garytouet

Chris Dixon:

If you are starting a company and wondering why nothing good seems to happen unless you force it to happen, that’s because the world wants to stay the way it is. Customers, partners, and most of all incumbents don’t want to think hard, try new things, or change in any way. The world is lazy and just wants to keep doing what it’s doing.

Ars Technica:

French researchers at Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble, in cooperation with the Centre Technique du Papier, have developed a wallpaper that can block WiFi signals, preventing them from being broadcast beyond the confines of an office or apartment.  But unlike other signal-blocking technologies based on the Faraday cage (which block all electromagnetic radiation), the wallpaper only blocks a select set of frequencies used by wireless LANs, and allows cellular phones and other radio waves through.

Apparently, you’ll be able to use a classic wallpaper on top of it for a better look.

I hope anti-wifi carpets and ceiling paint are in progress.

The New York Times has an interesting article on Zuckerberg and the Facebook story. It is mind-blowing to read about his success and future challenges. He is so young and he built a giant.

The outlines of the Zuckerberg story thus far — the boyhood in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., the Harvard wars over “thefacebook,” the relentless rise in Silicon Valley — are by now well known. But Facebook’s I.P.O. will begin a new chapter — indeed, a new volume — in one of the great business narratives of our time. It will also make Mr. Zuckerberg almost impossibly rich. In an instant, his stake could be worth upward of $18.7 billion.

It’s a good before-bed Sunday story to read.

GigaOm:

A former U.S. Department of Justice lawyer and antitrust expert says Facebook’s purchase of photo-sharing site Instagram will take between four months and one year to clear regulatory hurdles. In the meantime, the deal is effectively on hold.

[…]

If Facebook can have Instagram, it will be a leading player in photo sharing both online and on mobile. (See Om’s explanation here). The FTC is concerned Facebook could become a dominant advertiser on these platforms — and hurt competition.

“Mark and his signature hoodie: He’s actually showing investors he doesn’t care that much; he’s going to be him,” Pachter said in an interview on Bloomberg TV. “I think that’s a mark of immaturity. I think that he has to realize he’s bringing investors in as a new constituency right now, and I think he’s got to show them the respect that they deserve because he’s asking them for their money.”

Should investors be more preoccupied by Zuckerberg’s hoodie or by his projects for Facebook?

A suit would definitely make him more mature and better at managing Facebook. For sure…

Peter Kafka for AllThingsD:

The site was once one of Silicon Valley’s hottest Web 2.0 startups, and there was a period when lots of Web publishers spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to court Digg’s hordes of users. But that time is long gone (if you’re looking for a social/traffic kingmaker, head to Reddit, which used to be dismissed as a Digg wannabe).

Ironic.

Nick Bilton for the NYTimes:

Yet an even more bizarre activity in the Valley than shushing the talk of a bubble is how some start-ups are advised by investors not to make money. This concept might sound ridiculous from a business standpoint, but for investors, it fuels the get-richer-quicker mentality that exists here.

“It serves the interest of the investors who can come up with whatever valuation they want when there are no revenues,” explained Paul Kedrosky, a venture investor and entrepreneur. “Once there is no revenue, there is no science, and it all just becomes finger in the wind valuations.”

It is indeed difficult to put a value on a company that does not have revenues. It makes it easier or less head-spinning to look at valuations that way. There is no tangible base to the valuation so how can you tell if it is overpriced?

Bilton’s continues:

When small start-ups I’ve spoken with do make money, they often find it difficult to recruit additional investment because most venture capitalists — and often the entrepreneurs they finance — are not interested in building viable long-term businesses. Rather, they’re interested in pumping up enough hype and valuation to find a quick exit through an acquisition at an eye-popping premium.

I guess it isn’t true for all investors (I hope so), but it makes a lot of sense. A lot of start-ups out there do not have a business model yet.

Past midnight, in a dimly lighted warehouse jutting into the San Francisco Bay, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger introduced something they had been working on for weeks: a photo-sharing iPhone application called Instagram. What happened next was crazier than they could have imagined.

In a matter of hours, thousands downloaded it. The computer systems handling the photos kept crashing. Neither of them knew what to do.

“Who’s, like, the smartest person I know who I can call up?” Mr. Systrom remembered thinking. He scrolled through his phone and found his man: Adam D’Angelo, a former chief technology officer at Facebook. They had met at a party seven years earlier, over beers in red plastic cups, at the Sigma Nu fraternity at Stanford University. That night in October 2010, Mr. D’Angelo became Instagram’s lifeline.

The recent stories that came out after Instagram’s deal with Facebook have been interesting to read, but the previous three paragraphs seem to be the closest to the reality. It’s been a big ride from that night to the Facebook deal for Systrom and Krieger. For me, it’s important to remember that they found hiccups along the way. It didn’t go as smoothly as we can imagine.

The rest of the NY Times article will tell you more about the helpful connections that played a role in Instragram’s growth. It’s a bit concerning how important Stanford University is, actually.

The New York Times explains the split’s outcomes:

Google is proposing to have three classes of stock. Mr. Brin and Mr. Page will control the super-voting Class B stock, which have 10 votes per share and provide the two co-founders with voting control over Google. The Class B shares are convertible into the current publicly traded Class A shares, which have one vote per share and trade under the symbol Goog.

Now, Google is planning to add a separate nonvoting stock called Class C shares, which will trade publicly under a separate ticker. According to Google, Class C will have all the same rights as Class A shares including the rights to dividends, if and when Google ever pays them.

As a result, if you currently own Google shares, after the stock split you will have twice the number of shares you had before, but your voting power won’t change at all as well as the value of all the shares you have.

It’s all about increasing Brin’s and Page’s power over Google’s management.