the NCTA Cable Show in Boston.
ESPN pays tens of billions of dollars every year in sports rights fees to major sports and college leagues — much of which is live programming that doesn’t lend itself naturally to the subscription video-on-demand model popularized by the likes of Netflix and Amazon, he points out.
The Disney-owned sports network is the envy of the cable television business, and several major rivals, like News Corp and Comcast Corp’s NBC Universal, would love to replicate its model.
Skipper was careful to play down recent bullish comments about ESPN’s strengths versus potential rivals. But he pointed out that, while he respects his rivals, it would be difficult for them to build a new sports network to the size, scale and fees that ESPN enjoys today.
He also disputed the idea that the rising cost of sports could one day see ESPN forced onto a sports tier.
Facebook’s passive-aggressive friendship
We are witnessing a fascinating changing-of-the-guard moment in tech. The old Internet, represented this week by once-mighty Yahoo, is fumbling with another leadership crisis it must solve before it can even think about restoring some semblance of relevance. The new Internet, Facebook, is ruled by a young man in a hoodie who is on the verge of creating a massive public company that, as was the nascent Yahoo back in the early ’90s, will be an Internet darling longer on potential than track record, but running hard on an open field.
The common thread might seem to be the “If it’s big, it’s gotta be BIG” illusion that got us all in trouble at the turn of the millennium, when Internet investment hysteria equated today’s eyeballs with tomorrow’s profits. But it’s always about the profits, and the people who promise them. This time that person is Mark Zuckerberg, who as the books on the Facebook IPO closed Tuesday, well in advance of Friday’s first trade, seems to have convinced Wall Street that his seven-year-old company could be worth more than $100 billion — the richest-ever launch in Silicon Valley.
When you value your company at 100 times revenues, investors are banking on the belief that Zuckerberg has perfected the unstable compound that is social abandon and advertiser hunger.
Search remains pretty much the top use of the Web (as opposed to the Internet) – the gateway to everything else. The other big use is now social, which was invented on the Web but whose chops will be tested in the app schoolyard that is the mobile Internet.
But thus far, advertising works better on search than social. Google makes about $40 billion a year, almost 100 percent on ads. Facebook is reporting last year’s revenues at just north of $1 billion $3.7 billion. Google has a market cap of roughly $200 billion – so it’s twice as big as Facebook’s IPO valution and makes 40 times the money more than 10 times the money.
While Facebook is very successful, the question is: at what? It’s great at creating a community of time-wasting freeloaders, but it needs to be good as an advertising medium to be worth anything to the institutions falling all over themselves to get in on the ground floor of its stock.
To compare the new and the old way of tech, let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that there are two kinds of Internet companies – Googles and Facebooks.
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.
Wireless industry at annual convention bemoans lack of consumer trust
The wireless industry is one of the least trusted businesses among U.S. consumers ,and network operators need to improve their reputations as they look to provide sensitive services like mobile payments or health monitoring, according to the chief executive of the No. 3 U.S. mobile provider Sprint Nextel.
Sprint CEO Dan Hesse cited statistics regarding the wireless industry from the Reputation Institute Pulse Index annual survey during his keynote at the CTIA — The Wireless Association annual U.S. wireless convention in New Orleans.
“Even cable and oil industries rate higher with consumers than we do,” Hesse said. “Its very troubling.”
Hesse, who himself is facing a push by some shareholders to vote him off the board at Sprint’s shareholder meeting next week, said he did not know why mobile has such a bad reputation. But, he said, it urgently needs to improve as it offerings tap further into people’s lives in areas such as financial services, health and home security.
“Trust is important. There has never been a device as personal as a smartphone,” said Hesse who participated in a panel of the top executives from the top four U.S. mobile providers.
In his presentation, Philipp Humm, chief executive of No. 4 U.S. operator T-Mobile USA, showed a video advertisement that portrayed his company’s network as being substantially faster than the Apple Inc iPhone on the network of bigger rival AT&T Inc . AT&T’s mobile chief Ralph de la Vega pointed to the advertisement for a suggestion as to why customers might feel they cannot believe U.S. operators.
Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s forgivable sin
We’ve all had a little time to breathe after the disclosure last week that Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson embellished his resume. Despite saying he received an undergraduate computer science degree, he in fact did not. And while rising through several positions of increasing responsibility for years, he allowed those vetting his suitability to believe otherwise.
So far Yahoo has said Thompson was guilty of an “inadvertent error” and that it was reviewing the matter. Third Point, the activist shareholder who revealed what had apparently been hiding in plain sight and is trying to grab spots on Yahoo’s board, is now demanding that Yahoo fire Thompson.
Is this what’s best for Yahoo? I doubt it. Is Scott Thompson what’s best for Yahoo? I don’t know. It’s too early to say. And that’s the point.
The company is on its third CEO in as many years, and he’s been on the job one day short of four months. You don’t get from here to there overnight, no matter who’s in charge, and you don’t get from here to there at all if you are constantly taking detours.
Yahoo can afford to have a guy at the helm who didn’t get a CS degree but said he did, but it can’t afford to aimlessly cast about, as it has now for nearly a decade. Unlike some CEOs, Thompson isn’t accused of sexual harassment or running a secret hedge fund within the company. There is something to be said for a bit of calm and a period of continuity.
Thompson was hired for whatever talents and abilities he’s displayed since college, not for ostensibly logging computer lab time in his teens. Sure, lying on your resume is not a good thing, and it shouldn’t be rewarded. But in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t rate.
Netflix: The New Arch-Frenemy
The Albanian Army is coming everyone, watch out!
We’re only into week 1 of big media companies reporting their quarterly earnings and the most prominent name hasn’t been CBS Corp, Time Warner Inc, Comcast Corp, and Viacom — instead it’s all been about Netflix.
Pretty much on each of these companies’ conference calls, the $4 billion company from Los Gatos, California was a key reason for a boon to the bottom line by supplying ’found money’ by digital licensing of shows that would have been gathering dust on a shelf somewhere in Hollywood. But also on the calls for several of the same companies, Netflix was seen by analysts as a threat to their future. Let’s not forget the four who reported this week have combined market value of over $160 billion.
At CBS on Tuesday, which most people see as a broadcast and billboards advertising company, the first quarter was given a nice bump from its licensing of old CBS shows like”‘Cheers” but also by newer cable shows like Showtime’s “‘Dexter” and “Sleeper Cell”. Here’s the ever ebullient CBS CEO Les Moonves telling analysts on Tuesday how great Netflix and other copycats are:
“Content is forever and quality content never goes out of style. Nowhere is this more evident than the way we monetize our content digitally. In addition to the deals we struck with Netflix and Amazon, other online video distributors are looking to license our library content. These deals are having a big impact on our financial results, adding meaningful, very high margin dollars to our bottom line”
