How Did I Do On My 2012 Predictions?

Posted on December 31, 2012 by robhof
2012: The Year Ahead

Photo: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

From my Forbes.com blog The New Persuaders:

It’s that time of year: time to reflect on the past year, time to get wasted and watch a glass ball smash into the ground, time for people like me who foolishly offered predictions for the past year to face the music. So here’s how I did on my 2012 predictions:

* Facebook goes public, but won’t start an IPO landslide: Bingo! Indeed, Facebook’s ill-received IPO led to a months-long drought in IPOs as investors realized they were not a sure route to riches. The situation may be improving, but mostly for enterprise more than consumer companies.

* Facebook’s ad business booms–but not at Google’s expense: Bingo! While Facebook’s revenues slowed even before its IPO as it continued to experiment with new ad formats and scrambled to provide mobile ad units, ad revenues have since accelerated, up 36% in the third quarter over last year. At the same time, while Google’s revenue growth disappointed investors in the third quarter, it was mostly thanks to the impact of its Motorola acquisition, not a shortfall in its core ad business.

* Image ads finally find a home on the Web: Half-right. YouTube proved there’s a real market for TV-like video ads if you give viewers the choice to view them or not, as its revenues were expected to hit $3.6 billion in 2012, according to Citibank. But Facebook’s struggles to attract brand advertising despite a TV-scale audience, while partially successful, show that no one has yet come up with brand ad formats that work consistently and at large scale online. Or at least brands, which still spend most of their money on TV ads, don’t believe it yet. And they write the checks.

(more…)

About these ads

Filed under: advertising, Amazon, Android, Apple, apps, data, display, entrepreneurs, Facebook, Google, iPad, marketing, mobile, social, startups, tablets, targeting, TV, Zynga | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Venture Capitalists: We’re Doing Fine! Really!

Posted on December 11, 2012 by robhof
4444 students from 25 schools in Gwalior

Image: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife

From my Forbes.com blog The New Persuaders:

With so much turmoil in the venture capital business, from the rise of competing super-angel investors to tepid fund returns for the past 10 years to some big IPO duds this year from the likes of Facebook, the future of this economic engine of innovation is pretty murky. But to hear VC investors on the opening panel of the Silicon Valley Venture Summit held annually in the coast-side community of Half Moon Bay by business media network AlwaysOn, there’s not much to worry about.

On the panel addressing the “VC & Investor Outlook for Global Silicon Valley” were host Packy Kelly, partner and co-head of KPMG’s U.S. Venture Capital Practice; Norm Fogelsong, general partner at later-stage VC Institutional Venture Partners; Neal Dempsey, managing general partner at early-stage VC Bay Partners, which has gone through its own travails in the past couple of years; and Gaurav Tewari, director of SAP Ventures. Here’s what they had to say about the state of the VC business:

Q: Where are we in terms of the VC cycles today?

Fogelsong: The industry’s healthy. Things got quite excessive in the bubble, and now we’re back up to $15 billion to $20 billion that’s healthy for the industry.

Dempsey: Companies are going to have major exits, and I’m convinced it’s going to be fine over time.

Tewari: The pace of innovation and entrepreneurship is just accelerating. It’s a very exciting time. The numbers are mixed. The number of folks in the industry has shrunk 30% in recent years.

Q: Is there still ample capital to invest?

Fogelsong: Yes. But we’re still burning off the excess of the bubble.

Q: How have things changed in terms of the choices entrepreneurs have now–angels, seed funds, accelerators?

Dempsey: It’s only better for the industry. The angels provide this huge infrastructure of small investments that we can’t make. We can see what trends or companies are working. When we get involved, [unlike angels who make dozens of investments a year], we’re hands-on.

Fogelsong: But if you’re thinking of getting angel financing, get an experienced angel. Some of the new ones don’t realize their investments are going to need follow-on financing. …

Read the complete post at The New Persuaders.

