April 2008 Archives

The current debate on Hacker News seems a little too black and white to me.  In my opinion, there is no right way to start a startup (or a business).  How you should start your startup depends on your definition of startup success.  In particular, I believe you should:

1. Define what startup success means to you right now.
2. Make decisions that have the highest probability of achieving that success.
3. Every so often, GOTO 1.

Different people will have different definitions of startup success depending on a number of highly personal attributes, including current monetary wealth, desired monetary wealth, desired lifestyle, what one wants to work on, how much one wants to manage people, how much one wants to impact the world, etc, etc.

Consider the following (knowingly grossly simplified) personal situations:

• An independently wealthy person doing what they love with an indefinite (5Y+) time horizon.
• Someone at a high salaried consulting job who wants to quit to start a startup, but not change his/her lifestyle.
  
• Someone living in a developing country who just wants enough money to not work.
• Someone who wants to quit their job to do a startup, but has a family and so needs $x/month relatively soon to do so.

I posit that these people will (probably) have vastly different definitions of startup success, and thus should be starting their startups in different manners. 

A poll I created the other day I believe exemplifies this point.  I was surprised how many people would sell their startup for under $100K (the highest answer).  Clearly this poll has issues--for one, it would be better statistically if it were worded slightly differently and then given to startup founders right when they are starting out.  But I think the core exemplification still shines through.  If your monetary end goal is $5M vs. $100K, you should probably be doing things a bit differently.

Btw, this comment inspired me to write this post...so thanks for that hugh.

I am new to Twitter.  Well, not new to the concept, but I hadn't really used it until yesterday.  This video of Michael Arrington at Startup School inspired me to get started. To paraphrase, he said every developer and their startup should be Twittering, if only to contribute something to the startup community.  As this is one of my primary goals, I was sold.

So I set up a twitter feed under the username yegg.   If you are on twitter, you might want to check it out.  If not, you can still follow it on the sidebar of this blog and on my homepage.  Enjoy!

I am registered to vote in the Pennsylvania democratic primary on Tuesday.  I don't really like either candidate, and I'm not sure I am actually going to vote.  But if I do, I'm certainly not voting for Obama.

And it is because of Obama's smoking.  Before you say that's stupid, hear me out.  This is a short post.

Obama apparently smoked cigarettes regularly (5-10 a day) for years (possibly as many as twenty-six).  He only quit when he decided to run for president.  In fact, his quitting is so recent, that he apparently still uses quitting smoking products (e.g. nicotine pathces, nicorette gum).

One of Obama's central campaign issues is health care.  On Obama's Web page for health care, there are three bolded points that define "The Problem," in his opinion:

    Millions of Americans are uninsured or underinsured because of rising medical costs.
    Health care costs are skyrocketing.
    Too little is spent on prevention and public health.

A significant percentage of our national health care costs are attributable to smoking.  These costs were preventable.

So, regardless of whether Obama is right or not on health care, he is essentially asking us to "do as I say, not as I do."  And that is show stopper for me.

This goes beyond the image of Obama grabbing a cigarette break behind the Capital Building because you can no longer smoke inside of it.  It goes beyond the fact that he has been framing himself as a role model and community leader for years when he only stopped smoking last year.  It is about the issues. 

Health care is perhaps Obama's (and the Democrats' in general) central issue this election cycle.  And yet he has made a personal choice that for years has blatantly undermined the goals he wants to set for the country on this important issue.  He talks about prevention and rising costs, and yet he was rising these costs himself via preventable action.

Maybe the country as a whole does not, but I expect my leaders to lead by example.  Or at the very least, I expect them to not contradict their central theses with their errant personal behavior.

Update: I have decided not to vote in this PA primary.  Note that I view this primary stage as very different than the actual presidential election, which I think was lost on some of the readers of this post.  I think that one should vote in the presidential election, even if you have to choose between candidates you don't particularly like.  But in the primary, one is in no obligation to do so.  In the primary, you are promoting a candidate for selection by their party.  In order to get me to promote you, you have to be pretty compelling.  In this case, this smoking issue was enough to get me to not promote Obama in the primary. 

