Search Results for: startup

How Much Tech Can One City Take?

Longreads Pick

The takeover of San Francisco by tech companies prompts some soul-searching by Talbot, a longtime resident and veteran of the first dotcom boom as founder of Salon.com:

“One recent Friday evening, a single mother named Fufkin Vollmayer found herself at a Shabbat service started by two young Jews who work in the tech sector. The service, known as the Mission Minyan, is held each week at the Women’s Building, in the heart of San Francisco’s hottest neighborhood. The fortysomething Vollmayer, who was raised in the Haight-Ashbury by an activist mother, is the kind of vibrant, idiosyncratic personality that defines San Francisco (she took her first name from the band manager in Spinal Tap, for reasons that made sense at the time).

“The night she attended the Mission Minyan service, most of her fellow worshippers were successful digital wizards, and all were products of elite schools and seemed single-mindedly focused on the business of tech. As the startup chatter droned on, Vollmayer finally blurted out, ‘What about giving something back?’ A deep silence fell over the room. No one responded. After the embarrassment faded, the conversation returned to business as usual.

“‘Maybe it’s youth—the folly of youth,’ Vollmayer mused to me later. ‘The group that night was clearly about 15 years younger than me. If you’re young and rich, do you really think much about the implications of the work you do and the money you make?'”

Published: Sep 20, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,504 words)

An excerpt from Stross’s new book, which goes inside Y Combinator, Paul Graham’s Silicon Valley startup incubator:

The Kalvins are attempting an improbable thing, making a case for a nondigital product: ‘Having a physical product that you flip through and have on your coffee table and show your friends—it’s real­ly valuable! We’ve actually bought photo books for our friends and family. It sucks because you have to spend hours making them, finding the photos.’ Every dorm has to prepare one each year, pay a printer $20 a copy, and buy at least a hundred.

Graham returns to his still-unanswered question: ‘Where does this expand?’

A Kalvin suggests offering a book based on your personal calendar and Foursquare check-ins. Or your tweets for the year.

‘You’re not serious, that people are going to print up tweets from last year?’ asks Trevor Blackwell, who is in his early 40s, about the same age as the other three founding partners. He too has a day job, as the chief executive of Anybots, the robot company that then shared its building with Y.C.

‘Actually, I have a tweet book,’ says one of the Kalvins.

“Who Wants to Be a Billionaire?” — Randall Stross, Vanity Fair

More Vanity Fair

Who Wants to Be a Billionaire?

Longreads Pick

An excerpt from Stross’s new book, which goes inside Y Combinator, Paul Graham’s Silicon Valley startup incubator:

“The Kalvins are attempting an improbable thing, making a case for a nondigital product: ‘Having a physical product that you flip through and have on your coffee table and show your friends—it’s real­ly valuable! We’ve actually bought photo books for our friends and family. It sucks because you have to spend hours making them, finding the photos.’ Every dorm has to prepare one each year, pay a printer $20 a copy, and buy at least a hundred.

“Graham returns to his still-unanswered question: ‘Where does this expand?’

“A Kalvin suggests offering a book based on your personal calendar and Foursquare check-ins. Or your tweets for the year.

“‘You’re not serious, that people are going to print up tweets from last year?’ asks Trevor Blackwell, who is in his early 40s, about the same age as the other three founding partners. He too has a day job, as the chief executive of Anybots, the robot company that then shared its building with Y.C.

“‘Actually, I have a tweet book,’ says one of the Kalvins.”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Sep 10, 2012
Length: 20 minutes (5,153 words)

A startup keeps searching for its winning formula:

While their neighbors toiled away, building unglamorous businesses, Justin.tv’s March 19, 2007, launch became an immediate sensation. The San Francisco Chronicle did a front-page story. Ann Curry, in an excruciating Today show interview, lectured Kan. “Fame, I have to tell you, Justin, has a price,” she said. But it was all fun, at first. Kan took the camera with him to the park, to business meetings, even to bars, where it made for awkward small talk. When one young woman took him back to her place one evening, he left the camera in the dark outside the bedroom; the gang back at Justin.tv headquarters overdubbed the video stream with audio from a porn movie. On his walk back to his apartment, Kan encountered a group of cheering viewers.

‘If this doesn’t scare the shit out of TV networks, it’s only because they don’t understand it yet,’ Graham told the San Francisco Chronicle. On NPR’s All Things Considered, he declared: ‘Their ultimate plan is to replace television.’ It was fortunate for television, then, that Kan and his friends knew very little about running a business. ‘We had one week’s worth of a plan,’ says Kan, laughing at what he describes as his youthful folly. ‘Today, I have an understanding of the world, and of the entertainment and media industries, of how people consume content,” he tells me. “But at the time, I had no idea.’

