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Box: The Path From Arrington's Backyard To A Billion Dollar Business
May 13, 1:00PM
It's no secret that many deals have been struck and key relationships formed at TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington's former house in Atherton. In case you aren't familiar, Arrington threw epic parties at his home for the tech community in the early days of TechCrunch. Police were called, booze was flowing, people passed out. I don't have enough fingers to count how many times I've spoken to a Silicon Valley entrepreneur or VC who said he or she used to frequent Mike's house parties back in the day. Clearly this was the place to be for anyone looking to meet their next investor, acquirer, co-founder etc. And that's exactly what Box co-founders Dylan Smith and Aaron Levie were thinking when they showed up to Mike's house in early February 2006 for the Naked Conversations TechCrunch Party. It was in Mike's backyard where they met then Draper Fisher Jurvetson partner Emily Melton. Beers in hand (actually only Levie was of age-barely, so Smith was drinking water), the pair pitched Melton on their idea. She was so impressed and their passion for what they were building cloud storage, that she immediately introduced them to the DFJ partner covering SaaS and enterprise investments, Josh Stein, who months later led Box's first round of institutional investment.Convertible Note Seed Financings: Econ 101 For Founders
May 13, 10:00AM
What Is a Conversion Discount? In the context of a seed financing, a convertible note is a loan that typically automatically converts into shares of preferred stock upon the closing of a Series A round of financing. A conversion discount (or "discount") is a mechanism to reward the noteholders for their investment risk by granting to them the right to convert the amount of the loan, plus interest, at a reduced price (in percentage terms) to the purchase price paid by the Series A investors. In other words, the founders are saying to the investors, in effect, if you take this risk and give us money today, we'll reward you by giving you "20% off" at our Series A round down the road (20% being the usual discount, as discussed below). For example, if the investors in a $500,000 convertible note seed financing were granted a discount of 20%, and the price per share of the Series A Preferred Stock were $1.00, the noteholders would convert the loan at an effective price (referred to as the "conversion price") of $0.80 per share and thus receive 625,000 shares ($500,000 divided by $0.80), which is 125,000 shares more than a Series A investor would receive for its $500,000 investment and a 1.25x return on paper ($625,000 divided by $500,000). (The foregoing example does not include accrued interest on the loan, which is typically about 5%-7% annually, as discussed below.)PayPal Gets Its Own Share Of The Yahoo Diaspora, Hires JavaScript Icon Douglas Crockford
May 13, 7:08AM
The reorganizing and downsizing at Yahoo -- and possibly the executive scandal at the very top of the pyramid -- are leading to a wave of talent departures at the company: the latest in that story is that Douglas Crockford, a trailblazing Java guru most recently at Yahoo, is joining eBay's payment giant PayPal. The news was announced by Bill Scott, PayPal's senior director of UI engineering, on his own blog, yesterday. Scott himself had also worked at Yahoo years ago.Help! There's A Patent On My Idea! What Now?
May 13, 6:00AM
One of the most frequent questions I get asked goes something like this: "I have a really great idea, but (name of big company or university) has a patent on that. What do I do?" With over 8,000,000 patents issued to date and thousands of new patents issued weekly, chances are good that patents have been issued that are relevant to your business or idea. Knowingly infringing an active patent can lead to disastrous consequences for your business. So what do you do?Marc Andreessen Visits Peter Thiel's Stanford Class To Talk Startups, How He Invests & The Future
May 13, 4:33AM
It wasn't so long ago that Peter Thiel began publicly pushing the somewhat controversial idea that higher education is in a bubble, or launching an initiative to help smart young people "stop out of school." For these reasons, Thiel's decision to teach a higher ed course was unexpected, even controversial. Last month, he began teaching a class at Stanford called "Computer Science 183: Startup." One of his students, Blake Masters, provides a glimpse into Thiel's lectures through his comprehensive class notes. Masters has turned his notes into essays and posted them on his blog, one of which is a fascinating conversation between the investor and Marc Andreessen on the past, present, and future of the tech industry, which we've highlighted herein.Pornterest Vs. Pornstagram Vs. Tumblr's #NSFW
May 13, 3:00AM
Wow, Pinterest's porn section is fairly tame. I was just curious about the type of not-so-mommy-friendly content that might be popping up on what's now the third-most popular social network after Facebook and Twitter. (Also I'm bored). After all, Tumblr houses, like, a lot of porn. Both services aim to help their members find platforms for self-expression, one through pinning images for inspiration, the other through blogging, and both have also had to fight unwanted content on their networks.Five Ways Native Monetization Is Changing Silicon Valley
May 12, 11:30PM
With a $100 billion IPO pending, it's with confident defiance that Facebook has thumbed its nose at traditional web advertising models. On Facebook, despite their $5 billion 2012 forecasted ad revenue, you'll see no prerolls, no rich media ads, no "punch the monkeys," and no interruption. Facebook is leading the charge for a new generation of media companies who are building their businesses on "native" advertising models, a fundamental shift away from the traditional interruptive ad models that users have learned to ignore. Facebook's commitment to native monetization signals significant change to come.Digital Wallet Battle Heats Up As Visa And MasterCard Enter The Game
