It is every entrepreneur’s dream: start a company, grow to millions of users, sell your company to Facebook for $1 billion.
As you may know by now, that Cinderella story belongs to Instagram, the photo sharing app used by over 30 million people. Say what you want about the company not having a business model, zero revenue, etc. The reality is that internet companies are not defined solely by how much money they’ve made so much as they are by their user base.
(more…)
Photo by SFGate
Awhile ago, I discovered one of my most frequently used Twitter tools in Timely, which automagically posts your tweets for you based on their optimal times. (Quora thread on how Timely works.) Timely was a product built by the folks at Flowtown, a social media marketing company founded by Ethan Bloch and Dan Martell. I thought it would be cool to email Ethan some questions for an interview, and luckily he responded. In our discussion, I asked him about the origins of Timely, Flowtown’s recent evolution, and some of the things he’s learned as a startup founder.
"A shoe?! I get a shoe for being the runner-up?? WTF!"
The final day of Disrupt SF has come to an end. Shaker, a spin-off of sorts of Half-Life but for the “real life interactions”, took the $50,000 prize. I hope they plummet into obscurity as quickly as possible. I enjoyed watching The Matrix trilogy, but never considered living in it. Shudder.
(more…)
It was a rather unexciting day at Disrupt. Most pitches bored me to tears. After awhile, every startup sounded like they were the next Quora. “Oh, so you’re a Q&A/crowdsourced knowledge base? But, I prefer Quora! What makes you any different?”
(more…)
I awoke this morning uncertain if I would attend Techcrunch Disrupt. Foremost amongst my concerns was actually getting into the conference. I did not purchase a ticket beforehand like I was supposed to. I had actually signed up as a volunteer during the weekend, but hadn’t received any confirmation whether my presence was expected. How could I possibly convince the gatekeepers guarding the entrance between me and the technology utopia inside?
News of how one of Airbnb’s hosts had her home completely vandalized and burglarized went viral late last month. It seemed to be almost an inevitability and consequence of placing too much trust to complete strangers for the care of your own home. Who in the right mind would simply rent out their place to a random stranger just to make a quick buck? The anonymity of the Internet reared its ugly head, turning one victim’s life upside down.
(more…)
This past week, I’ve been reading David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect, the book that was based on in 2010′s Oscar-winning movie, The Social Network. Through the first couple of chapters, Kirkpatrick describes the early events in 2004 when Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow Harvard roommates launched Facebook from their dorm room. The service quickly gains traction as they expand across to other colleges in the country including Yale, Stanford, and Columbia. At the forefront of the team’s concerns however, was being able to scale, something that plagued fellow social network FriendFeed’s early days. With ad revenue barely covering the cost of keeping Facebook up and running, the team’s finances hinged at the brink of a major setback.
In Chapter 5′s Investors, we find the small group of Harvard undergrads teamed up with Sean Parker, of Napster fame, in their new Palo Alto digs. As the social network entered the new school year in the fall, the total user count exploded, reaching nearly 1 million users by December.
(more…)
It is easier today to bootstrap a startup than it was a decade ago. Web hosting used to be reserved for big corporations or people who use Benjamins for napkins. Now, anyone from your high school geometry teacher to your newborn child can have their own basic website for little to no cost whatsoever.