kazabyte

Monster Acquires Trovix

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:55:28 -0800

Congratulations to Jeff Benrey, Earl Rennison, and the Trovix team. Today, they announced the sale of Trovix to Monster for $72.5MM. I met Jeff back in '04 when Ben and I were cooking the MerchantCircle idea. I introduced them to Tim at USVP and they led the A. It's great seeing a smart team with great technology evolve into a successful VC backed business.

Google Day Care Fiasco: New York Times Scooped by Valleywag

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 09:28:58 -0800

Today, the New York Times reports on a "rare fumble" made by Google with respect to on site daycare. An interesting read, but equally interesting is a story behind the story:

Valleywag reported this story over two weeks ago on June 16. Second, Owen certainly deserves some props/attribution -- a hat tip at least -- for breaking this story. Yet, there is no mention. Where's the love? Lastly, this is just further evidence of the demise of newspaper industry and the growing relevance and importance of the blogosphere -- where's the "new" in newspapers?

Visa on Facebook: Bringing Local Businesses online

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:00:46 -0800

Visa has launched a Facebook application for small businesses.

The first 20,000 US businesses that download the app get $100 of advertising credits. I'm not sure what that means.... At .2CPM, a business would get 500,000 impressions That would be a lot of page views for a small business.

With the relationships that Visa has with local businesses, it is a giant entering the online local space. I'm surprised this isn't huge news all over the online local blogosphere.

John Ousterhout

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 10:06:53 -0800

Rumor Alert:

For those that follow academics: John Ousterhout is going to Stanford!

I have immense respect for John. He's done great stuff.

Virgin America

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 10:24:41 -0800

Instead of flying Southwest on a recent quick trip to the Bay Area, I decided to give Virgin America a try, even though I'm a pretty loyal Southwest flier. For the most part, it was a more pleasant experience.

Convenience: Virgin flies to San Francisco (SFO) not Oakland (OAK). Because I was going to San Francisco, this was a lot more convenient.

Planes: New planes and comfortable seats with fancy media services in the seat back -- satellite TV and games with Internet access coming.

Gates: Very comfortable. In SEA, it's terminal A. In SFO, you fly out of the international terminal.

Reserved seating: On Virgin America, I could book specific seats on line in advanced. (On Southwest, they still have the (modified) "cattle call.")

Cool Factor: On VirginAmerica, it was a fun experience. It was like going to a night club or bar. If you are going to Las Vegas, I suppose you can get the party started early. I, however, was preparing to give a talk later in the day and I needed to get a business game face on -- so this, sadly, distracted me.

On the downside, the in flight entertainment system didn't work on my return trip -- it was down for the entire flight. I'm assuming they are still getting the bugs worked out. I found it a bit disturbing that immediately on touch down (literally, when the wheels hit the tarmac), the system tried to re-boot and failed. There's something about airplane computers failing (even though they are probably completely unrelated to the flight operations) that bother me. Maybe if they didn't display the root console on boot to the seat backs, I'd be happy in my ignorance.

I hope they got that disk problem fixed. At least they run Linux.

Amazon down?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 09:51:18 -0800

WTF?

Macintosh-5: wget www.amazon.com
--10:46:35-- http://www.amazon.com/
=> `index.html'
Resolving www.amazon.com... 72.21.210.11
Connecting to www.amazon.com|72.21.210.11|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 503 Service Unavailable
10:46:35 ERROR 503: Service Unavailable.

Go Big or Go Home

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:08:54 -0800

I'm talking to a lot of technology entrepreneurs these days. One question that frequently comes up is, "How do I know if my idea is good?" While this is a difficult question to answer, invariably, my answer always includes an assessment of market size.

A good idea should address a large market -- preferably a mature industry ripe for disruption. After all, if you are going to jump into the risky business of doing a startup, the rewards had better be commensurate with the risk. "If it's high beta, make sure it's high reward," as Sharon Wienbar once said to me. If the market isn't very big, there isn't much to take. Sounds so obvious. As a corallary, disrupting an existing large market is even better. However, finding a large market to disrupt is often hard to find because you need to be "there" at the right time and place with the right idea.

When Ben and I started MerchantCircle, we decided to attack the local Internet and we knew our customers were going to be local merchants (not consumers). However, it took us a few months to realize that it was the Yellow Pages industry that we were going to disrupt. The Yellow Pages business was/is mature, successful, and generating multi-billion dollars a year in advertising. And, yet, it was clear that consumers were abandoning the phone book for the Internet. Figuring this out was key to how we focussed the company.

