The Facebook Founders Club never ceases to expand:
Indeed, Mr. Greenspan, who is now 24 and moved to Silicon Valley last year to start a company, appears to be a clear example of a truism in this high-technology region: establishing who is first with an idea is often a murky endeavor at best, and frequently it is not the inventor of an idea who is the ultimate winner.
Mr. Zuckerberg declined to be interviewed, saying through a spokeswoman that he was not sure how to respond. He did not dispute the chronology of events or the authenticity of Mr. Greenspan’s e-mail messages. Mr. Zuckerberg is seeking to dismiss the ConnectU suit.
Mr. Greenspan said that Mr. Zuckerberg’s lawyer contacted him this year in connection with the ConnectU lawsuit but that he had declined a request to serve as a witness, fearing that he would become embroiled in the legal battle.
In an interview at a cafe here this week, Mr. Greenspan said he had mostly made peace with the fact that Mr. Zuckerberg will be the first of the Harvard ’04 graduates to become a billionaire.
If Mr. Zuckerberg did borrow some of Mr. Greenspan’s concepts, he may have simply been working in a grand Harvard tradition. After all, it was a young Harvard dropout, William Gates, and his classmate, Paul G. Allen, who almost three decades earlier copied a version of the BASIC programming language, designed by two Dartmouth college professors, to jump-start the company that would grow into the world’s most powerful software firm.
Read the rest and see our Facebook index here.
Digg this Blog
Share on Facebook
WatchMojo on Twitter
WatchMojo on YouTube
Add to Favorites
WatchMojo NewsletterIf you thought financing rounds were raising eyebrows, here’s a prediction, it’s about to get a lot more interesting, and competitive, starting… now. Part of the reason why is that exits are about to get more competitive.
Tech Crunch points to a press release that $15 billion hedge fund General Atlantic is backing Jon Miller - former CEO of Time Warner’s AOL - and Ross Levinsohn - former CEO of News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media’s roll-up fund. We’d heard a lot about these roll-up funds, and now we’re seeing that move from concept to reality. The challenge, now, is the execution.
Michael Arrington raises a good point: the fund will be competing with Demand Media, what makes that interesting, is that Levinsohn and Demand Media Chairman and CEO Richard Rosenblatt teamed up on Intermix Media’s sale to FOX: the Intermix board brought in Richard Rosenblatt to replace founder Brad Greenspan… and eventually, FIM’s CEO Levinsohn got News Corp. head honcho Rupert Murdoch to sign the big check $580M to Rosenblatt and other Intermix shareholders.
Of course, Intermix’s Myspace was the crown jewel, but the MySpace guys only got $5M in the sale, and Greenspan to this day thinks he and other shareholders were short-changed. Afterwards, Levinsohn basically told Greenspan off, read more on Valleywag’s post, called “Fox interactive head: Brad Greenspan is a loser“.
Not to be outdone, Brad Greenspan, founder of Intermix, has since started LiveVideo.com and been busy buying up assets, he bought video search (Flurl.com) and probably, safe to say, hates both men (Levinsohn and Rosenblatt). He also tried to derail Murdoch’s planned acquisition of Dow Jones, which was beyond ballsy, and ineffective. Expect to see Murdoch try to derail at least some of Greenspan’s plans in the future.
Back to this new fund, by the sounds of the press release, Miller and Levinsohn are:
“to Serve as Advisors to General Atlantic’s Media and Consumer Sector,” but I think by next week you will see news that the gentlemen are launching a new fund and leveraging GA’s far-flung assets and know-how.
According to Anton Levy, Managing Director and head of GA’s Media & Consumer sector, said, “We are excited to be bringing Jon and Ross on board to work with our media and consumer team as we continue to partner with the leading companies in this high growth sector.”
Paid Content adds:
The new fund is called Velocity Investment Group, and among the companies we have heard it is looking at is online video distribution firm Broadband Enterprises. The two have also been talking to numerous other companies, at least a dozen of them according to our sources. The focus initially is platform/distribution companies.
Also, the two have been talking to various investors for while, and among them were Texas Pacific Group. The fund came very close to doing a deal with Warburg Pincus, but Warburg was putting in too many restrictive clauses which the two didn’t agree to, and General Atlantic came in at the last second, our sources tell us.
What’s more noteworthy, in fact, is that to some extent, Levinsohn got shown the exit door by News Corp. and AOL sheepishly fired Miller and replaced him with NBC’s Randy Falco. Guess who this fund will also be competing with?
Media companies like NBC and News Corp.
I am not sure if I should be saying this, but this week I held talks with a couple of media firms who wanted to buy us. Both fantastic businesses, but on my way back, I could not help but think that it was too early to sell and that the demand vs. supply mechanism was in our favor and we should hold out. I might very well never cross any of these men (well, Mr. Levinsohn certainly knows about WatchMojo.com, but I digress), but you are just starting to see the flow of things towards digital, mark my words.
I love this business.
I have no idea who Alan D. Mutter is, but I stumbled onto his site and his post, Print ad sales hit 10-year low, is damning for print media:
After six straight quarters of accelerating declines, newspaper print advertising sales in the first half of this year fell to the lowest level in a decade, according to statistics released today by the Newspaper Association of America.