“The Many Pivots Of Justin.tv.” — Andrew Rice, Fast Company

More from Rice

The Many Pivots Of Justin.tv

Longreads Pick

A startup keeps searching for its winning formula:

“While their neighbors toiled away, building unglamorous businesses, Justin.tv’s March 19, 2007, launch became an immediate sensation.The San Francisco Chronicle did a front-page story. Ann Curry, in an excruciating Today show interview, lectured Kan. “Fame, I have to tell you, Justin, has a price,” she said. But it was all fun, at first. Kan took the camera with him to the park, to business meetings, even to bars, where it made for awkward small talk. When one young woman took him back to her place one evening, he left the camera in the dark outside the bedroom; the gang back at Justin.tv headquarters overdubbed the video stream with audio from a porn movie. On his walk back to his apartment, Kan encountered a group of cheering viewers.

“‘If this doesn’t scare the shit out of TV networks, it’s only because they don’t understand it yet,’ Graham told the San Francisco Chronicle. On NPR’s All Things Considered, he declared: ‘Their ultimate plan is to replace television.’ It was fortunate for television, then, that Kan and his friends knew very little about running a business. ‘We had one week’s worth of a plan,’ says Kan, laughing at what he describes as his youthful folly. ‘Today, I have an understanding of the world, and of the entertainment and media industries, of how people consume content,” he tells me. “But at the time, I had no idea.'”

Source: Fast Company
Published: Jun 15, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,599 words)

[Not single-page] A profile of Oliver Samwer and his web copycat factory in Berlin, which specializes in building knockoff websites inspired by growing American startups—then, sometimes, them back to the original company:

The decision to copy a given business generally takes three hours to a couple of days; actually building the first version of the new company’s website takes four to six weeks. “The speed at which you can make decisions here is amazing,” says Brigitte Wittekind, a former McKinsey consultant who was recruited last year to create a clone of Birchbox, the New York start-up that offers samples of cosmetics to subscribers for $10 a month. Wittekind’s company, Glossybox, spent its first year opening websites in 20 countries. It has 400 employees and 200,000 paid subscribers—twice as many as its American counterpart—and just launched in the United States, one of the few instances in which a Rocket clone will go head to head with the company on which it is modeled.

“Global Copycats: The Sincerest Form of Flattery.” — Max Chafkin, Inc.

More from Chafkin

Global Copycats: The Sincerest Form of Flattery

Longreads Pick

[Not single-page] A profile of Oliver Samwer and his web copycat factory in Berlin, which specializes in building knockoff websites inspired by growing American startups—then, sometimes, selling them back to the original company:

“The decision to copy a given business generally takes three hours to a couple of days; actually building the first version of the new company’s website takes four to six weeks. “The speed at which you can make decisions here is amazing,” says Brigitte Wittekind, a former McKinsey consultant who was recruited last year to create a clone of Birchbox, the New York start-up that offers samples of cosmetics to subscribers for $10 a month. Wittekind’s company, Glossybox, spent its first year opening websites in 20 countries. It has 400 employees and 200,000 paid subscribers—twice as many as its American counterpart—and just launched in the United States, one of the few instances in which a Rocket clone will go head to head with the company on which it is modeled.”

Source: Inc.
Published: May 29, 2012
Length: 15 minutes (3,957 words)

Why do startups struggle after being acquired by giant companies like Yahoo? They’re forced to focus on integration instead of innovation: 

When a new startup comes into an established company, the first wall it typically hits is CorpDev, or corporate development: the group within a business that manages change. CorpDev is usually charged with planning corporate strategy—where a business will grow or shrink, the markets it will enter or exit, and what kind of contracts and deals it may strike with other companies. It often oversees acquisitions. It plans them. Approves them. And then it sets the terms.

When a big company gobbles up a smaller one, only a fraction of the money is handed over up front. The rest comes later, based on the acquisition hitting a series of deliverables down the road. It’s similar to how incentives are built into the contracts of professional athletes, except with engineering benchmarks instead of home runs.

“How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet.” — Mat Honan, Gizmodo

How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet

Longreads Pick

Why do startups struggle after being acquired by giant companies like Yahoo? They’re forced to focus on integration instead of innovation:

“When a new startup comes into an established company, the first wall it typically hits is CorpDev, or corporate development: the group within a business that manages change. CorpDev is usually charged with planning corporate strategy—where a business will grow or shrink, the markets it will enter or exit, and what kind of contracts and deals it may strike with other companies. It often oversees acquisitions. It plans them. Approves them. And then it sets the terms.

“When a big company gobbles up a smaller one, only a fraction of the money is handed over up front. The rest comes later, based on the acquisition hitting a series of deliverables down the road. It’s similar to how incentives are built into the contracts of professional athletes, except with engineering benchmarks instead of home runs.”

Author: Mat Honan
Source: Gizmodo
Published: May 15, 2012
Length: 21 minutes (5,347 words)

A startup founder struggles with what’s next after a period of slow growth:

It was late on a gloomy Saturday afternoon in Mountain View, and we were doing a walk’n’talk ‘office hours’ session with Paul Graham – ‘PG’ – on the street outside the Y Combinator office.

‘What do you have to show for the funding you’ve taken so far?’

I tried to explain. ‘We felt we needed to build our own technology platform for flight search, because nothing already existed to support the product we were trying to build. So, basically we spent it on back-end engineering.’

‘Well that sure was a mistake,’ he huffed.

‘How do you know your product is something people want?’ The pg-bot had engaged.

It was hard to explain.

“Reality Check.” — Tom Howard