] HipMojo.com » Angel Investor Jeff Clavier: Revenue is Noise

Angel Investor Jeff Clavier: Revenue is Noise

Odd how a couple of stories fit together: from CNET’s Rafe Needleman

SoftTech venture capitalist Jeff Clavier is trying to convince start-up companies that their income, if it’s in the $300,000 a month range–a range that most companies made up of three guys and a credit-card funded Amazon S3 account would kill for–is “noise” that distracts them from their potential.

Some folks are outright disagreeing with the argument.

I hate raising the East Coast vs. West Coast style of investing because all VCs are fundamentally similar, but I think this is a West Coast mentality. East Coast investors certainly seem more interested in a company’s path to profitability, let alone their revenues not being noise. But reading Clavier’s comment, I could not help but think of Fake Steve Jobs’ post on Facebook hiring Cheryl Sandberg away from Google.

Not sure if I agree with all of this, mainly due to the last line… but it’s pretty funny, Fake Steve Jobs (the bold and underlined is my emphasis):

You have to remember what Facebook’s core business is about. It’s not about helping people stay in touch with friends or express themselves. It’s not about changing the world or creating an ecosystem for small apps makers. It’s not even about selling ads. Facebook is a vehicle through which a bunch of investors in the Valley hope to turn a small pile of money into a much bigger pile of money by selling shares in the public markets. That is Facebook’s core business. That is its raison d’etre as they say in Latin. This is a company created by, for and about venture capitalists. It’s not a company so much as it’s a narrative. A fable. A fairy tale.

Zuckerberg himself is pretty much incidental to the whole thing except that it makes the story a little better to have a boyish little Harvard dropout (cough Gates cough) in flip-flops and fleece jacket up on stage. (Not as CEO, mind you, because he’ll soon be giving that title to Sheryl Sandberg. Z-Boy will become Chief Innovation Visionary or Chief Strategy Architect or some other meaningless title which in English will translate into “World’s Luckiest Little Bastard.”)

Worse yet, right now Facebook is a friggin Ponzi scheme, with Facebook’s venture-funded apps partners making money primarily by selling ads to, um, Facebook’s other venture-funded apps partners. And voila, like that, everyone’s making money! Can you say shell game? Moreover, Facebook itself is being propped up and kept alive by the Borg, simply so it can serve as a thorn in Google’s side. And frankly the Borg will be happy to keep this thing alive and to help Z-Boy and his backers make obscene billions as long as Facebook saps energy from Google and distracts them and draws away their talent. Z-Boy, clever fellow that he is, is happy to serve as the Borg’s proxy in its war against Google, so long as he’s richly compensated, which he will be. He spotted a war between giants and cleverly turned that to his own advantage. Well played, kid.

Bottom line on the Sandberg hire is that what Zuckerberg and his advisers realize full well is this: IPOs usually boil down to one sentence that investment bankers can use when they call their clients. The one sentence Facebook would really like to have is this: “It’s the next Google.”

Reading the boldfaced part, especially with regards to the reference to underlined Silicon Valley (and not simply investors), maybe my point about East vs. West isn’t wrong after all.

I don’t know… I agree that focusing on revenue is a bit moot. For us for example, worrying too much about running pre-rolls to generate revenue from our millions of streams is indeed secondary to getting as much content embedded in as many high-traffic destination points online… but guess what: unless we have some revenues, we’ll die… so I don’t think either extreme works. You need some revenue, but you should probably not think about revenue alone.

Let’s face it, no self-respecting new media company gets acquired for the income component, all investors look for that capital gain payoff… and I suppose Jeff Clavier is the epitome of that… in all fairness, his track record is good enough that one cannot blame him.

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Posted By: Ashkan Karbasfrooshan | Mar 5th

One Response to “Angel Investor Jeff Clavier: Revenue is Noise”

  1. HipMojo.com » 20 Dumb Things About Web 2.0 Says:
    October 20th, 2008 at 8:21 pm

    […] of the more successful Web 2.0 investors or will eventually be remembered for saying that “revenue is noise“, which then was and remains to this day ludicrous.  As an investor in largely nonsensical […]

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