$1billion? Really

I'm hoping this will launch a discussion, but I'm personally astounded by the news about Instagram's $1 billion acquisition from Facebook. It's not that Facebook can't afford it, but that's precisely the point. They could have developed the same technology for their mobile app for a fraction of a fraction of the price.

Why consider Instagram at all? Well, aside from being a cool photo editing app, they have tapped into a great way to release the artist within and create and share awesome photos. They are essentially a Flickr for Mobile with some different bells and whistles. As cameras continue to improve on smartphones (the iPhone 4s is amazing), the majority of our photo taking, and hence photo sharing, will be done on phones. Instagram has grown explosively over the last 2 years with 30 million users, so clearly they have found a way to answer some photo needs that facebook's app hasn't.

Is that worth a $1 billion? My gut reaction is "Hell No!" After reading up on it, my educated reaction is "Hell No!"

The only way I can think it might make sense for Facebook is that it gives them a competitive edge in time to market. They are now the only big player with something like this and they were already the dominating social force for pictures. Buying a great brand name keep them hip and relevant and it's another reason to log on. Still, I think they should have found the 100 brightest engineers in the world and offered them $1 million each to work for 6 months and develop a kick ass alternative.

Lion's Den

A lot has happened since my last post. Most significantly and life altering is that I became a very proud father on August 2nd when my wife, Miranda, gave birth to our little girl. This picture is from Labor Day weekend when we went to Mendocino, a gorgeous get away town in Northern California on the coast. Inside that little sack on my chest is our little girl. The lion's den is getting bigger out here in California, for AC Lion's Bay Area Recruiting team!

Getting Settled

It's been a few a weeks since my last post and A LOT has happened in a short time. I've attended several networking events. We rented office space and, most importantly, we've successfully placed a handful of candidates.

Last week I went to the Velocity 2011 conference in Santa Clara because I saw that a few of our clients like Quantcast, Amazon and Akamai were going to be there. The noteworthy thing about the conference was that several large companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Amazon and Salesforce were all there exhibiting for the sole purpose of recruiting for new employees. This was a very engineer/developer focused show so that was who they were trying to attract, but what's noteworthy is that each of these companies spent 10K+ to exhibit at this show. The market in the Bay is very competitive for good talent.

As for the administrative stuff, we've rented an office space in Berkeley, CA, right next to UC Berkeley, about 20 min from San Francisco. The office is set up with High Speed Internet and it's conveniently across the street from a BART station to make access to SF very easy. Having an office is great and I really appreciate the additional focus I'm able to dedicate to my work by being here. Yesterday the AC Lion name plate was put up outside our door, making us official!

8 Tips for Nailing Your Next Startup Job Interview

Alex Berg wrote a great article in Mashable with interview tips for a job interview with a startup. A link to the article is here:

8 Tips for Nailing Your Next Startup Job Interview

Why isn't ebay excited by ebay right now?

ebay had a busy year, spending $200 million on acquisitions last year, and admittedly, they didn't all make sense. Like Milo an application that lets someone scan an item and then find out what retailers offer the same item in that area and at what price. How would that help ebay or paypal and how could it possibly tie into their long term strategy or are they just buying cool companies for fun?

Well, thank you tech crunch. They wrote a very fascinating article and it was helpful for connecting the dots to make sense of all of ebay’s acquisitions this last year. The boiled down version is that ebay is making a major push to grow paypal's business by making inroads to the offline world by securing a space for paypal in a virtual wallet payment world where consumers cam make purchases in stores via their smartphones. This would happen in an application that is a virtual wallet that securely stores your payment options (visa, MC, amex, and of course, paypal) and you can use this app at the cash register. This would obviously mark a huge transition and area of growth for paypal if they can pull it off.

The only thing I’d contend with is that I’d say the pivot is as good as done. Even if Paypal’s business is still smaller than ebay’s, when you look at the momentum of PayPal and the room for potential growth in that business, it seems like a no brainer that PayPal will soon enough dwarf ebay.

It’s also worth applauding eBay/paypal on this one because, as the article points out, this new business strategy of connecting consumers with brick and mortar retailers is not their core business and arguably, cuts into their pie if a customer can find a product at Target for the same price they can on eBay. It’s a long term strategy and a visionary one where they are willing to forego a smaller piece of the temporary pie to gain access to the enormous pie of payments in the brick & mortar world. Brilliant and gutsy.

