Day 111 – 2010

Rainy day today mid, low 50.  

Hopefully the activities today will not be rained out.

 

BTW

investing in a startup There are many people with brilliant ideas out there in the real world.  However, with the bust of the internet bubble ten years ago, investors are very cautious with their money when it comes to online businesses.  What was easy money based on a great rate of return once, is now viewed with caution. However there are exceptions to the rule, some of which are not very clear to me. One of the examples is facebook. Mark Zuckerberg who founded it in 2004 is now a multi Billionaire. So how did he get the initial money?  Did he have a great business plan, like everybody and their mother is preaching to have? Or did he just present the concept and got the initial 1.3 million dollar funding?  I guess at the end he only knows.  In the meantime, Microsoft invested $240 million, The Samwer brothers from Germany added millions to it, another $60 million from Billionaire Li Ka-shing, Hong Kong for a total of $716 million.  Facebook valuates itself as a $15 Billion company with around 500 million visitors every month.  Those numbers are mind boggling.  So, the question is, besides the amount of visitors mainly between 18-25 years of age, what exactly is it that makes facebook special to draw numbers like that? The other example is plentyoffish.com. Founder Mark Frind.  No investors, not a public traded company. Markus is basically a one-man band running a website that, by his latest traffic figures, is two and a half times bigger than digg.com. Digg.com gets 200 Million page views per month, but Markus says plentyoffish gets 500 Million: “The site(plentyoffish.com and Forums.plentyoffish.com) serves ~500 million pageviews a month and does so using 1 DB server and 1 Web Server which is a far cry from the industry standard of 300+ servers for a site of this size.” Digg uses 3 web servers and 8 small database servers.  Asked how many hours he puts into his site on a daily basis he replied: “It is around 2 hours of work a day and that stays steady because as the site grows i automate more and more. Some of that work I get my girlfriend to help me with, she is far more diplomatic when answering mean emails. From what I can tell i should have no problem running it by myself even if it gets to 3 times its current size.” Now he’s in the NY Times bragging about his $10M a year in profit: For anyone inclined to daydream about a Web business that would all but run itself, two other details may be of interest: Mr. Frind operates the business out of his apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia, and he says he has net profits of about $10 million a year. Given his site’s profitable advertising mix and independently verified traffic volume, the figure sounds about right. So what is the difficulty in obtaining money these days for an idea?  Does anybody listen anymore?  Does it depend on who you know (of course)?  Did those guys just show up at the right time at the right place? If so, let me know where I have to be… Any answers to this question is more than welcome.

Quit smoking progress Day 14.2:  #$%^&* Do over  :{