In other words, neither candidate was compelling enough IMHO to get me to promote them for their party's nomination in this primary.  And just because I said I wasn't voting for Obama in the primary didn't mean I was going to vote for Clinton in the primary or that I am going to vote for John McCain in the general election.  In fact, like I said, I am choosing not to vote in the primary, and I have no idea who I will vote for in the general election.

Recently, Paul Graham wrote that there is a gap in the venture capital landscape, which he thinks explains why there aren't more "Googles" out there.  I have my own issues with his essay, but I take his word from the "front lines" that he is seeing innovative startups (potential Googles) not being able to get the funding they need.

So naturally, why not fill this gap himself (or at least part of it)?   It seems to make perfect sense.  If he doesn't have the money already, I can't imagine it would be that hard for him to raise a fund.  He is presumably already seeing potential Googles via Y Combinator, so he wouldn't have to do much work to get quality deal flow.  And of course, he would make a ton of money if his theory about why there aren't more Googles is correct.  After all his essay says:

...there is a big opportunity here, and one way or the other it's going to get filled. Either VCs will evolve down into this gap or, more likely, new investors will appear to fill it. That will be a good thing when it happens...[and] will get us a lot more Googles.

Am I missing something?  Perhaps this is already in the works...

Update: additional comments can be found here.

Recently Paul Graham wrote about why there aren't more Googles.  While I agree with Paul that there appears to be a gap in the venture capital landscape at the moment, some things about his essay have been bothering me.

• Where are all the Googles really getting lost?  The central thesis of Paul's essay seems to be (correct me please if I'm wrong) is that there aren't more "Googles" because VCs aren't funding them at the earliest stage.
  

If a Google is a big, independent innovative startup (more on that below), there are at least three ways a Google can be killed.

1. Never funded so never gets off the ground.
2. Underfunded so runs into the ground.
3. Acquired so ceases to be independent and thus is no longer a Google.
   

Paul's argument is that the bulk of potential Googles are getting killed via route #1.  But let us suppose for a second that is not the case, i.e. potential Googles are raising money as needed, which by definition ends #2 as a source as well.

So then you are left with #3.  Now, additionally suppose that most of the time M&A departments are getting it right on offer price.  Then there aren't more Googles (big, independent innovative startups) because they were all acquired at the right price.  This seems to be a sub-argument of the original post by Umair Haque that Paul answered.

...Myspace, Skype, Last.fm, del.icio.us, Right Media...all sold out to behemoths who are destroying , with Kafkaesque precision, every ounce of radical innovation with them.

Perhaps this crop of acquired potential googles were all (or at least most of) the potential Googles, but just got the right price offered to them, and corporate M&A isn't so bad after all.  If there was a secondary market for private equity as Umair and others have suggest, perhaps these startups wouldn't have accepted the offers, and there would be more Googles today.

In other words, I don't see a compelling argument or compelling evidence that explains where exactly the potential Googles are getting killed.  Is the essay suggesting that we just take Pauls word for it that it is all on #1, or am I missing something?  I am not saying he is wrong, but just that I don't really see a backed up argument (with evidence or otherwise) for why he is right.

• What is the actual evidence?

From the evidence I've seen so far, startups that turn down acquisition offers usually end up doing better.

I take Paul at his word that he has evidence on this point.  I simply want to know the details.  Is this just what you casually recall?  Or did you talk to lots of corporate M&A departments about the specific situation of startups turning down offers, and then you tracked down what happened to them?  If so, does it break down differently by size of offer?  Industry?  Market?  Or was it some entirely different kind of evidence?

• What does "Googles" mean exactly?  The essay doesn't define this term explicitly, and it is one of those things that seems obvious until you try to put a definition on it (at least to me).  Btw, I understand and appreciate Paul was replying to Umair Haque's post, which originally used the term.  However, I still think it should be defined explicitly so we know what we are talking about exactly.  Anyway, the essay hints at the definition this way:

...the reason Google survived to become a big, independent company...

...it's the same reason Google and Facebook have remained independent: money guys undervalue the most innovative startups.