May 12, 9:00PM
This week, two of the major players in the credit card industry, Visa and MasterCard launched their online digital wallet services. Known as V.me (Visa's) and PayPass Wallet Services (MasterCard), both are very similar initiatives which see the companies clamoring to become the credit card of choice for digital transactions, the way they fight today to be the credit card for all the other transactions taking place out there in the real world. And, to be clear, a "digital" wallet isn't necessarily the same as a "mobile wallet," although a digital wallet service could also be housed in a mobile app interface, as both MasterCard and Visa plan on offering in the near future.Postmates Get It Now Users Spend $100+ A Month — At Least In Month One
May 12, 8:00PM
Last December, Postmates launched with the plan to offer up a courier delivery service for local businesses throughout San Francisco. But then the team had a brilliant idea: What if it gave its couriers pre-paid debit cards, which would let them purchase goods for customers and then deliver them anywhere in the city? That idea evolved into the Get It Now app, which Postmates launched in private beta in mid-April. Since then, the app has attracted more than 1,000 users in just four weeks. Not surprisingly, many of those users come from tech startups themselves, with employees of Twitter, TaskRabbit, Square, Cherry, and Yelp all signed up to use the service.Mobile – Facebook And Google Can't Live With It And They Can't Live Without It
May 12, 7:00PM
This week Facebook did a virtually unprecedented thing. In the middle of its IPO roadshow it modified its S1 filing in reaction to questions it had been being asked by analysts. The modification I refer to stated that Facebook wanted to acknowledge a trend; that trend is the declining ARPU (average revenue per user) being seen in its current quarter. This trend is being driven, Facebook said, by the growth in its usage on mobile platforms and its inability to monetize those platforms in the same way, or at the same rate, as its desktop/laptop offerings. The previous iterations of the S1 had all contained the possibility of this trend. Even the likelihood of it. But the actuality of the trend was noted here for the first time in the S1.No, Snapchat Isn't About Sexting, Says Co-Founder Evan Spiegel
May 12, 6:06PM
"The minute you tell someone that images on your server disappear, everyone jumps to sexting." Evan Spiegel laughed and leaned back into his chair during his first sitdown interview since his iPhone app Snapchat blew up over the last month. Snapchat is #12 on the free iOS photo app charts in the U.S. and just scored some mainstream media attention in The New York Times. Plus, we hear that Snapchat has also impressed Facebook's internal product leadership and even Zuck himself. Why? Snapchat is a photo-sharing app that changes privacy norms in a very novel way. The free app allows users to send others photos and control how long receivers can see them. These photos last for up to 10 seconds, before they disappear forever. "It seems odd that at the beginning of the Internet everyone decided everything should stick around forever," Spiegel said. "I think our application makes communication a lot more human and natural."Gillmor Gang: Tomorrow Never Knows
May 12, 5:00PM
The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — turned off their minds, relaxed, and floated downstream on the push notification inbox of tomorrow. Borrowing a page from the Tibetan Book of Windows, the Gang debated the impossibility of multitasking, the existence of a new uber operating system, and the overall impact of surrendering to the void. Revolver marked the exact center of the Beatles arc; everything before was prologue, everything after continues to expand as the media is transformed. A quarter of a million may seem like a lot of dollars for playing one song once on a TV show, just as we await the size of the Facebook IPO. Recorded first and sequenced last, Tomorrow Never Knows is the end of the beginning.Never Mind The Servers: AngelPad Start-Up ElasticBox Makes It Easy To Set Up Web Apps
May 12, 4:35PM
If your response to virtual infrastructure installations is a derisive "Boring, Sidney, booring" then maybe AngelPad startup ElasticBox isn't for you. However, if you love cloud computing like Nancy loved heroin, I think you may be in luck. ElasticBox, founded by former Microsofies Ravi Srivatsav, Alberto Arias Maestro, and Amadeo Casas Cuadrado, is a service that makes setting up and running a cloud-based service quick and easy. With the service you don't have to set up the environment in order to run an app. Instead, you can focus on the actual functionality and far less on server maintenance.Dropbox Kicks Off Its Bigger, More Difficult "Dropquest" Scavenger Hunt Today
May 12, 3:30PM
Last year, nearly half a million completed Dropbox's very first "Dropquest." This time, designer Jon Ying and engineer Rajeev Nayak say they "honestly don't know" how many people will participate, but with the company's rapid growth, it's a safe bet that the number will be bigger. Nayak describes Dropquest as "a gift to our users." It's a online scavenger hunt where you solve logic puzzles while also learning about Dropbox's key features. Everyone who finishes gets 1 extra gigabyte of free storage, and there are other prizes for the players who finish first — the grand prize winner will get a Dropbox employee hoodie, a Dropbox Hack Week T-shirt, a drawing signed by the entire Dropbox team, an invitation to write the next Dropquest, and a 100 gigabytes of free storage for life.Begun, The Retina Wars Have
May 12, 3:15PM