Filed under: angel investing, entrepreneurs, Facebook, Silicon Valley, social, startups, technology, venture capital | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Facebook Live: Charlie Rose Interviews COO Sheryl Sandberg, VC Marc Andreessen

Posted on October 5, 2012 by robhof
DAVOS/SWITZERLAND, 28JAN11 - Sheryl Sandberg, ...

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (Photo: Wikipedia)

From my Forbes.com blog The New Persuaders:

For better or worse, you know a company is serious about putting forward a clear image of itself when it submits to an interview with Charlie Rose.

And so on Oct. 2, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and board member and uber-VC Marc Andreessen talked with the PBS journalist at the annual ad confab Advertising Week in New York, clearly in hopes of persuading brand marketers to invest much more on the No. 1 social network. Here’s a live account of what they had to say, paraphrased at times (especially when it comes to fast-talking Andreessen):

Rose asks Andreessen where advertising is heading in the Internet age.

Andreessen: People love the Internet and there’s such a powerful global phenomenon putting the world in people’s hands. We have the fundamental challenge in advertising and media: Most of the money is trapped on the wrong side. We still don’t have most of the money and advertisers moved over to online. We now can see that transition happen, particularly with mobile.

Sandberg: You went from radio to TV and print and then to online. We think Facebook represents the next stage of online and we’re still in the very beginning. Ads online today are onetime and one-way, no ongoing relationship. We’re at the very beginning of changing that. Businesses have an opportunity to change their relationships. They can establish an ongoing relationship. And members have 130 friends they can pass messages along to.

Rose: What are the challenges of mobile for Facebook?

Sandberg: Mobile is a huge opportunity for Facebook. There soon will be 5 billion phones. The engagement opportunities for us are obviously much, much higher. Our mobile users are much more engaged, and that forms the basis for monetization.

Also, the marketing messages can be put into the newsfeeds.

Rose: But does it in any way make the user unhappy?

Sandberg: We’re looking very carefully at this. We’ve been very pleased with the results. We’ve also seen a real improvement for marketers.

Rose: Has the monetization been slower than you expected?

Sandberg: Marketers understand they can’t just do the same campaigns. Then we have early adopters, and we’re working to help them understand. …

Read the complete post at The New Persuaders.

Filed under: advertising, Amazon, Android, Apple, apps, e-commerce, Facebook, Groupon, mobile, social, Twitter | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

What Are Those Twitter Founders Up To Now? Still Not So Obvious

Posted on September 12, 2012 by robhof
Biz Stone and Evan Williams, co-founders of Tw...

Biz Stone and Evan Williams (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From my Forbes.com blog The New Persuaders:

With Twitter apparently on a path to profits, or at least revenues, two of its cofounders are now on to other things.  Biz Stone’s and Evan Williams’ new company is Obvious, whose motto on its spare website is “We do various things.” A bit more specifically (but not much), Obvious’ goal is to “build systems that help people work together to make the world a better place.” Its first effort, called Medium, might be viewed as Twitter 2.0, seeking to figure out what to do with the firehose of information Twitter has helped create.

In a “fireside chat” with Hunter Walk, a Google director of product management working at YouTube, at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco today, Stone and Williams fleshed out their vision, admitted they didn’t get everything right at Twitter, and offered advice on how to build Internet companies today:

Q: You don’t still work at Twitter, right?

Williams: I’m on the board, but we don’t work at Twitter.

Q: It’s not an incubator, not an investment fund, and you’re building Medium. So what is Obvious?

Stone: It’s an excuse for me and Ev to work together. Really cool, good stuff comes from an organic atmosphere of working on things. We do whatever it takes to help people and projects philosophically aligned with us succeed.

We have marketing capabilities, design and engineering prowess, and money, and we deploy them wherever it makes sense.

A: Now you are older and wiser and wealthier, and parents. How does that change how you run a company?

Williams: I tried to be a ski bum when I left Twitter, but it didn’t work. We’re driven to do interesting things in the world. We decided to let it evolve as the products evolve, figure it out organically as we go. That’s satisfying. It’s a hell of a lot more fun than skiing every day.

Q: The first product you’ve come out with is Medium.

