dailylicious!
The answer to that question depends on what you get out of that million. If it’s a million paid users from which the company or the service can derive regular revenue, of course! If it’s a million users for a free service, what do you get out of it aside from eyeballs for ads and an increasing bandwidth bill? Even the term “active users” can be scrutinized these days.
Suhail Doshi, CEO of analytics startup Mixpanel:
You should pay attention to what their definition of ‘active’ even means,” he said. For instance, the number of users who are active on a service within a month could be swayed by a single day’s big spike in usage. “An average rolling daily active is far more indicative
That is of course when seen from a Silicon Valley point of view. How about Indonesian startups who generally struggle to gain even 100k users within one quarter?
Veteran investor Ron Conway was speaking at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles the other day and said that the tech industry (at least the US anyway) is nowhere near a bubble. Unfortunately the CNN story did not elaborate further on what he said and his evidence did not seem solid enough, at least not the ones printed on CNN’s story.
MG Siegler though, has his own arguments on why the industry is not in a bubble and provides evidence from 2007 when this very discussion spread among the press. In other words, it’s 2007 all over again.
The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, which actually tracks early-stage entrepreneurial activity found that in 2010 about 5.5 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 were actually helming an early-stage start-up (compared with 11 percent of 25 to 34 year olds, which is the most entrepreneurial cohort)—while Census data showed that in 2007, only 2.2 percent of business owners were under 25 years old. A survey by the Kauffman Foundation also found that the desire to start a business over other careers has risen for young adults ages 18 to 21 from 19 percent in 2007 to 25 percent in 2010.
Additionally,
Data shows that entrepreneurship is a self-perpetuating phenomenon. The Kauffman Foundation found that youth who personally know another entrepreneur have the strongest interest in starting their own business. Among youth who know an entrepreneur, 46 percent would like to start or have already started businesses compared to 31 percent of young people who don’t know a business owner.
Bit of a lighthearted conversation between some of Asia’s startup figures, Daniel Cerventus, Michael Smith Jr., and Daniel Goh, regarding feedbacks on pitches.
Not everything about Silicon Valley is glitter and glamor as Inc. tells a story about YouSendIt, filled with drama, betrayal, FBI investigation, and enough heartbreak to create an entire TV series, or even a movie. While YouSendit has been flying over the years, its co-founders are far from media darlings, one of which is living in a motel while awaiting a sentence for repeated cyberattacks to the company he helped create.
I have been an angel investor in internet start-ups since 1994, just after Mr Andreessen came to California to start the iconic Netscape. People often ask me why I continue to invest and work with entrepreneurs as vigorously and passionately as ever. The answer is quite simple: these entrepreneurs share their vision of the future with me. And every so often, their vision becomes the future. What could be more interesting than that?
Ron Conway on why he supports entrepreneurship and where he thinks startups will find success is 2012.
Many of the most successful companies today began as a struggling startup. Many of them never got to their feet until years down the line and some of them were forced to become what they are today out of necessities. Altucher calls these accidental startups.
Accidents happen. My two best investments at the moment are two accidents. They started as one thing, and after much agony later, ended up as something completely different and better. It takes a special person to survive these accidents. In other words, nobody, and I mean NOBODY, knows what’s going to work in advance. An abililty to see the future makes Uri Geller famous but does not make a successful entrepreneur.
Many of these accidental successes had an “oh shit” moment where it seemed like everything was going to fall apart, they had to come up with a way to transition (I hate the word “pivot” –its very February, 2011) and then they figured out a way to flourish and get over the hump.
the Google sale accomplished three lifelong goals for me: allowing me to set aside enough to pay for my twin toddlers’ college educations, funding my wife and my retirement account, and giving us a financial cushion that means I’ll never have to work at a job I don’t love. It also meant that, overnight, I can pay some karma forward and start investing in startups that I’m excited about
Selling your startup might say to others that you’re a sellout but sometimes it’s what works and if your investors can get more than their capital back, depending on how much, it might offset the loss of the potential that your startup might have had. Also, you might end up with more money that you’d earn if you were working on the startup.
If you want to take this further, there are people like the Samwer brothers who create startups and clones to be sold, but hey, that’s how they got rich.
It’s long but worth a read to the end. Pay attention.