As we approach the E3, the electronic gaming show in early June, I suspect that the value of "Retina" high-resolution displays will soon become apparent. While the prospect of Retina MacBooks is all but inevitable, we have reached a plateau when it comes to general computing and, more important, living room media. The first question is, in short, why do we need a Retina MacBook? Presumably it would be a superior experience for video and photo editing and offer designers far more real estate on a large screen, especially when viewing photos at lower resolutions. As evidenced by the iPhone's Retina display, gaming will become considerably more compelling. This presupposes a rich and vibrant OS X gaming ecosystem.The Weekend Watch: de Grisogono Meccanico dG Watch Hands-On
May 12, 2:11PM
In the watch world the Meccanico dG watch is a bit of a legend. Originally debuted back in 2008, it helped bridge the gap between modern tech toys and high-end mechanical watches. The all-mechanical design features dual time displays. One, a standard analog dial. Second, a digital display that uses countless small parts to indicate a second time zone like the piece's electronic cousins. Incredibly complicated, the Meccanico dG brought new people into the world of high-horology that previously would not pay attention to what they might have considered stuffy mechanical toys for traditionalists.No Shortcuts, No Mercy: The Bloodsport Of Recruitment
May 12, 2:00PM
One year ago I wrote an article called "Why The New Guy Can't Code," about how the industry-standard process for hiring software engineers is broken, shortsighted, and counterproductive. It remains my most-read TC post. Of course, I was far from the first to say so, and even farther from the last; every few weeks a similar rant bubbles onto the home page of Hacker News. And yet recruiting remains broken. When I wrote that post I imagined that in the subsequent year some sharp startup would come along and turn the game on its ear -- but no. A few have tried: Gitalytics, which tries to use Github data to identify good engineers; Gild, which acquired Coderloop last year and is still going strong; and especially StackOverflow Careers, which leverages the software world's most indispensable site to match employers and employees. But I think it's fair to say that all the contenders so far serve as adjuncts to the traditional recruiting process, rather than replacing it with something disruptively new. All of which adds up to today's very weird situation: there's a desperate talent shortage across the industry, but at the same time, employers are so terrified by the prospect of ever hiring a subpar engineer that the recruiting process has become increasingly gruelling and time-consuming, even though there's little evidence that the standard interview gauntlet identifies good engineers. Of late I'm getting more involved with recruiting myself. (My day job is at the software development shop HappyFunCorp; we're hiring.) And, pending the arrival of that hypothetical revolutionary recruiting startup, I have a modest proposal: stop worrying so much about hiring, and start putting your HR energies into firing.Warren Buffett Is A Punk
May 12, 11:00AM
Warren Buffett is like my ten year old. When she gives me some BS story about something she needs or something she is suggesting there's always a good reason for it. But whenever there's a good reason, there's always a real reason. And the two are starkly different. My job is to figure out the real reason while horse vomit is still spitting out of her ten year old mouth. With Buffett it's the same. He's like this saintly investor who can do no wrong in the public perception. He's America's grandpa investor, filled with sexual innuendos made honest and funny in that way that elderly people can transform ancient history into metaphor. And while he's talking and you're smiling, he very quietly tries to put his hand in your pants, on your wallet. It's all innocent. Until you realize he just got more rich and you got more broke. And then you're in handcuffs. And then you're dead.Americans Now Spend More Time On Facebook Mobile Than Its Website
May 12, 6:46AM
All those minutes reading your news feed in bed, messaging friends over lunch, and browsing photos on the bus really add up. Time spent on Facebook's mobile site and apps per month (441 minutes) has finally surpassed usage of its classic website (391 minutes) -- for Americans who do use Facebook on the go according to the latest report from comScore. And that's actually a big problem for the social network. Facebook usually shows four to seven ads per page on its website, but only a few ads per day in its mobile news feed. That means it makes a lot less money when you visit from your little devices. In fact, yesterday Facebook had to warn potential investors for upcoming initial public offering of stock that the more people who access it from mobile instead of the web, the worse its business is doing.The Importance Of Social Media In Elections: Mostly Hot Air
May 12, 3:14AM
If social media mattered in elections, Ron Paul would have a realistic shot at being the Republican nominee and Barack Obama would be on track to crush Mitt Romney in the biggest landslide in American history. Despite the hype over follower counts, a new study shows that there's no credible evidence that Twitter can be used to predict how elections will turn out. "It can be concluded that the predictive power of Twitter regarding elections has been greatly exaggerated," writes computer science professor, Daniel Gayo-Avello, in an unusually strident rant (for an academic). Gayo's conclusions are intuitive: social media users are an unrepresentative slice of voters, and tweets may not accurately reflect how voters behave.If at any time you'd like to stop receiving these messages, just send an email to feeds_feedburner_com_techcrunch+unsubscribe-hmdtechnology=gmail.com@mail.feed2email.net.
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