data.insights.ideas

Phew. That’s my first breath I’ve taken since I landed back in New York City on Tuesday morning at 3AM EST. For nearly a week, I was in San Francisco for the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference 2009 and other meetings throughout the Bay Area. You can take a look at the agenda [PDF] on their site (although it was nearly impossible to find online without an invitation to the conference - which, fortunately, I received).

I’m going to take more of a 50k foot Jason Calacanis approach to this piece, as there’s been a lot on my mind since setting foot back on the East Coast. In no particular order:

• “We’d rather be overspecialized than overdiversified in the way do business” - Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos of Netflix, Inc. I sat in Ted’s breakout session and the light went off for me: simplicity of execution is key in today’s connected web. Sure, there are the bigger players out there like Facebook and Google with lots of diversified offerings but I look at Twitter and think of evolution and simplicity. Netflix is kicking butt right now because they focused on doing one thing and doing it well when they started years ago and are now a juggernaut in the industry. Your scope and operations may be small at first but your vision and mission can be the size of the world. You’ll get to scale as long as clear execution is aligned.

• Interesting VC panel with three stage size investors: Ron Conway (don’t really need an introduction here to Ron, but check out CrunchBase), Bill Gurley (early- to mid-stage investor at Benchmark Capital) and Jay Hoag (later stage at Technology Crossover ventures). According to Ron, “Deal quality has gone up in this economy but deal quantity has gone down at least 10x.” VCs like Ron and Bill are still getting 3-4 new pitches a day through trusted referrals but are increasingly looking up to entrepreneurs to help stimulate and lift us from this downward financial trend. According to Bill, “For some reason here in Silicon Valley, people have no idea of QQ and the success of Tencent.” I couldn’t agree more; although it was quite interesting to see some members of Tencent’s management team in the same room with Bill when he said this. I asked a question about the future of e-commerce in the years to come while keeping in mind the juggernauts of Amazon, Inc. and Zappos in mind: “Where do VCs see innovation coming from, specifically on the e-commerce side of the business?” All agreed that e-commerce would be big this year but prefaced that customer service is going to be critical for success. Ron brought up Zappos and the way they meticulously operate their customer service department. Like any business, and even more so in e-commerce, pay attention to your customer. Not surprising, VCs still have money they are sitting on and need to deploy. However, it’s a totally different funding environment than even 12-16 months ago. It’s out there, but you need to work even harder for it.

• The CFO of Yahoo! did a lunch keynote on Wednesday only to get fired the next day.

• I’m very intrigued by the Priceline business model, especially now. Jeff Boyd, their CEO, talked about an ever important and pertinent channel for both buyers and suppliers looking for the best deals on airfare. At their current scale, Priceline can satisfy both ends of the classic two-sided market and are doing it well with compelling flights and prices. Price-sensitivity, according to Jeff, is the most important aspect to consumers when looking for flights domestically or internationally.

• I have a lot of respect for Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision3 for speaking his mind during the Online Video Panel. For Jim, TV is dead and the networks that produce shows are going to slowly fade away. Paul Graham just wrote about this yesterday that covers many points Jim raised. More on Graham below, but on a different topic.

• eBay has a near equal split of revenues coming in from fixed price auctions and traditional auction prices. Skype, said CEO John Donahoe and CFO Bob Swan, is a top priority this year for eBay on the topic of integration. An aside: speaking with conference attendees (mainly hedge funds, LPs and capital asset managers), I noticed that there was an interest in hearing more about PayPal as many feel it could entirely spin-off from eBay and do exceptionally well.

• The Social Networking Panel was fun. CEOs and COOs of Eventful, Yelp, Tangle and Zynga were there and all understood the imperative of the space right now: engagement. Monetization was of course a concern from the audience, but all agreed that social networking and social media isn’t ready to directly monetize their applications right now. As Mark Pincus of Zynga discussed, Facebook really helped the ecosystem out in a big way when they released Platform in 2007. Developers can now produce applications and get paid for them. (I asked a question about Facebook Payments, which was supposed to roll out at f8 where I saw Mark prior to GSIT09, and if this was the way to really monetize social networks). E-commerce, according to the panel, can be the killer application in 2009 for social media.