The reason there aren't more Googles is not that investors encourage innovative startups to sell out, but that they won't even fund them.

So, is a Google just a big, independent company?  It can't be just that or Microsoft and Exxon Mobil would be Googles.  Is a Google one of the most innovative startups" or just a regular innovative startup?  Or do you have to be both independent AND some form of innovative startup to be a Google?

This exercise strikes me as more than mere semantics.  If you have to be one of the most innovative startups, that is by definition a limited number.  Not all innovative startups can be the most innovative.  So if you do have to be one of the most, it then seems odd to ask why there aren't more Googles since they are then (by definition) the very limited number of most innovative startups at the time.

I gather, therefore, that Paul means a Google is a big, independent innovative startup.  You need big in there because his central thesis is that to create Googles you need to fund small companies, so a small startup can't be a Google yet.  That leaves independent and innovative. 

So does a Google cease being one upon any acquisition?  Was MySQL a Google before it was acquired?  Or does the market matter and they were too niche (despite a $1B acquisition)?  Is Salesforce.com a Google? Was Flickr one before they were acquired?  What about Reddit?

Does a Google have to be a software startup?  What about a life sciences or medical device company?  An innovative construction company?  Enough on this issue--hopefully someone will pick this up and attempt to answer these questions.

• There is probably a gap in the VC landscape at the moment, but is it just an expected catchup lag?  Despite the above, and like I said at the beginning, I agree with Paul that there seems to be a gap in the VC landscape at the moment.  I have two additional thoughts on that.
  
  First, Paul chides VC firms for "still operat[ing] as if they were investing in hardware startups in 1985."  I just don't by that there has been no change in the VC landscape since 1985.  Startups have been gradually becoming cheaper to start, and the venture capital world has been gradually answering.  Granted, maybe the same firms aren't changing as fast as they should be.  But there is more Angel investing.  There are specialty funds like the new Facebook and iPhone funds.  (Yes, I know those probably won't generate "Googles," but it's a start).  There are funds like Union Square Ventures.  And of course there is Paul's own Y Combinator and other recent additions.
  
  My first point here is that, one should expect a response lag.  Perhaps Paul is saying the lag is too long?  But, sooner or later, someone will execute a fund like Paul suggests.  (There are plenty of Angel funds that operate like this already (200-500K range), so maybe it is here already?)  Anyway, if those funds make awesome returns, it won't be long until that model is repeated.
  
  Or will it?  Why has it taken so long as it stands?  Is the supposed gap more than just a lag?  I think it might be, which brings me to my second and final point.  Hank Williams and others have pointed out that a lot of the answer may be explained behaviorally.  And I agree.  But I have a slightly different, or perhaps just complementary, point.
  
  VCs (and angels for that matter) are really investing in people.  The earlier you go to the beginning of the startup, the more the people matter because the more likelihood the idea is going to change. Paul has acknowledged this behavior several times in noting that they really concentrate on the founders when making funding decisions at his fund.
  
  At the same time, venture funds have been getting bigger.  When you have a big fund and are making small investments, you have to fund a lot of people.  Paul addresses this problem this way:

Would that mean sitting on too many boards? Don't sit on their boards. Would that mean too much due diligence? Do less. If you're investing at a tenth the valuation, you only have to be a tenth as sure.

This makes sense to me.  However, I suspect that VCs have a major psychological hurdle with doing less diligence in this space where people are the main component of the due diligence.  If you give away $15K to a team, and the team spends all your money and gets nothing substantive done, fine.  But if you give them $400K and that turns into just salary for them with no substantive results, I can see people having a psychological barrier there.  It is like people are just stealing your money.  So you hesitate, and have lots of meetings, give bad terms, or whatever.  Are there ways around this?  Absolutely.  Probably, VCs should just get over it.

My eccentric approach to entrepreneurship currently boils down to the following principles. 

• Spread risk through multiple projects and multiple partners.  I have my own little VC portfolio going, except that I am a principal in all the startups.  I have more work to do, but also have more equity.  Needless to say, I have to work smart and efficiently for this principle to even be executable.
  