Print revenues in the first six months of this year totaled $20.3 billion, the lowest since the $19.7 billion in sales recorded in the first half of 1997. Print ad sales in the first half of this year were 8.3% below the depressed level recorded in the same period in 2006.
Although the NAA touted a 19% increase in online ad sales to $796 million in the second quarter of the year in a spin-rich press release on the eve of the Labor Day weekend, print ad sales represented a bit more than 93% of the industry’s total volume of $22.49 billion in the first half of the year.
It’s also, I think, a sign of things to come for TV companies. Read more on that here:
- Understanding TV executives Angst and Envy
- Web Video Represents $150B market cap in 2011, but not for TV companies
- Digital Revenues are Never Incremental for Old Media
- Will TV companies face same fate at Print Companies?
- If You’re Old Media, What Would You Do?
- Vint Cerf is Latest TV Bogeyman (That’s a compliment)
When Valleywag is not promocking (promoting/mocking) Robert Scoble or Jason Calacanis, it publishes interesting commentary or identifies insightful reads [side note, I think I just invented the term promocking.]
Anyway, today, Valleywag points to Paul Graham’s How Not to Die post where he basically talks about what startups need to do to avoid from dying (shutting down) so that they can, well, get rich.
As I read Graham’s piece, I found numerous nuggets of wisdom. I’ll copied and pasted the best ones, but from a personal perspective, all I could think of was a personal experience from last year. Shortly after I started Mojo Supreme, I got attacked personally and legally. Our flagship unit WatchMojo.com was losing money and there was no way to assume that we’d one day, in the context of Graham’s post, “get rich” over it.
So in essence, I had to fight back (in fact increase our burn rate) to defend myself and avoid our company from shutting down, or dying. But the more I had to defend myself to avoid getting killed by the courts, the more I increased the likelihood that we’d die from too much expenditures.
And, if I were successful in defending myself and my company in the courts, then my prize, at least in the short term was essentially losing more money from operations!
My friends thought it was crazy, my family thought I was insane; thankfully, my wife supported me.
Today, it’s obvious that I would do what I did all over again, but at the time, it was anything but obvious.
Anyway, some highlights from Graham’s piece:
A couple days ago I told a reporter that we expected about a third of the companies we funded to succeed. Actually I was being conservative. I’m hoping it might be as much as a half. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could achieve a 50% success rate?
Another way of saying that is that half of you are going to die. Phrased that way, it doesn’t sound good at all. In fact, it’s kind of weird when you think about it, because our definition of success is that the founders get rich. If half the startups we fund succeed, then half of you are going to get rich and the other half are going to get nothing.
If you can just avoid dying, you get rich.
(…)
You may have heard that quote about luck consisting of opportunity meeting preparation. You’ve now done the preparation. The work you’ve done so far has, in effect, put you in a position to get lucky: you can now get rich by not letting your company die.
(…)
We don’t know exactly what happens when they die, because they generally don’t die loudly and heroically. Mostly they crawl off somewhere and die.
For us the main indication of impending doom is when we don’t hear from you. When we haven’t heard from, or about, a startup for a couple months, that’s a bad sign. If we send them an email asking what’s up, and they don’t reply, that’s a really bad sign. So far that is a 100% accurate predictor of death.
Whereas if a startup regularly does new deals and releases and either sends us mail or shows up at YC events, they’re probably going to live.
(…)
When startups die, the official cause of death is always either running out of money or a critical founder bailing. Often the two occur simultaneously. But I think the underlying cause is usually that they’ve become demoralized. You rarely hear of a startup that’s working around the clock doing deals and pumping out new features, and dies because they can’t pay their bills and their ISP unplugs their server.
Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!
If so many startups get demoralized and fail when merely by hanging on they could get rich, you have to assume that running a startup can be demoralizing. That is certainly true. I’ve been there, and that’s why I’ve never done another startup. The low points in a startup are just unbelievably low.
(…)
Startups almost never get it right the first time. Much more commonly you launch something, and no one cares. Don’t assume when this happens that you’ve failed. That’s normal for startups. But don’t sit around doing nothing. Iterate.
(…)I like Paul Buchheit’s suggestion of trying to make something that at least someone really loves. As long as you’ve made something that a few users are ecstatic about, you’re on the right track. It will be good for your morale to have even a handful of users who really love you, and startups run on morale. But also it will tell you what to focus on.
(…)
The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with “but we’re going to keep working on the startup,” you are in big trouble.
(…)
A startup is so hard that working on it can’t be preceded by “but.”
In particular, don’t go to graduate school, and don’t start other projects. Distraction is fatal to startups.
(…)
One of the most interesting things we’ve discovered from working on Y Combinator is that founders are more motivated by the fear of looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars. So if you want to get millions of dollars, put yourself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating.
(…)
So I’ll tell you now: bad shit is coming. It always is in a startup. The odds of getting from launch to liquidity without some kind of disaster happening are one in a thousand. So don’t get demoralized. When the disaster strikes, just say to yourself, ok, this was what Paul was talking about. What did he say to do? Oh, yeah. Don’t give up.
(…)
Indeed, starting a new business is not for the faint of heart… but once things start to roll then it’s the best thing you could ever imagine…
PLAY