• Ellen Levy, VP or Corporate Development at LinkedIn (and former VC at Benchmark), thinks social commerce, specifically group-buying (or tuangou) will explode this year.

• ZipCars are sweet. I drove a Volvo S40 on the 101 down to Palo Alto and back for two days out of the trip.

• If you’re a startup in Northern California, or someone who is interested in startups, entrepreneurship and social media, you should check out Startup2Startup run by Dave McClure. Visitors, like myself, are always more than welcome.

• Peet’s iced coffee destroys Dunkin Donuts here on the East Coast. They also have super strong Early Gray loose leaf tea. The strength can be overwhelming.

• If you’re building a technology company, you should (more than likely) move to Silicon Valley. Not only do you have an amazing talent pool among engineers and a relatively stable ecosystem of capital lenders, you have a support group of other technology companies in the area. But let me be clear about one thing and list a meager request, as it was brought up time-after-time when I told folks I’m from New York City: if you’re a startup, you don’t need to move to Silicon Valley just because you’re a startup. I’m not arguing that you don’t have great weather, don’t have amazing driving roads or don’t have an awesome entrepreneurial environment, but seriously, the constant and incessant echo-chamber is killing innovation. Stop (Paul Graham on building a Silicon Valley) it (the Hacker News discussion on PG’s post). Why not build your startup in New York City?

• I like the New York MoMA space better than San Francisco’s.

• See below for a Scribd embed on Goldman Sachs’ top Internet and Technology trends for 2009.

March 05, 2009, 11:45am

If you live or are interested in living in New York City, do yourself a favor and read this post first followed by this captivating discussion here.*

On money in NYC:

“Maybe its not all about money, but its definitely more about money. Coming from Wisconsin and working in Manhattan, I find my midwestern frugalness is completely alien to people. Time is money here, there is no doubt about it. Walking three blocks and taking a subway ride gets thrown out the window in favor of a $20 cab ride. Its the small stuff but it adds up. When a city suffers a shortage of BMWs after Wall Street bonuses come out, its hard to say its not about money.”

On rent in NYC:

“While rent is “extreme” for people who don’t live here, you should also consider that we generally don’t have the same expenses as people in the burbs or elsewhere. We don’t own cars, we don’t buy gas, etc. That right there knocks $500-750 off your living expenses. Furthermore, you need to consider rent in NYC as a culture tax because no where else in the world will you find anything remotely similar in terms of fashion, design, art, food, etc. You might think you’re approximating it with the Olive Garden in suburbia, but you aren’t even close.”

On finding talented software engineers in NYC:

“Frankly, it’s almost impossible to find good engineers in NYC. The banks do take them all, that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to start up in the city, it is just harder.”

On Madison Ave. agency life in NYC:

“I’ve worked in such environments, and as much as I enjoyed the work when I was able to do it, the reality was that we wound up wasting a lot of time spinning our wheels because we accidentally stepped on each other toes. As a result, I wasn’t able to do the work I wanted to do, and was hired to do, most of the time that I was there. So the affection wore off, and I gave up and left once I saw the writing on the wall.”

On Silicon Valley in NYC:

“The thing is, any reasoning that assumes Silicon Valley is where it’s at ignores all the TechCrunch articles about “the crisis in venture capital” and the inability of the VCs to find companies that need their money to lift off at all in the commodity-hardware/open-source-software era. It’s very, very unlikely that the Valley-centric monoculture of the past will continue to characterize the startup scene. NY has a startup scene, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Edinburugh, London, every place I’ve been to or met people from in the last ten years has a startup scene. Even Santa Fe, New Mexico, an isolated mountain city of only 60,000 people, counting daytime commuters, has a startup scene.”

*It also helps if you’re interested in technology and a startup scene. :)

July 08, 2008, 10:17pm

Hiring is Obsolete

Paul’s essay is nearly three years old at this point, but his insight is extremely acute for Generation Y.

July 06, 2008, 10:44pm