Williams: We came out with a preview, not a real product yet, a few weeks ago. We have a team of engineers working on it every day.

Medium is essentially a publishing platform, along the lines of what we’ve done before, with Xanga and Blogger. We’ve been obsessed with the democratization of media on the Internet. We just thought there’s still more stuff to do.

Q: Only a select few can publish on Medium. Why?

Williams: We want to help high-quality content succeed and get attention. Not everybody can write. It’s not to limit who can publish. It just happens to be we launched in private beta. It’s hard to throw open the doors in closed beta. It’s definitely not the ethos of Medium to be closed in any way.

Stone: We learned a few things about opening up the doors….

Read the complete post at The New Persuaders.

Filed under: advertising, angel investing, entrepreneurs, social, startups, venture capital, YouTube | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Reid Hoffman: Social Networking Isn’t Over Yet–And Neither Is Facebook

Posted on September 10, 2012 by robhof
Reid Hoffman

Photo: Wikipedia

From my Forbes.com blog The New Persuaders:

Reid Hoffman is one of the most prolific angel investors in tech startups from Facebook and Zynga to Airbnb and Zipcar. It’s a talent he transferred to more traditional venture capital in 2009 when he joined Greylock Partners. He’s also a cofounder and executive chairman of LinkedIn.

In a “fireside chat” at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco today with TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington, who has since joined the VC world as well with his own CrunchFund, Hoffman proffered comments on everything from Facebook’s struggles to Twitter’s battles with developers. Here, paraphrased at times, is what he had to say:

Q: You are exceptionally wealthy. What changes?

A: There is a bunch of weird things. I had had a long-term plan to be affiliated with universities, like teaching. Overnight all those changed to donor relationships. Also, I would never have imagined I would fly in a private plane by myself, and now I have. It has its advantages.

Q: You wrote a book [The Startup of You]. How’s it doing?

A: It’s sold 120,000. In the consumer Internet space, we’re used to much higher numbers. I don’t think we’ve created a movement yet.

Q: You were one of the very first investors in Facebook.

A: $37,500 at a $5 million valuation. [That means he made 3,000 times his investment, or $111 million.)

Q: So you did very well. What do you think of Facebook’s stock now?

A: I’m a big believer in Facebook’s long-term position. The real question is how it plays out over the next year or so. People’s hand-wringing about not making money on mobile is an innovation problem that is not that hard to solve.

Q: Did Facebook screw up its IPO or was it inevitable it played out that way?

A: In some ways, it was inevitable. You had unprecedented demand, and you couldn’t know NASDAQ servers would go down. We at LinkedIn were criticized for leaving too much money on the table. …

Read the complete post at The New Persuaders.

Filed under: angel investing, data, Facebook, LinkedIn, Silicon Valley, social, social games, startups, Twitter, venture capital, Yahoo, Zynga | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Next-Generation Venture Capitalist Ben Horowitz On How To Build A Company Today

Posted on September 10, 2012 by robhof
PandoMonthly - June 2012 - Sarah Lacy intervie...

Photo: thekenyeung

From my Forbes.com blog The New Persuaders:

Few venture capital firms have been more aggressive in recent years than Andreessen Horowitz, which has invested in dozens of the hottest companies from Facebook to Groupon to Pinterest. It has become one of the largest VC firms in just the three years since it was formed by onetime Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen and his longtime partner Ben Horowitz, former CEO of Andreessen’s company’s LoudCloud, later sold as Opsware to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion.

Today at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, one of the year’s largest conferences for tech entrepreneurs (streaming live here), Horowitz was interviewed by legendary Silicon Valley VC and adviser Bill Campbell, known in these parts at “Coach.” Here, paraphrased at times, is what Horowitz had to say about how best to build a company today:

Q: What do you mean by “Software eats the world” as your basic investment thesis?

A: Weak form: Software is eating the technology industry. The stronger form of the hypothesis is that software will eat every industry eventually. Retail, movies, radio and music. We see software eating every industry from agriculture to finance.

Historically, the technology industry has been sized at a certain size. Only so much new technology could be absorbed. But as software eats other industries, technology will actually expand.

