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Sep
29
2011

  • Disruptive technologies are dismissed as toys because when they are first launched they “undershoot” their users’ needs. The first telephone could only carry voices a mile or two. The leading incumbent of the time, Western Union, chose not to acquire telephone technology because they didn’t see how it could be useful to businesses and railroads – their best customers. What they failed to anticipate was how rapidly telephone technology and infrastructure would improve. The same was true of how mainframe companies viewed the PC, and how modern telecom companies viewed Skype.
Nov
2
2010

  • “It takes a while for something new and different to find its footing and I think Google was just not patient,” he told
  • Like Wave, Buzz launched with much fanfare in February of this year. But unlike Wave, Buzz was available to many users right of the box, and instead it was security issues and misunderstandings that led to its initial stumbles. The Buzz team worked quickly to smooth those out, but now the service has a much more serious issue: indifference.
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Jan
5
2009

  • We starting working on Gmail in August (or September?) 2001. For a long time, almost everyone disliked it. Some people used it anyway because of the search, but they had endless complaints. Quite a few people thought that we should kill the project, or perhaps "reboot" it as an enterprise product with native client software, not this crazy Javascript stuff. Even when we got to the point of launching it on April 1, 2004 (two and a half years after starting work on it), many people inside of Google were predicting doom. The product was too weird, and nobody wants to change email services. I was told that we would never get a million users.
  • However, it does give some perspective. Creating an important new product generally takes time. FriendFeed needs to continue changing and improving, just as Gmail did six years ago (there are some screenshots around if you don't believe me). FriendFeed shows a lot of promise, but it's still a "work in progress".
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Aug
30
2009

    • In many ways, Buffett’s world is diametrically opposed to the startup world. He specializes in boring industries, doesn’t worry much about products, and has extremely long timeframes. Yet I took a lot out of reading about his experiences, and thought I’d share some thoughts about the startup world:

       
         
      1. Enduring businesses take a long time to build
      2. Who cares what other people think? Boring businesses can win big 
      3. Access to money can be a huge competitive advantage
      4. Success begets success
  • Instead of asking “what are the hot areas right now??” instead, the question to ask might be, “what are the overlooked areas right now?” 
Jul
11
2009

  • The most interesting part of the interview was when Mark described how his first startup took off very quickly, once he arrived at a solid concept.  Mark created ONEList and it took off overnight because it solved a fundamental pain many people were experiencing.  Making mailing lists at the time was a painful process, and ONEList made it easy.  Bloglines was another good idea because it solved a problem Mark personally was experiencing, how to keep up with the many blogs he read.  Furthermore, Mark leveraged the marketing and PR relationships he had built at ONEList to get press for Bloglines which spurred their growth.
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