Definitely Maybe is this rare exception: the smart romantic comedy. The premise is slightly contrived but allows for great storytelling. The dialogue is fantastic – quick, witty and intelligent! The characters are intriguing and the 11 year old is memorable in her adult like analysis.
Go watch it!
Auren just wrote an interesting article analyzing the behavior pattern of men and women on social networks. Even though men and women both represent 50% of the users on social networks, women are much heavier users. This dichotomy is even more true for married women who are active users, while married men mostly don’t join the sites. Men spend as much time online, but spend more of it playing video games or poker.
Read the full article at:
http://summation.typepad.com/summation/2008/03/men-are-from-vi.html
Somehow someone at the Four Seasons read my negative review and called to apologize. They reimbursed the room service charge and explained that the rental operation is run by Whistler itself and that they will try to push them to provide faster service.
They also suggested that next time I should complain while on the trip so they could accommodate me better. Good idea :)
Nine months ago we moved all of OLX to Jira (http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/). We are extremely satisfied with the product.
It’s extremely important to input every single project your tech team is working on. If you don’t document very small bug fixes and changes, you can end up having a large portion of your tech resources on projects that may or may not be very important.
Also note that online project management tools like Jira and Trac (http://trac.edgewall.org/) are much more useful than PC based solutions. Everyone always sees the latest version of all the projects. Developers assigned to a project can comment on it or update the status in real time. Managers can update specs and track their projects.
There are many ways to organize your release schedule to fit your organizational needs. At OLX, releases are on an ad hoc schedule, but we average a release every 2 weeks. We also have a weekly product meeting where we cover what was released, upcoming releases and adapt project priorities as needed.
Despite my previous post on the gloomy outlook for startups for the next 12 months, I am more bullish than most on the online advertising market.
Advertising expenditures have a tendency to decline during recessions and the online advertising market collapsed in 2001 after the Internet bubble burst. However, I predict things will play out differently this time. The online ad market is not supported by billions of dollars of silly VC money as it was in 1999.
Companies now have the tools to monitor the ROI on their online advertising. As such, if anything a recession would probably accelerate the transition from offline advertising to online advertising as companies become more ROI focused. Given that online media represents about 20% of media consumption but only around 5% of advertising spending, it still has a lot of growth ahead of it.
That is not to say that growth is not going to slow down. The largest budgets are still controlled by big brands and agencies who don’t invest much online yet and who are going to be even more risk averse in a difficult environment, but the trend from offline to online is inexorable.
Google is going to great pains to make online advertising more attractive to advertisers. To decrease accidental clicks they recently changed their AdSense policies to:
All those changes decrease the click through rates on their ads, but should increase conversion rates for advertisers which in theory should allow them to bid more on keywords. All those changes are bad for revenues in the short run for Google and its AdSense partners, but should pay off in the long run.
Conclusion: The recession will decrease the short term growth rate of online advertising, but accelerate the transition from offline advertising to online advertising.
Homeowners hate to sell their houses for less than they paid for them. When prices fall, instead of adjusting to the new reality, homeowners keep their price expectations hoping that their house will sell. In the short run, they don’t need the money and patiently sit on the house. As a result liquidity dries up in the market. After many months, they adjust their price expectations and the market begins to clear again.
The same thing is about to happen in the startup world. In theory, startups should be insulated from the current macroeconomic headwinds. The current economic slowdown is caused by massive deleveraging around the economy. Venture capitalists are not funded by debt and cannot afford to sit on all the capital they raised for too long. Likewise, startups for the most part have no debt. However, as public valuations of consumer Internet companies have come down by over 25% across the board (and in some cases much more than that) and the IPO market has shut down, exit multiples are likely to decrease accordingly. Moreover, VCs, like most people, are like sheep. If everyone is putting their heads down and bracing for the worse, they will do the same and be much more careful.
Because there are still a few crazy deals happening, like Slide raising money at a $500 million valuation or Bebo being acquired by AOL for $850 million (a good sign we are at the top of the market), startup owners have not yet realized that this will affect them. Valuations are about to come down, but like homeowners, startup owners take a while to adjust to the new reality. Few deals will get funded for 12 months. Eventually the need for cash will win and deals will start happening at much lower prices. In fact, valuations might fall by more than they “should” if you have hundreds of deals that have to get funded simultaneously coming to the market.
People with cash will be in a much stronger position in 12 months than those without and should be able to buy companies and advertising at much lower prices.
Conclusion: Your greed versus fear dial should be turned to the fear side right now. Raise money now (even if not at the valuation you dreamed of) and be extremely careful with your cash burn.
As an economist by formation and at heart if not by trade, I have always been fascinated by how the creation of efficient markets can fundamentally improve welfare for all. This is one of the reasons, I love my job at OLX so much: I am creating free, liquid, efficient markets where in many cases there were expensive, fragmented alternatives before.
I recently came across a fascinating article in the Harvard Business Review on how to design markets with examples from the kidney exchange, medical labor, spectrum allocation and school selection markets.
Read the article at:
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp;jsessionid=AHGDP3AXMA4WIAKRGWDR5VQBKE0YIISW?ml_action=get-article&articleID=R0710G&ml_page=1&ml_subscriber=true
Auren Hoffman wrote an interesting article a few weeks ago on how recessions can promote innovation. I can relate. When Zingy was created in July 2001, the mere mention that we were doing “telecom” and “direct to consumer” made investors run away in the other direction. In the end, Zingy was definitely helped by the lack of capital available in the market because it meant that we had very few competitors. Aucland, by comparison, had dozens of competitors in every country with many companies raising over $10 million. As the result, we exhausted our resources fighting for market share rather than building a sustainable company.
Read the article at:
http://summation.typepad.com/summation/2008/03/recessions-prom.html
If like me, the concept of our mortality bothers you, be sure to check out Stayin’ Alive, an article on Ray Kurzweil, longevity and the singularity in the April 2008 issue of Wired. I doubt Kurzweil is right, but I sure hope he is! It’s not online yet, but you can find a summary at:
http://pimm.wordpress.com/category/medicine/
After a long non-fiction binge, I decided to read a few fun thrillers while on my two ski trips. I picked up The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte and Special Assignments by Boris Akunin on strong recommendations from Amazon, my friends and a review in The Economist.
The stories are enjoyable, but something was missing from both. I am not quite sure what was missing, but the books lacked that special page turner “I can’t wait to see what happens next” quality that some thrillers magically seem to conjure.
I had extremely high expectations for the Club Dumas. Having read The Three Musketeers and watched The Ninth Gate (and loved both), I felt ready to fall for the story. I liked the intrigue, but found the pace much too slow and the main character unappealing. I also really hate it when authors keep repeating what a main character is like to entrench our image of them. I get that Corso can use different smiles and looks to ingratiate himself to different people – no need to repeat it 100 times! Describe Corso’s character a few times, then demonstrate it through his actions. No need for the repetition!
I approached Boris Akunin’s Special Assignments differently. Special Assignments is a collection of two novellas on the adventures of Erast Fandorin, a 19th Century Russian special investigator described to me as a mix of James Bond, D’Artagnan and Sherlock Holmes. Again, I found the adventure intriguing, but disliked the repetition about the characters’ traits, the simple mindedness of most characters (yes we are in the nineteenth century, but that does not mean that everyone is naïve and stupid), and the fact that it’s more Sherlock Holmes than James Bond and D’Artagnan – it felt lacking in action.
Despite my misgivings, the stories were interesting and I feel there is something there. I am definitely going to give both authors another try. I will check out The Winter Queen by Akunin and am still debating which Perez-Reverte book to check out next.
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