Category: Entrepreneurs

Blodget: The Bear Case for Google

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Henry Blodget:

No one else is writing this piece, so it will have to be me. I should say upfront that I’m not predicting that this will happen (yet), and I’m certainly not making a recommendation. I’m just laying out a scenario that could kneecap Google and take its stock back to, say, $100 a share.

Google’s major weakness is that it is almost entirely dependent on one, high-margin revenue stream. The company has dozens of cool products, but with the exception of AdWords, none of them generate meaningful revenue. From an intermediate-term financial perspective, therefore, they are irrelevant.

So, the question is, what could happen to AdWords, and what will happen to the company (and stock) if it does?

Rather ironic – and refreshing, coming from Blodget.

It’s Not The Technology That Raises Productivity, But How it’s Used

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Hal R. Varian:

Just dropping a bunch of new personal computers on workers’ desks is unlikely to contribute to productivity. A company has to rethink how business processes are handled to get significant cost savings.

As the Stanford economic historian Paul A. David has pointed out, the productivity effects from the electric motor did not really show up until Henry Ford and other industrialists figured out how to use it effectively to create the assembly line. The same is true for computers: just as the early industrialists had to learn how to use manufacturing technology to optimize the flow of materials on the factory floor, companies today must learn how to use information technology to optimize the flow of information in their organizations.

Local “Arful Home” Site Guild.com Raises $7M

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Judy Newman reports that Guild has raised another $7M. I am impressed that founder Toni Sikes has created an organization with so many lives – not an easy task. During the dot-com era, Guild raised several million in local funds along with over $30M in Venture Money. Those early investors lost their position when assets were purchased from Ashford (Newman briefly touches on this in her article, but doesn’t mention the amounts).

Several years ago, NBC 15 ran a story on Guild. They, too made no mention of the firm’s dot com fund raising and sale. I phoned the reporter (whose name escapes me) and asked why she did not describe the firms early investment rounds? She replied that “those people got to keep their (worthless) stock”.

In some respects, it is a sign of progress that a firm can have more than one life in Madison.

This type of incomplete cheerleading, unfortunately simply makes it more difficult for other entrepreneurs to startup and raise capital. People within the investment community are well aware of these matters.

Genetic Testing for the Rest of Us – over the Internet

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Katherine Seligman:

DNA Direct offers genetics tests that can reveal a predisposition to a half dozen diseases or conditions, among them breast and ovarian cancer, cystic fibrosis, clotting disorders and infertility. Phelan obtained her chromosomal analysis the same way any client could. She spoke with the company’s genetic counselor and then went for a blood test. The counselor reviewed the findings to help her interpret what they meant. In Phelan’s case, the results provided a surprise — what looked like partial Turner’s syndrome. It was a possible clue to her past struggle with infertility, although she’s never had any other symptoms.

“When I realized this I was thrilled,” she said. “There may have been an underlying genetic factor. … I thought, wow, women could go through this and have this help. It can work backward and help diagnose the past.”

Interesting Collaboration Software Approach – P2P

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James Fallows:

The Berklee College of Music, in Boston, already supplies NoteTaker software to all 3,850 of its students and plans to issue NoteShare to them, too. David Mash, its vice president for information technology, wrote that because “notebooks are immediately available without servers,” students can “collaborate on projects as the ideas hit them.” For instance, they could “drag their music into a notebook, add some comments and ask for criticism” from friends and teachers on the network.

The interesting aspect of this software is that it does not require any expensive/time consuming server tools. NoteShare FAQ.

Procrastination

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Two timely and useful essays:

  • Paul Graham: Good and Bad Procrastination:

    The most dangerous form of procrastination is unacknowledged type-B procrastination, because it doesn’t feel like procrastination. You’re “getting things done.” Just the wrong things.
    Any advice about procrastination that concentrates on crossing things off your to-do list is not only incomplete, but positively misleading, if it doesn’t consider the possibility that the to-do list is itself a form of type-B procrastination. In fact, possibility is too weak a word. Nearly everyone’s is. Unless you’re working on the biggest things you could be working on, you’re type-B procrastinating, no matter how much you’re getting done.

  • Richard Hamming: You and Your Research:
    1. What are the most important problems in your field?
    2. Are you working on one of them?
    3. Why not?

Fascinating: John Diebold Obituary

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Jennifer Bayot:

Mr. Diebold (pronounced DEE-bold) made a career of recognizing relevant advances in technology and explaining them to the likes of A.T. & T., Boeing, Xerox and I.B.M. Through books, speeches and his international consulting firm, Mr. Diebold persuaded major corporations to automate their assembly lines, store their records electronically and install interoffice computer networks.
In 1961 he and his firm, the Diebold Group, designed an electronic network to link account records at the Bowery Savings Bank in New York. Rather than being updated after hours, the records immediately reflected both deposits and withdrawals and were available to any teller. Customers could then bank at any branch and at any window.
Another data network eliminated much of Baylor University Hospital’s paperwork in departments like accounting, inventory, payroll and purchasing. More important to Mr. Diebold, the system made medical records and statistics available to researchers in electronic form, permitting studies that were otherwise too daunting. The American Hospital Association embraced the project, and hundreds of other institutions created data systems modeled on it.

Leadership/Decision Making: Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep

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Michael Lewis:


The 49ers had not bothered to interview college coaches for the head-coaching job in part because its front-office analysis found that most of the college coaches hired in the past 20 years to run N.F.L. teams had failed. But in Schwartz’s view, college coaches tended to fail in the N.F.L. mainly because the pros hired the famous coaches from the old-money schools, on the premise that those who won the most games were the best coaches. But was this smart? Notre Dame might have a good football team, but how much of its success came from the desire of every Catholic in the country to play for Notre Dame?

Looking for fresh coaching talent, Schwartz analyzed the offensive and defensive statistics of what he called the “midlevel schools” in search of any that had enjoyed success out of proportion to their stature. On offense, Texas Tech’s numbers leapt out as positively freakish: a midlevel school, playing against the toughest football schools in the country, with the nation’s highest scoring offense. Mike Leach had become the Texas Tech head coach before the 2000 season, and from that moment its quarterbacks were transformed into superstars. In Leach’s first three seasons, he played a quarterback, Kliff Kingsbury, who wound up passing for more yards than all but three quarterbacks in the history of major college football. When Kingsbury graduated (he is now with the New York Jets), he was replaced by a fifth-year senior named B.J. Symons, who threw 52 touchdown passes and set a single-season college record for passing yards (5,833). The next year, Symons graduated and was succeeded by another senior – like Symons, a fifth-year senior, meaning he had sat out a season. The new quarterback, who had seldom played at Tech before then, was Sonny Cumbie, and Cumbie’s 4,742 passing yards in 2004 was the sixth-best year in N.C.A.A. history.