  Why multiple partners?  When I have the same partner on multiple projects, we tend to let all our projects except one fall by the wayside.  And different partners bring different skills that are useful for particular projects.
  
  
• Do as much as possible, myself.  I believe this principle is the primary source of my sustainable competitive advantage on competitors.  The more I do myself, the more about my startups is in my mind.  When disparate things are in my mind, it naturally makes connections between them.  (I'm pretty sure yours does too.) 
  
  In most companies (yes, even most startups), work gets cut up various ways and assigned to distinct people, or even outsourced.  Not so with my projects.  I want to be tailing multiple server logs while writing code and thinking about design and marketing, for example.  My best ideas have come this way: with lots of seemingly different (but actually related) things in my mind at once.  No silos.  No black boxes.  Even if a partner is primarily responsible for something, I want to know about every detail, so I can feed it into this coalescence engine.
  
  
• Question everything, all the time.  Nothing is off limits from my questioning.  All decisions are considered as temporary as they can be.  This principle keeps the ideas flowing for me.  And in practice, it means a lot of thinking, reading and research in conjunction with endless experiments, revisions and tweaks.  I believe this principle is a secondary source of sustainable competitive advantage simply because most people, and in turn, their companies, tend to follow "standard practice" and to freeze decisions once made.
  
  
• Only trust data.  Just because something is plausible, doesn't make it true or optimal.  Additionally, tweaking with no data is just a random walk.  Sometimes that is all you can do, however.  But as soon as there is data, I analyze it and trust it over non-data or unverifiable data.  This process can yield some non-intuitive results, and I believe it is another source of secondary sustainable competitive advantage.  It shouldn't be, but the hard truth is most people, and in turn, their companies, trust more than data.
  
  
• Don't seek funding unless there is a good reason for doing so.  This principle keeps my equity high and my focus on target. 
  

I think a lot of entrepreneurs follow these principles to some extent, at least some of the time.  But I take their adherence to the extreme.  And I think that is where the sustainable competitive advantage actually arises.

I did not approach entrepreneurship like this initially.  I've arrived here after many years.  Along the way, I've certainly made a lot of mistakes, as well as gained an appreciation for the potential usefulness and drawbacks of this approach.  My (surmised) potential usefulness of this approach is laid out above, albeit tersely.  I will attempt to summarize the approaches' drawbacks, lessons learned from past mistakes, and corollary principles in future posts.

Of course, I wholeheartedly realize the real usefulness of this eccentric approach is unclear.  I say I only trust real data, and yet I only have one data point.  And on that one data point (myself), I only have (at least in my opinion) one major success and one minor one.  Yes, that is encouraging, but hardly compelling. 

Consequently, I'm interested in more data.  Are you following this approach, or a related one?  What has your experience been?  (I realize it's not "clean" data--more anecdotal--but it's a start...)

Update: additional comments can be found here.

I think that building something that users want is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition, to building a successful business. 

Below are some cases where you can build something users want, but still not end up with a successful business.  And there are also some suggestions for getting around these pitfalls.  

• You build something users want, but there are just not enough high value users to reach profitability.  You can be very successful with very few users if the users are willing to pay a lot, e.g. big companies.  But sometimes you see entrepreneurs targeting really small niches where their user base is also not willing to pay a lot for their product.
  
  To escape this pitfall, you can broaden your user base by making your product useful to more potential users.  You can also try to make your product higher value, so that (at least some of) your users will pay you more, and hopefully enough to make a business out of it.
  
  

• You build something users want, maybe a lot of users, but reaching them is cost prohibitive.  This often happens with low cost or mostly free (ad-supported/freemium) products, but can happen with anything.  All that matters is your average user acquisition cost is higher than your average user revenue. 
  
  To escape this pitfall, either lower your average user acquisition cost or increase your average user revenue--it sounds so simple!  In practice, this can prove quite difficult.  This is where all that "guerrilla" and "viral" marketing comes into play.
  