Read the article at Tech Crunch here

Out on the town

This week marked my first time venturing out into the vibrant scene of networking and events that the Bay Area digital world has to offer.

On Tuesday I went to the SF Ad Publishers Monthly Meetup and on on Wednesday I went to SF New Tech.

SF Ad Publishers is an informal gathering and a smaller group of people in the publishing space. I noticed that the majority of the attendees were in the performance marketing space. The event was held at the offices of VigLink in SOMA. VigLink is an affiliate marketing company that can turn your content into affiliate links to major etailers like amazon, zappos, walmart or ebay and if purchases are made by people clicking on the links, then the publisher is paid. I saw a couple of familiar faces from the isocket team as well as a few folks I met at the Blumberg Party at Adtech SF.

On Wednesday I headed over to SF New Tech, a bi monthly meetup that highlights half a dozen new start ups and gives them 5 minutes a piece to talk about their company. I found out, once I'd attended the event, that these are VERY early stage start ups with no, or very little funding. In most cases, it's a couple techies that "had a good idea" and built something. I learned also, that most of their ideas were to simply build something neat, with no worry about how it will ever make money. The, "if you build it, they will come" mentality seems sort of like wishful thinking to me, but hey, there's always twitter and foursquare to prove me wrong. I could be proven wrong about the companies I saw that night, but for the most part, I don't see them really getting big. There was one exception, a very cool company called Storify. Essentially, it's a publishing tool to make news article looking posts that can pull together a series of tweets. You can then publish the articles in a blog. The company just got a round of funding and they are looking for developers.

I also met a guy that cofounded a company called Nimbuzz that is a single deck to manage multiple voice chat accounts like gchat and yahoo voice etc. You can use it to chat or do voice calls on those platforms and they said video is in the works.

So, all in all, it was a very interesting evening and I enjoyed the free (?) ice cream, tacos and waffles that came with the $25/admission. It's not the best event to go to where I can find clients that need AC Lion's Bay Area recruiting services at this point, but it's a great place to meet people with an unquestionable passion for technology and innovation, so I felt right at home.

Week #2

So begins week #2 in my transition to the Bay Area. Last week was a productive week and it flew by at lightning speed. In week #1 we looked at office space, set up a new laptop for work, found an apartment, found a car, moved our stuff into a storage unit once it arrived from the cross country move, joined several meetups in the bay and visited a candidate and a client in San Francisco. Oh, and we went to a Giants game on Mother's day and saw them sweep the Colorado Rockies.




I mentioned in my last post that I'd give reviews of the different coworking places I visited.
Here are my very biased and brief reviews:

1. The Hub- a pretty good spot in a great building. Their focus is social justice and green businesses, which although I support, it's not my focus professionally. It had a professional, quiet feel to it. Very modern and it felt more like a cafe than an office.
   


2. The BlueDoor- Super nice people. The space is very small and sits at a busy intersection where you can hear the traffic. The space is not set up for taking phone calls, so it would be ideal for a web designer or a coder. The type of place you could throw headphones on and get to work. - it has the benefit of being the cheapest place at around $250/mo for a reserved desk.



3. Sandbox Suites- My personal favorite. These guys have 2 offices in the city and one in berkeley. The Berkeley one is very close to my house and if you get a pass at one, it's good at all their locations. Their places are very clean and well appointed and they have a lot of great ammenities like free coffee and tea and even lockers. $295/mo is the bedouin pass which lets you roam from each facility without a reserved office/desk. They have a lot of space to work from and for long phone calls you can jump into a free conference room. The only downside to it is that I didn't feel 100% comfortable just jumping on a phone call because I didn't want to disturb people. That said, I still think I could make it work.
   
   


4. Berkeley Coworking- Another small spot with good people. As a disclaimer, they were in the midst of moving into the space, so it wasn't decorated. It had a feel of a hackers lair, with computer parts strewn about and a couple of coders sitting there working away. I liked the guys there, and it could certainly work, but I'm not sure it was the right vibe for me either because it was a little too quiet. Again, if you're a developer or creative type, then it could be great.

Now I'm going to test the facilities out and see what it's like to actually work there. That's the big test!