Today, is it really "news" that "Telephone book companies are heading for a long slow decline?" Well, at least it gives affirmation of our approach, a few years later. This seems so obvious in 2008.

Nonetheless, we have yet to see a runaway winner disrupting the lucrative Yellow Pages business. We've seen a few challengers come and go. As the successful Yellow Pages businesses continue to grapple with their "Innovators Dilemma," someone will "crack the code" in this space and send the Yellow Pages down the path of music labels and newspapers. Hopefully, it will be MerchantCircle.

As an entrepreneur, I'm bullish on disruption -- go big and transform an existing/successful/mature industry by disrupting it. Or go home and do something else.

Jim Gray

Sat, 31 May 2008 22:43:32 -0800

Last year in January, Jim Gray sailed onto the San Francisco Bay but did not return. Today, in Berkeley, we honor Jim. I personally will take a moment to recognize Jim for his contributions. He is an influential pioneer -- a legend -- in Computer Science, the Internet and the World Wide Web. His contributions touch us all. It's not just nerdy computer science types -- such as web developers building a MySQL application -- that can thank Jim for his contributions to the areas of deep stuff like transaction processing and databases. If you ever booked an airline ticket or used an ATM to get cash, you can thank Jim too.

Respectfully, I point out the poetic irony and sadness that all of our collective search efforts and queries for Jim have returned a null result.

Air Travel Tips

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:40:00 -0800

I've been doing a bit of travel (planning) in the recent past -- here are three tidbits I've found useful.

Best Reason to Join Southwest's Rapid Rewards Program. At SeaTac (that's Seattle Tacoma International -- SEA -- for you non-locals), Rapid Rewards members can use the priority queue reserved for "premier" travelers at the airport security check point. On most airlines, only first/business class passengers or passengers that have elite status on a frequent flier program (i.e. you've accumulated a bizillion miles) get access to the queue. Sign up for the Rapid Rewards program and you can avoid those long lines at security and zip straight to your gate. It's free and you don't have to have flown any flights.

Hopefully, this feature will be extended to other airports as well.

Also, Southwest remains the best carrier for frequent travel up and down the west coast. Low cost, flexible scheduling, and no penalties for cancellations make it the best experience for those quick trips between SFO/OAK, LAX, SEA, LAS. And it's fast and easy to accumulate free trips once you've signed up for Rapid Rewards.

Best Use of United Mileage Plus. I rarely fly United anymore. Service sucks and I don't travel SEA/SFO->NYC/BOS with regularity anymore, where United flights were convenient (Plus JetBlue and Virgin America are much better experiences for these trips.) However, I've accumulated a lot of frequent flier miles on United. Using miles on their Mileage Plus "saver" program, you can fly to Asia for 60,000 miles . For a mere 30,000 miles more (90,00 total) you can go business class. Well worth it if you can find a seat. If you can't find a seat, don't start looking for a "standard" award (which will cost you 200,000 miles). Try booking a first class saver seat -- there's more inventory than that for business class -- and it will only cost you 120,000 miles. In short, using frequent flier miles for business (or first) class instead of coach for international travel is a great deal.

Use Tripit. When you book a flight online, send a copy of your booking to plans@tripit.com. You get a master itinerary and more. No registration at Tripit is required.

What I really like about Tripit is the "no registration" part. You don't have to register, login, or even visit their website. It's a clever application design that I haven't seen anywhere else. From an end user perspective, the friction to use Tripit is minimal. Kudos to the team for figuring this out.

[Caveat: Seems like there might be some Terms of Service issues with respect to privacy since you, the end user, don't agree to anything. Hopefully Tripit has done something reasonable here.]

Catching up with Paul Boutin

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:07:33 -0800

We stopped by Moose's the other Friday night to catch up with Paul Boutin holding court. I hadn't seen Paul in years. Paul is one of my favorite writers these days. Make that nerd-come-famous-writer.

I met Paul when he came over from Boston fresh off of Athena. We'd hang out at Cafe Montmartre in Palo Alto on Friday nights with Isaac. I think Dave Lemke was his hero. Later, I wondered if he and Steve Jobs were twins separated at birth:

Today, there's the Bono thing, which I don't quite get but fully appreciate:

This seems to have come full circle:

Paul, it was great seeing you. Seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same!

Can We Learn from the Past?

