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September 21, 2005 Successful Companies
NOTE: If this post looked weirdly formatted and broken, it was because Flock inserted a bunch of line breaks in to it and wrecked a bunch of my hyperlinks, and deleted the last paragraph. :(
The WYSIWYG editing is cool, but as with most WYSIWYG editors, it may not interpret hand-written code properly. I don't blame the Flock guys, though. I should be more careful than to use pre-release software on my live site.
Recent Success
You've probably heard of EBay's acquisition of Skype. As Cringely notes, Skype's investors put two years and $20 million into the company for a return of 12,899.88 percent. With results like that you're going to get a fair amount of attention.
I will avoid talking about whether or not I think the acquisition makes sense, or whether or not EBay paid too much. I'm too far removed from the matter. What I will say is that Skype has seen tremendous growth, with a stated 57M users, and making a product that successful isn't easy.
In fact, Cringely will even speculate that EBay, with its $50B market cap and vast resouces, would have a hard time fighting with Skype:
"Yes, eBay could have built a Skype equivalent, but that would take the same two years or more than Skype took to do it. And unlike Skype, eBay would be building its VoIP division in an environment that still contained Skype as a competitor. But the simple fact is that the chances of eBay being able to repeat Skype's success at this time are pretty close to zero. Skype has too much of a head start in terms of members. It would be analogous to eBay starting a payment service in competition with PayPal, which they once did, and that, too, failed. Maybe eBay was trying to learn from the PayPal experience and simply cut to the chase, which is acquiring earlier and avoiding completely any expensive lessons."
Recent Challenges
Another Internet startup, Technorati, which has also seen tremendous growth over the last year, with several million people hitting the site daily, has had a different experience. Technorati is a search company, indexing feeds from blogs and news sources. Recently Google, the top search company in the world, has decided to roll their own solution.
David Sifry, Technorati's CEO and founder, welcomed the competition. Yet some people are not so optimistic on their chances. Ken Norton, VP at JotSpot and former Yahoo! engineer, thinks Technorati's chances are slim.
So who's right? Since Technorati didn't get purchased by Google does that mean that they're in trouble? Or might they go the way of PayPal and end up beating the multi-billion dollar competition.
Advice
Now that I'm working at a startup of my own, far from the three 17-story marble towers of my former employer, I've been looking for advice on how to design something useful and sustainable.
I'm reminded of John Maeda's question to Paul Rand:
John Maeda: "Most of your designs have lasted for several decades, what would you say is your secret?"
Paul Rand: "Keeping it simple. Being honest, I mean, completely objective about your work. Working very hard at it."
I also finally got around to watching Robert Cringely's interview with Max Levchin on Nerd TV. Max had two pieces of advice.
The first is about being brutally honest with yourself and admitting that you need to change course:
"One of the things I had to learn at PayPal, which was sort of going back to your engineering question, is actually engineers and me as an engineer but pretty much any engineer get into this trend of thinking, and they like what they're doing, even if it's not necessarily a business-savvy thing to do. And then when the time comes and you have to change your direction, it's actually very painful. The very specific moment when your business counterpart or your manager, whoever, comes and tells you, that code you've been writing for the last six months, I'm really sorry, but you might as well just erase it now, is really painful. That is a very painful moment for an engineer to stomach."
The second is about the importance of execution:
"I actually think that a successful startup is 5 percent good idea and 95 percent execution. It's really - it's just one of these things where can you strike the fear of God into your competitors by releasing every two weeks the features that it takes them three months to write. And by the time they're done copying the features that you built last week, you've got three more months on them. And this is really all about execution."
Of the companies that started more or less around the same time as Slide (ANT, YouTube, Vimeo, Flock, FeedBurner, Technorati, Shutterbook, Furl, Del.icio.us, Digg, Odeo, Yelp, Rojo) sometimes I wonder who will be around in five, ten, fifty years.
Posted by johnnie at September 21, 2005 01:02 AM
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ยป Manzari On Successful Companies from In Other News
Johnnie Manzari has a great read on Successful Companies in today's world. My favorite part of the article is the talk about execution. I actually think that a successful startup is 5 percent good idea and 95 percent execution. It's... [Read More]
Tracked on September 22, 2005 07:46 PM
Comments
Interesting thoughts Johnnie. I especially like the piece on execution. The business world moves way too fast now to sit around acting idle. I think you have firsthand experience from watching Adobe stomp Quark out of the market (essentially) all because Quark sat idle.
I have more to say, but it's 3:30am so hopefully I can come back to this.
Posted by: Scrivs at September 22, 2005 12:28 AM
now how can you reconcile paul rand's vision ("keep it simple") with max's ("release new features every two weeks")? they seem antithetical.
Posted by: Mike Rollin at February 10, 2006 10:01 AM
That part is not easy to do. It's like the Einstein quote: "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." In the business world it's easy to see if what you've changed or added was worth doing just by tracking your numbers. It's harder to do when designing a logo--something that doesn't have easily identifiable metrics (Rand would argue that some of the best logos are the ones that do the worst in focus group tests).
Posted by: Johnnie Manzari at February 11, 2006 02:46 PM
That part is not easy to do. It's like the Einstein quote: "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." In the business world it's easy to see if what you've changed or added was worth doing just by tracking your numbers. It's harder to do when designing a logo--something that doesn't have easily identifiable metrics (Rand would argue that some of the best logos are the ones that do the worst in focus group tests).
Posted by: Johnnie Manzari at February 11, 2006 07:08 PM
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