Q: Apple defies some part of that with software and hardware integration. How do they do that?

A: Increasingly, such as with Amazon, it’s software, hardware, and content.

Q: Why did you go over to the dark side–venture capital?

A: I’m considered a much better CEO now that I was when I was a CEO. Venture capital had become too abstract when it came to building a business–it was about business models. When you’re building a business, it’s about the struggle and the horror. I thought it would be good to have a firm that knew how to actually build a company. …

Read the complete post at The New Persuaders.

Filed under: angel investing, Apple, Facebook, Google, Silicon Valley, startups, Twitter, venture capital, Yahoo | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Move Over, PayPal Mafia. Meet The Google Mafia

Posted on July 16, 2012 by robhof

From my Forbes.com blog The New Persuaders:

PayPal, the online payments company that eBay bought in 2002, is legendary in Silicon Valley for spawning an incredibly talented group of founders, investors, and executives at startups that read like a Who’s Who of Web success stories. The so-called PayPal Mafia includes Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, LinkedIn cofounder, angel investor and Greylock VC partner Reid Hoffman, hedge fund and early-stage investor Peter Thiel, Yelp cofounder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, YouTube cofounders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, and many more.

Now, it looks like a new corporate organization is moving in: the Google Mafia. With the surprise appointment today of longtime Google executive Marissa Mayer as CEO of Yahoo, it now appears that the Google Mafia could prove almost as powerful, though in a different way: It’s more of an executive mafia than a startup mafia. But these former Googlers are now in high-profile positions around the Valley and the larger tech industry, in very influential companies. …

Read the complete post at The New Persuaders.

Filed under: AOL, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, payments, Silicon Valley, startups, Twitter, venture capital, Yahoo, YouTube | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Is The Tech IPO Deep Freeze Finally Thawing?

Posted on July 9, 2012 by robhof

Courtesy 20th Century Fox

From my Forbes.com blog The New Persuaders:

Facebook’s initial public offering in May was supposed to be the bellwether for an expected pile of IPOs this year, but the subsequent dive in the social network’s shares appeared to put new offerings into a deep freeze. Now, it looks like the mini-Ice Age for IPOs is starting to thaw.

Today, two companies that were widely expected to file for an IPO before Facebook’s IPO faceplant, said they plan to go public this month. Internet security firm Palo Alto Networks aims to raise up to $175 million with an offering at $34 to $37 a share.  Kayak, which had put off an IPO expected late last year, also priced its offering, hoping to raise $87.5 million at $22 to $25 a share.

Given that Facebook’s IPO was supposed to be a sure thing–and most assuredly wasn’t–there’s certainly no guarantee that these two companies will help bring back the IPO market. Investors will be cautious about every new IPO, not only because of Facebook, but because of the poor subsequent performances of tech IPOs such as Groupon and Zynga. What’s more, the economy is simply too uncertain to bet on a momentum-driven market like IPOs.

Nonetheless, successful IPOs by Palo Alto Networks and Kayak–on top of another recent IPO success by ServiceNow in June–would inject new life into the technology investment cycle. Indeed, investors such as YCombinator’s Paul Graham have warned that Facebook’s face plant has already cooled early-stage tech investment. So any revival would be positive for the innovation and growth that comes out of that cycle. …

Read the complete post on The New Persuaders.

Filed under: angel investing, Facebook, innovation, Silicon Valley, startups, venture capital | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

What’s the Next Breakout Mobile Startup? Here’s What VCs Think

Posted on June 12, 2012 by robhof

Cross-posted from my Forbes.com blog The New Persuaders.

Mobile computing is arguably the most disruptive force in tech right now. Just look at what it did to Zynga’s stock today. Or what it has already done to Facebook’s and Google’s shares.