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 17:59:12 -0800

After peaking at $747.25/share, Google (GOOG) closed today at $508.95. It's been a sharp decline over the past few months, but its meteoric rise since its IPO was even more phenomenal. If you are a Google employee that's been around for, say, 2 years or even longer, you have vested shares that are worth real money. Secretly, you calculate your net worth more than a few times a week. "Holy Sh*t", you think to yourself, "I'm worth X millions of dollars, not even counting the unvested shares." You are quite pleased and you also rationalize the latest drop as only a temporary downturn. The stock price will jump back, you say to yourself. After all, Google *defines* the Internet. You work for the greatest company ever. Yet, maybe in the back of your mind, you are a bit concerned -- should you have sold some stock yesterday? That recent decline looks kinda like the last decline. And, even after a 30% decline, you are still in the money. "Might as well stick it out", you tell yourself. So, you continue to hold out -- selling nothing or only a small amount of your shares.

Maybe you exercised some options but did not sell -- holding out for potentially long term capital gain treatment on your ~~winnings~~ earnings. You weren't figuring on the decline and maybe you forgot about the AMT implications. Maybe that worry is another trigger in your mind that you should sell. Or, maybe you've chosen to ignore it.

You are truly blessed. You've made a great choice to come work at Google. You've been rewarded handsomely. All those free meals, massages, and trips re-affirm your greatness. And, you are among the select few that get to define the future. It's all good, isn't it?

Maybe Google is truly a unique experience and the stock will rebound. It's kinda hard to tell. However, our past, the repeated boom-bust cycles in the Valley of yesteryears, says something different. Certainly, Google's success dwarfs the successes of most all other "booms." But, we've seen this pattern before:

Can we say with any certainty that the bust is not coming? For you, the happy Googler, I truly hope this is a temporary "correction" in stock price. However, I keep thinking that maybe you should take some money "off the table" and be rewarded for your efforts, just in case.

Redux: Naive! Crazy! Brilliant!? At Least We Have Happy Customers....

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 15:47:58 -0800

As previously noted, when Ben and I co-founded MerchantCircle three years ago, we were met head on with typical skepticism...."You know nothing about media and local....or the Internet." "Look at all the dead bodies pursuing the holy grail of getting to small small businesses...How can you possibly succeed without building an audience first?" "You guys are naive and crazy....but, possibly, if it all works, brilliant!"

Boy, starting up is hard work, especially when your greatest supporters -- your friends -- aren't so supportive.

350,000 merchants registered on MerchantCircle later, we're still plugging away on our "March to Millions of Merchants." We want them all -- we want all local businesses to know and use MerchantCircle as their partner in online advertising. What Google is to search, what Starbucks is to coffee, we want to be to online advertising for local businesses. Or course, there is still a ways to go. True victory is far from guaranteed. But, we're on a great trajectory.

Along the way, let us not forget our "other" goal -- to positively impact the lives of the people who own and operate those small businesses. Would we make their lives better? After all, building a successful business would be a "tough row to hoe" if our customers didn't succeed and thrive. I think sometimes we forget the real value that we provide to these business owners. These are "salt of the earth" people working hard to make a living, build better communities and fight growing competition from large corporations with international muscle. Here's what some of many have to say:

"I live in a farming community, where's there's a recession, not a lot of revenue and the local traffic has died off.... MerchantCircle has allowed me to keep my store going with the help of customers outside of Archer who want to buy my handmade soaps."

-Tina Elmore-Wright, Scents of Peace, Archer, FL

"This has been such a fantastic service for my business. It not only allows me to promote my business, but get to know, help, and be helped by other reputable businesses. I love that your goal has been to keep small businesses thriving. We are enjoying the service, and having fun doing it through Merchant Circle." You guys rock!"

-American Qualitees, Reno, NV

"I love MerchantCircle! I go to San Diego Chamber of Commerce events and all the MerchantCircle members gather around and give each other high fives. We all love the site. It's like we're in a cult. I don't tell anyone else in the printing business about it because I don't want them to find out how I'm getting new customers!"

-Tuan Hoang, Sky Printing and Graphic Design, San Diego, CA

Read more here.

Sometimes we ask ourselves if these comments are real. (They are.) We couldn't write such good stuff. Sometimes they sound like those endorsements on a late night television infomercial where there's always the disclaimer of "Actors compensated for their opinions." But these are all real. That all feels pretty good.

Maybe we're no longer so "Naive." I'll accept that we're still "Crazy." Hopefully, we're headed towards "Brilliance." Along the way, I'm glad we're making the lives of local businesses better.

Yahoo!Mail Meltdown Coming?

