The Money Panel
This is what Jeff Clavier called this. In general the call they call their session “The good, the bad and the ugly.”
It starts with the definition of Web 2.0, which is simply the next generation of the web. Easy enough really. There is a real problem with the presentation from Jeff’s laptop. Jeff really believes that Bootstrapping goes a long way now and you can go to a million users with a million of dollars. A good exit road is the GYM, which are the large buyers out there, Google Yahoo! and Microsoft. Founders he believes will make the most amount of money in this web 2.0 world, as there are a lot of companies that will possibly range money from Angel but never have to go to VCs. Angels will look for an investment of $100k to $1 million, with $5–20 million being possible with VCs.
Jeff needs to decrease his screen resolution and he just moved to a mac so he doesn’t know how. Technorati’s own comes for help and now we can finally see the presentation. :)
Om Malik can’t be here, but there is a video that is shown. The good is that companies that make tools that people want and that are providing infrastructure. The bad is that there are a lot of me too companies that are being founded and everybody is banking on being bought out. Actually very nice to see he is almost here.
Rodrigo Sepulveda believes the energy is back, which is good. There is some good funding going on in Europe. The bad is a lack of ambition, with a lot of people just wanting to be sold. The ugly is that there is a lot of copy and paste.
Jeff Clavier thinks the good is that the vibe is back and that there are lots of people in there. He has the right US mind in that lots of people will fail but they will learn and start again, which is something that Europe or at least Germany still needs to build up.
David Hornik says that entrepreneurs are interested in the consumer internet again, which is the great new for him. The bad news at this moment in time the GYM isn’t yet at the stage where they are paying huge and crazy amounts for companies. The ugly would be when that comes back, which is when it would turn ugly. Businesses need to work out to be a real going concern.
I sadly got distracted when Simon from Yahoo! was talking. Typically Yahoo!, he does say that one of the bad things is that there is not yet an universal login system, meaning that you can target your ads a lot better on blogs because you really know the user. Of course Yahoo! is really doing just that, and he believes there are not enough ambitious companies.
David talks about buying a new recording device to allow him to podcast. He is very excited about blogging, podcasting and videocasting and he really does look for a good group of people who have a really great long-term vision and will build a big company. He has seen that in blogging and not in the rest yet.
In the discussion it came up that David believes that there might be a funding bubble on the horizon as there are a lot companies out there that might not have a viable business or exit strategy. We don’t have a public market bubble yet.
Heiko Hebig asks what the next big thing will be, especially in light of so many me-too companies being funded. The panel seems to be pretty sure that Video will be something that will move with force to the web. Asking Simon from Yahoo! to talk about Flickr a bit, he denies to say what they paid for it. Jeff then smilies saying everyone knows and puts up a few fingers being interpreted as a 27 :), but then David seems to say it was less.
A million square foot in LA, is what Yahoo! rented recently based on Marc Canter and he wishes them good luck and would love to see some multimedia out of there. Marc actually asks about the new open Yahoo!, which he believes they are using this openness as their weapon against Google.
Next item is the question of Mechanical Turk from Amazon and what they think about it. David is a bit skeptical, and believes that people might value their time higher than what people might pay for it, especially in terms of things like Mechanical Turk.
Rodrigo talked about that there are companies out there that haven’t ever taken VC funding, like Spreadshirt who are now 100 people and profitable. David agrees that people don’t have to take his money, as he might be a nice guy at meetings, but not nice enough for the amount of share of the company he takes away for that. :)
Some more questions and answers that I didn’t write down, but all in all a great panel.