Today, a group of venture capitalists laid out what they think is coming for mobile investment this year–in other words, who’s going to disrupt whom next. On a panel at the AlwaysOn OnMobile conference in Redwood City (Calif.) were host Mihir Jobalia, managing Director at KPMG; Rob Coneybeer, cofounder and managing director at Shasta Ventures; Paul Santinelli, a partner at North Bridge Venture Partners; Sling cofounder Jason Krikorian, now general partner at DCM and the Android Investment Fund; Navin Chaddha, managing director at Mayfield Fund; and Aydin Senkut, founder and president of Felicis Ventures.

Here’s what they had to say:

Q: What are the opportunities and challenges in Apple’s iOS vs. Google’s Android?

Chaddha: With Android, even though it’s open, not having control is a big issue. If developers have an app, they go to iOS first, then they look at Android, but there are so many choices, phones. It’s just hard. In the iOS, iPad and iPhone are all the same–life is easy.

Senkut: iOS’s big advantage is monetization. If you want growth and high numbers, it’s difficult without Android.

Coneybeer: It’s a stable duopoly. You need to do both. But nobody’s talking about any other platform now. For developers, you’re looking at a five-year-plus duopoly.

Santinelli: In a few years, you’ll be able to do all development in HTML5. It will solve a lot of those fragmentation problems.

Q: Where are the most interesting growth opportunities in the next five years?

…

Read the full post at The New Persuaders.

Filed under: advertising, Android, Apple, e-commerce, Facebook, Google, iPhone, local, mobile, payments, social, social games, startups, venture capital, wireless | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

The Top 10 Tech Trends, Straight From the Top 5 Tech VCs

Posted on May 23, 2012 by robhof

Cross-posted from my Forbes blog The New Persuaders:

Everyone in Silicon Valley wants to know what’s coming next, and every year for the past 13 years, a panel of the most forward-thinking minds in technology and tech finance convenes here to provide a look at what innovations are likely to emerge in the next few years.

Last night it was time again for the Top 10 Tech Trends dinner, hosted by the Churchill Club, which puts on a bunch of Valley events with top tech folks every year. I wrote about last year’s here as well.

This year, the 14th, the panel is especially venture capital-heavy, but these folks are also, to a person, heavyweights in the Valley, so their opinions carry special weight. On the panel: Kevin Efrusy, general partner at Accel Partners; Bing Gordon, investment partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Reid Hoffman, partner at Greylock and executive chairman and cofounder of LinkedIn; panel regular Steve Jurvetson, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson; and Peter Thiel, president of Clarium Capital. Moderating the festivities in place of longtime emcee  Tony Perkins, Churchill Club cofounder with Forbes Publisher Rich Karlgaard, are Forbes’ Eric Savitz, San Francisco bureau chief for the magazine, and Managing Editor Bruce Upbin.

The panel portion of the dinner, which attracts several hundred people (you can watch it live here for a fee), starts at 7 p.m. Pacific at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara. The audience gets to vote–in past years, with red and green cards as well as electronic voting devices. This year, they’ll be using a Twitter-based polling system. Panel members have similar red-green paddles they hold up. I’ll post the highlights as they happen.

And we’re underway. Eric and Bruce will describe each trend and then the owner of that trend, one of the panel members, will explain it.

1) Radical Globalization of Social Commerce: Efrusy explains that companies today will be instantly global, or they will fall behind those that aren’t. For the previous Web generation, international was a distinct minority. Groupon, for example, was half international when it went public last year. If you want to be the leading global player, just leading the U.S. might not be enough. You can’t wait to win the U.S. and then open an office.

The other panel members wave half-red, half-green panels. Gordon, who waved a red, says that’s going to take awhile. Hoffman, also red, said the U.S. is still the most important. Thiel’s in-between, I think, but because he thinks it’s not very interesting. Jurvetson says it’s true, but 12 years old. It’s what every consumer Internet startup has been doing for 12 years. Thiel on second thought thinks it’s a worthwhile rule to go international early to avoid local copycats.

The audience shows mostly greens, matched by about 70% supporting the trend on TwitPolls.

(more…)

Filed under: advertising, angel investing, Facebook, gamification, Groupon, innovation, LinkedIn, mobile, Silicon Valley, social, social games, venture capital, virtual goods | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Next Page »
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 65 other followers