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 11:42:41 -0800

With increasing frequency (say, a few times a week), I'm finding Yahoo!Mail temporarily down. Either the site doesn't respond or I get the ever helpful "Error Code 1" or "Error Code 5." And of course, "contacting Customer Care" is a futile trip into a black hole.

Is it me or is this a systemic issue revealing technical/scalability/reliability cracks in Yahoo!? Executive shuffles, re-focusing the company, layoffs -- maybe these things will get Yahoo! on track again. However, even though I've been a loyal customer for over 10 years, I'll still jump ship if they can't keep the applications running. I'm guessing I'm not alone. And, to state the obvious, It's all downhill if Yahoo! can't keep audience/page views/engagement.

Is it just me -- or are you too finding Yahoo!Mail increasingly unreliable and flakey?

Isaac Salzman

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 12:33:56 -0800

Isaac was a good friend of mine in the early 1990's. He was an aspiring musician and a pretty good software hack. Tragically, he was killed when a car smashed into his car on November 22, 1992. He was only 29. Wow! Fifteen years ago. As a friend notes, I can't believe it's been 15 years and yet it seems just like yesterday.

A story about Isaac Salzman (and Me)

A day or two after Isaac started at Sun Microsystems, I received this cryptic single line email from Isaac:

(lunchp)

with a signature that included this line:

JG JG JG JG JG JG.....

I smiled because I then decided that "this guy," Isaac, is gonna fit it.

The cryptic part, as you nerdy/lispy/emacs/ex-Sun AD/MMPP types recognize, is not the "(lunchp)" part -- this clearly is a question that asks, "Do you want to go to lunch?"

The cryptic part was the line in the signature.

So, indeed, we gather for lunch and I had to ask:

Me: Dude, what's up with the "Jay Gees (JG's)?"

Isaac: The "Jay Gees?"

Me: Yes, the "Jay Gees" in your signature....

A few seconds pass.

Isaac: Dude! [Yes, we really talked like this] (laughing) That's the sound of the Mesa Boogie Master in Crunch Rhythm Mode -- the only way to fly! ... "Jug Jug Jug Jug Jug Jug Jug Jug...."

Me: [Nodding] Cool! Where do you want to go to lunch?

I really didn't have too much of a clue what he was talking about, faked it, and of course figured it out later. It was the beginning of a great friendship.

Guess you had to be there. It *was* funny. Really. Maybe you need to hear it. (Wait for the JG's.)

Isaac: I still miss you. I'll have a M\"azen and a bread stick in your honor.

[M\"azens and bread sticks -- We used to spend a lot of time drinking M\"azens and eating bread sticks at Gordon Biersch in Palo Alto, where we'd see Smokey Wallace and Larry Cable *every* night. But I digress -- that's a story for another day. :-)]

It's Turtles All the Way Down

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 21:44:17 -0800

I was waxing philosophically with Skrenta the other day about systems and abstractions; Underneath the covers of many tried and true interfaces, lie crap. He pointed out that 20 years had passed before a bug was uncovered in Jon Bentley's Binary Search implementation first published in Programming Pearls in 1986. Arguably, this bug is an edge condition -- however knowing a bug in this famous hunk of code possibly went unnoticed for two decades should shake our collective confidence in software engineering to the core.

Beyond the trivial lurk even more disturbing problems. What trouble is buried in, say, your TCP stack? Or, maybe worse, your compiler?

I still lose a little sleep when I look back at how I bootstrapped a compiler a few years back at one of my former companies. I'll elide the details, but this involved compiling the compiler first with the C compiler and then recompiling the compiler source with the newly created compiler binary. No great shakes here -- I'm sure many of you have done a similar bootstrap.

The regression test suite pretty much sucked at the time so it was never clear where the bugs were. I would compile the compiler one more time and diff the binaries as a paranoia check. In the end, though, I was never really certain of the impact of a bug in the compiler that compiled itself or a bug in the resultant compiler that was used to compile the source base of what was arguably the largest software system in the world at the time.

And what about the C compiler used to build the first rev of the compiler? And the compiler to build that compiler? And the compiler to build that compiler? In the end, It's Turtles All the Way Down! (Well, maybe terminating at Grace Hopper's first compiler. :-))

Looking for some comfort, I dug up this paper -- Ken Thompson's Turing Award lecture. This, of course, made me even more paranoid. At best, "It's Turtles All the Way Down" and you can't find the bugs. Or, worse, there lurks some mischief on the way down that you'll never find. Sometimes it shakes my confidence to the core that we provably can't trust our computations....

[Two hours have passed. I'm over it as I happily hack away, content that nothing so awful would have a practical impact....Could it?]