  Ultimately, you hope that if you truly built something users wanted, your average user acquisition cost would go down naturally as your user base grew and word of mouth increased on that increasingly larger base.  And if that is the case, you might be able to spend your way out of this problem or otherwise do something creative to get over the hump.  But unfortunately, some products are more prone to word of mouth than others.  And your viral coefficient just may not be high enough.
  
  

• You build something users want, maybe a lot of users, but they just won't pay for it, won't upgrade, won't click on advertising, won't pay for support, etc.--nada. 
  
  To escape this pitfall, either build something complementary that people will pay for, or raise money and keep growing (unprofitably) until you get acquired. 
  
  
  
• You build something users want, but a lot of other companies built it too.  You see this all the time.  One company is successful, and then the copies start flooding in.  The copiers know it is something users want given the first success.
  
  To escape this pitfall, don't just copy--differentiate in a noticeably better way or go after a particularly unsaturated niche.  You might end up in one of the other pitfalls, but at least then you aren't in a lottery situation.

One simple response to all of this pitfall talk is to say I'm going to consciously ignore it all and just concentrate on my users, hoping it will all work out in the end.  And it might, but not always.  (More on this related topic in a future post.)

Anyway, if you think of more cases (or disagree with these), please put your thoughts in the comments, and I will do the same.  I think a list (as complete as possible) of potential pitfalls of this variety is quite useful for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Btw, I've been thinking about this topic for a while, but this post today finally got me to write something down...so thanks for that.

Update: additional comments can be found here.

This is the second post that examines one valuable asset Facebook definitely has--the daily attention of a large group of people--by looking at other analogous things this user base's attention is yielding in the marketplace.  The last post considered TV advertising, and concluded (albeit roughly) that the time spent by FB users online might be worth $3B/year to FB in TV-like advertising on the Web.

This post considers mobile phone use.  Let's say there are 10M FB users in their core demographic (young people on college campuses).  Note that FB apparently has 30M users total.  The average cell phone bill is about $50, which may be on the low end for college students.  Let's go with it for now.

10M users * $50/month * 12 months/year = $6B/year in revenue.

Now, of course this mobile phone comparison is quite different than the TV advertising comparison.  FB has a shot at actually creating TV-like brand awareness advertising on its site, but doesn't have a prayer of capturing any of the mobile phone market's revenue.  Or does it?

On the one hand, FB's core demographic arguably uses FB to communicate as much as they do with their mobile phones.  And consequently, surveyed, this demographic might say they derive just as much value from FB as they do from their mobile phones.  Although the same might be said for email and IM, both of which are free of course.

On the other hand, people pay for mobile phone service, because they want to be...duh...mobile.  But that isn't the whole story either.  If you have a wi-fi device on a college campus, then you could connect with your friends via FB outside the mobile phone network.  And they could add voice pretty easily...

So I don't think it is totally clear cut.  Granted, if FB charged $50/month, that probably wouldn't fly.  But what about $10/month for some useful feature subset?  Some might say well then people would just switch to X, but I'm not so sure.  Just because people can switch without monetary cost, doesn't mean people will switch.  And they would presumably still have the free version.

Anyway, at $10/month on average, that's roughly $1B/year in revenue.  Now I realize that not *everyone* would pay.  That average # could be chopped up a number of ways.  Maybe , because of the way it is offered (in some network effect way), the vast majority of the core demographic does sign up.  Or, maybe it is a heavily skewed distribution with a bunch at a few $ and some at $100.  The latter might be realized if the offering was more in a la carte services.

Now, FB has a ton of employees (for who knows what reason), but their profit margins are probably still way way higher than mobile phone companies.  After all, they have no cell towers, customer service, stores, etc.  So in effect, that $1B might be equivalent in earnings.

Of course, there are in-betweens as well.  There could be cell phone plan add-ons for exclusive FB services.  FB could launch a MVNO.

All in all, I suppose I just find it amusing that college kids spend $6B/year on their cell phones (probably more) and not a penny on FB.  Now I realize their are valid economic reasons for this.  It might cost that much to actually provide the mobile phone service (not sure what their margins are exactly).  And the cost of providing FB might be so low it pushes it down to being free. 

But, at the same time, I think these markets are colliding and FB has significant market power.  So every day this gets closer to market collision and FB gets more market power, is a day where FB is giving valuable surplus to consumers.  How much?  I don't know.  What do you think?

This recent comment on this Hacker News thread about the validity of FB's $15B valuation inspired me to do some quick back of the envelope calculations.  The relevant part of the comment said:

If it can convince major brands that Facebook eyeballs are worth the same as traditional advertising (in effect sell them CPM, not CPC - "Facebook is the new TV"), then Facebook will do quite well. That's a very tough sell for smaller players, but it might not be impossible for Facebook.

The comment's author cites compete's FB #s at about 30M users with 350M visits/month at an average stay of 15 min each.  That gives us:

350M visits/month * 15 min/vis * 1 hr/60 min * 12 months/year ~ 1B hrs/yr

At 30M users that is around 33 hours per year for each user.

American Idol apparently sells a 30 sec spot for ~$750K with about a 30M audience.  That is about same size audience and demographic of FB, so let's just go with it for now. 

$0.750M/30sec * 60sec/min * 60min/hr = $90M/hr

At 30M viewers, that is around $3/hr per viewer.

If we put that together we get:

$3/hr * 33hr/year ~ $100/year per user.

And then with $30M users, we get our answer: $3B/year.


Please let me qualify that I am not trying to imply any of the following:

• That FB's real value lies in its ability to deliver TV-like advertising.
• That FB could even get this kind of money for TV-like (brand awareness) ads, although this recent article about CBS online ads vs TV ads is interesting in that respect.
• That FB should even go in this direction.

All I'm trying to do here is examine one valuable asset FB definitely has--the daily attention of a large group of people--from one angle.  This one angle is to look at another thing the FB user base's attention is yielding in the marketplace. 

Btw, I did a second calculation, but this post is already too long, so I'll write it up tomorrow.

Update: additional comments can be found here.

We (the human race) need to establish a colony on Mars as soon as possible.  Why?  To start the process of saving ourselves from the possible extinction we face by remaining solely on Earth.

Pick your poison.  Nuclear holocaust.  Disease.  The death of our Sun.  It doesn't matter. 

Every day we are only Earth-bound is a day we can become extinct relatively easily.  In other words, why put all our eggs in one basket?

Of course, we nay naturally progress to colonize other parts of space, most likely due to private market forces (frontier desire, exploitation of resources, etc.).  And farther down the road we may more or less be forced to due so because of overpopulation (unless we stabilize our birth rate). 

But why wait?  We have the technology now!  We've had it for decades really.

I think it is completely irresponsible of past US presidents (since and inclusive of Nixon) to not fully engage our resources in creating a fully self-sustaining Mars colony.  Human space exploration should not have ended with moon landings and should not have stalled in space stations.

This idea isn't new of course, but it is not said enough IMHO.  I feel this point is getting lost in the recently increased debate about sending humans into space again, and going to Mars in particular.

So, what do you think?  Will a colony on Mars save us humans from extinction?

Update: additional comments can be found here.

Google says:

Network neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet.

This translates, in Google's opinion, to:

In [Google's] view, the broadband carriers should not be permitted to use their market power to discriminate against competing applications or content.

A couple years ago (in 2006), Amnesty International accused the major search engines of hypocrisy on net neutrality because of their activities censoring content in China.  At least one telecom exec repeated the accusation.

But that's just the tip of the hypocrisy iceberg, in my opinion.  Google has about 60% of search traffic.  Some significant percentage of people use Google exclusively as their gateway to the Internet.  If a Web site is not in the Google index, that content is literally invisible to these people.  In that case, Google has effectively used "their market power to discriminate against competing applications or content."

I presume Google might say to that, "well, anyone can switch search engine providers."  Yet by the same token, most people can switch broadband providers.  I realize not everyone can, but the % of people who can is high and increasing.  I have 4 independent choices now (cable, dsl, fiber, and wireless) at my house.

Additionally, the argument that anyone can switch search engine providers easily has issues.  First off, a lot of people still don't really understand what a search engine is, that there are multiple providers, who they are, and how to switch.  And I would presume that a lot of these people are the same people that use Google exclusively.  Someone set up Google as their homepage some years ago, and it hasn't budged since.  To some of these people, Google is their access to the Internet even more so in their minds than their broadband provider.

Furthermore, Google has zero transparency when it comes to why parts of a domain or even an entire domain is in or out of their index.  Plenty of small businesses have just woken up one day to find their search traffic from Google gone, for a completely unknown reason.  Plenty of others have had to wait months or years to be included in the index at all, even though Google has crawled their pages countless times.

Now I am not suggesting that Google should be forced to include every domain and page in their index.  Nor am I suggesting they become more transparent, or be forced to do anything for that matter.  I am simply pointing out that IMHO their insistence that broadband carriers do not content discriminate and allow people to get to all sites seems very hypocritical when they themselves content discriminate and do not let people get to all sites.

Does this suggest net neutrality is unworkable?  No, I don't think so.  (I still don't have a strong opinion on net neutrality btw.)  I just think if Google is going to argue in favor of it, they should do it themselves.  What would that entail?  For starters:

• Don't delete domains from your index.  You already use penalization schemes that rank things to the bottom of search results.  That should be enough.  Actually deleting it really does make it like the site doesn't exist for some non-negligible amount of people.
• Be more transparent about why things got deleted from your index, or are still not in it.  A simple response code would be a good start.
• If you type whatever.com into Google, and there are no results but you know it exists, put a link to that domain up.

Again, I'm not suggesting Google do these things, should do these things, or should be forced to do these things.  I just think that doing them would make them seem less hypocritical on net neutrality.

What do you think?  Is Google hypocritical on net neutrality?

For the fourth time in a year, I set up a new domain (for a Web project), sent a personal message from it to my Gmail account, and it got marked as spam.  For the skeptical, let's just say I am not a noob when it comes to the intricacies of email and the spam problem in general...

• Yes, I have correct SPF records, reverse-DNS entries, etc.
• These data points contain different IPs, networks, MTAs, etc.
• The messages were different and not "spammy."
• This was repeatable, i.e. the second message went to spam too.
  

First off, despite the above, I am open to the possibility that is this just happening to me for reasons I don't understand yet.  Has anyone out there had a similar experience?

Secondly, I'm not saying they are doing this on purpose, but I wouldn't be surprised either.  Probably a lot of new domains are registered by spammers.  But not all!

Another reason I think they might be doing this on purpose is that after the first three times this happened, Gmail support fixed the problem for me.  By the way, getting them to fix it was particularly annoying, mainly because they did not read my email.  I wrote up a very detailed support ticket, and I just kept getting canned responses saying something like: "here are our guidelines and common problems, if it is not one of these, please reply to this message."  Well, if you had actually read my message, you would know that it wasn't one of those!  So after replying with basically the same message multiple times, it was fixed.

This fourth time was a little different, however.  I wrote up the same ticket, got the same canned responses.  And then finally I got this (new to me) canned response:

Hello,

Thank you for your reply.

 If you are adhering to our guidelines and are not sending unwanted mail,
the classification of your messages could be influenced by other factors.
The problem may resolve itself, but if the issue persists for more than a
month, please contact your Internet Service Provider's customer support
department to learn whether any spam is being sent by your or a
neighboring IP address.

Sincerely,

The Google Team

This response is annoying on so many levels.  I won't get into all of them, but here are a few.

1. I already told them I am running my own server on my own IP.
2. Punishing IP blocks (and even single IPs because of shared hosting) is irresponsible IMHO (see below).
3. A month!  Are they really serious!?!?
   

Anyway, if they are doing this (sending new domains to spam) on purpose, I think it is just simply irresponsible.  Spam false positives degrade email as a communications medium by creating a large negative externality.  Gmail false positives -> Domains can't communicate effectively via email -> Domains stop using email as much across all their customers.  (For a graphical representation of this, see pg 44 in my Master's Thesis.)

Lame! (cut from South Park's AWESOM-O)

While I'm on Gmail annoyances...I've been waiting years for an option to NOT add everyone I communicate with to my contacts.  I know I am not alone on this one...

Yes, I get it Gmail--if you keep everyone you can do cool things like auto-populate the chat list.  And yes, I gave up using folders in a similar way.  But here's the problem.  You use all these people to auto-complete addresses when I am composing email. 

As time goes on, the random emails addresses with which I have communicated dwarf in number the ones I regularly communicate with.  But yet, you don't give the latter ones preference.  And this defeats the purpose of the auto-complete feature IMHO, and is additionally quite annoying.  So I find myself ever so often going through and cleaning out my contacts list.  I want that time back!

Another problem with auto-add to contacts.  I get really hesitant using those "import your contacts from Gmail" features on other sites.  I don't want to risk spamming a billion people.  All in all...

Lame! (cut from South Park's AWESOM-O)

I get it Gmail--it seems more personal to display only first names in the chat window.  Problem is, I regularly talk with three people whose first name is Dan.  I can't be alone here...

Yes, I know the full name is at the top of the window.  So what--I hardly ever look there.  My eye is drawn to the bottom where the conversation is actually happening and where the first name is bolded. 

Yes, I've mixed up who I've been talking to, especially when one Dan writes an IM right after I've just talked to another Dan.  C'mon, at least give me a full name display option...

Lame! (cut from South Park's AWESOM-O)

I happened on Facebook's "People You May Know Feature" today, which is pretty self-explanatory.  In theory, love the idea.  In practice, Lame!

I can't figure out how to hide the section or block individual people from showing.  For reasons I won't get into here, there are just some people I don't want to see, and Facebook keeps showing me their faces every time I log in!

Lame! (cut from South Park's AWESOM-O)

Update: I logged into Facebook this morning, and they appear to have added the ability to block people on this feature!  I doubt they were listening to me, but thank you nonetheless. 

For years now I have been expecting a viable AdSense competitor, from Microsoft, Yahoo, or a then yet unknown startup.  By viable competitor, I mean publishers (like myself) could easily switch to the competitor and expect to make at least as much money on average.  Yet the years go by, and there is nothing appealing to try out.  I just don't get it...

Google's latest 10-K says their AdSense type products still account for 34% of their advertising revenue, of which advertising revenue is 99% of their total revenue (search for "Google Network web sites as % of advertising revenues").  You would think that if you were Microsoft or Yahoo and you wanted to compete with to Google for the long-term, then you would start trying to grab away this ever expanding AdSense revenue. 

I've heard rumblings about Microsoft's, Yahoo's, Ask's and others' attempts.  However, to date there has been apparently no viability according to my above definition.

I appreciate that Google probably has a larger advertising base.  However, Microsoft and Yahoo seem to both have the same order of magnitude of traffic across their sites, which should in theory translate into the capability of getting the same order of magnitude of advertising dollars.

Additionally, Google keeps a lot of the money from AdSense (in a rather opaque way IMHO).  A competitor (Microsoft especially) could potentially subsidize the platform for a long time in order to help get publishers to switch.

So...

• Why the interminable delay?
• Will a combined Microsoft/Yahoo deliver something better?
• Am I just wrong and there actually is a viable AdSense competitor out there today (because I'm willing to try it right now)?
• Is it the fact that the big deals totally swamp out the small publishers and they are therefore somehow a waste of time?
• Is the coding and infrastructure of a contextual advertising platform really that hard (I really really doubt the answer to this is yes btw)?

Update: additional comments can be found here.

I've started a personal blog a number of times over the years, but have always abandoned it shortly after its start, followed by its timely extraction from the Internet.  So why is this one any different?

Well, let's just say I learned from my past mistakes and I am approaching personal blogging different this time around.  I won't get into all the details, which have to do with my (admittedly eccentric) personality, goals and expectations.  Just be rest assured this blog should remain up indefinitely.

So what can you expect?

• Generally short posts.  If I want to write something longer, I'll probably do an article.
• A lot of questions for which I don't have answers.
• Not a lot of regurgitation of stuff on other blogs and articles.  I hope none!
• Stuff related to Internet startups, but not exclusively.