Bonobos Website Is Down

I ran across this error on the Bonobos website.

I like a few things:

• It’s visually striking. It admits error while simultaneously referring to their core business.
• The layout stays close to David Ogilvy’s guidelines on effective advertising
• You can still sign up for their mailing list and take advantage of the offers. They’ve turned their error into an opportunity for you (and Bonobos).

Legislation That Keeps The Bubble Alive

This congress is considering legislation that will prolong the current funding bubble. The Private Company Flexibility and Growth Act (H.R. 2167) aims to “amend the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to change the threshold number of shareholders for required registration under that Act.” Although the changes it proposes may seem minor, they could have far-reaching and disastrous consequences.

• It revises the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934. Companies were forced to register with the SEC when their assets reached 1 million dollars and held by 500 persons. The proposed change would extend the limit to 10 million dollars and 1000 persons.
• The proposed bill exempts accredited investors and employees.

There are some differing ideas about why this legislation is needed. Sure, you can give in and say that it will help keep private companies private, and protect that piece of our economic landscape. I think the legislators would argue that its noble purpose is to allow private companies more runway to grow before going to the public markets for capital funding. If you are a cynical person you might think that the true purpose is to keep SecondMarket alive by fixing inherent flaws in their business plan.

However, there are many overlooked consequences of the bill. As others have pointed out, the bill could delay IPOs and exits for VCs. It will further depress the number of IPOs in a depressed IPO market.

The real danger of the bill is that it allows companies to grow larger and attract more investors before having to disclose material facts about the company. Combined with the current bubble in early and late stage funding, it’s a setup for a catastrophe.

There is no doubt that there is a bubble in angel and VC funding. As everyone has been saying for the last year, young startup companies are flush with cash from Angels and VCs. They will now have a secondary market to sell stock in their fledgling companies. If the only rule is “caveat emptor”, Angels and VCs will dump underperforming investments into a secondary market, rather than take the coming losses. Pension funds, investment managers and employees, regardless of their investment skill, will be entangled in another toxic asset class. So will anyone else chasing quick bucks in the technology sector.

The Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 was passed to mitigate risk of fraud for consumers and investors when investing in securities by providing transparency. By changing a few small provisions, this bill will open the door for unscrupulous salesmen to create new financial WMDs. Furthermore, it is going to pump the bubble and keep the funding Ponzi scheme alive.

Try Things

Sriram Krishnan hits the nail on the head with his post, Don’t be so f*king strategic.

All large companies (and I do mean all – this is not a post about Microsoft) tend to be in love with finding the right “strategy” in place before doing anything.

In the strategy consulting industry, this is close to what they call “analysis paralysis”. It is easy to get stuck in a loop searching for the ultimate strategy or design.

For big companies, analysis paralysis leads to a lot of wasted management time. For smaller companies, a lack of action can lead to wasted development and design cycles. It is important to find test projects and try random things with any spare cycles, and make that part of the strategy, than lose valuable development hours.

Bank of America and Buffett

David Weidner’s commentary on Berkshire Hathaway’s investment into BOA is misleading. This is a great investment by Berkshire since they are getting a 6% annual return and receive options which are already in-the-money. Furthermore, Berkshire protected their investment by getting preferred stock.

The only thing surprising about this rush to slaughter is that Buffett has played this game before. His investments in bailout babies General Electric Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. have played out terribly for mini-Buffetts who love to follow the oracle.

This is misleading, since the people who bought into GE and Goldman Sachs bought common shares. Obviously, the common shares did not do as well, since the companies were forced to cut dividends to their common shareholders.

The upside for the shareholders is that GE and Goldman Sachs still exist today. Berkshire isn’t an ordinary investor. In each of these deals, Berkshire stepped in to provide “last resort” financing to stabilize the enterprises. Other firms have paid back Berkshire’s loans, so it is entirely possible that this bank will do the same.

It would be folly to follow Berkshire into Bank of America since you are not getting the same deal terms as Berkshire. On this point, David Weidner is right. If you want to be a “mini-Buffett”, it’s better to buy Berkshire than to follow Berkshire.

(Disclosure: I own Berkshire B shares.)

Mobile App Publishing

In the past few months, I have looked at the mobile application space. One particular topic has piqued my interest. Before my research, I held the opinion that the market was a free-for-all, and that small and individual publishers had equal footing with large developers.

This is not completely true. With hundreds of thousands of apps, and with each category reaching saturation, it is necessary to differentiate yourself to get noticed. Sure, adding the appropriate description to your app and putting it in the right category will help, but what about offline marketing? How do you work with similar apps? How do you price your application? Large development houses and content providers have an upper hand when it comes to marketing applications, with their experience and scale.

The mobile app space adopted a familiar organizational structure or pattern. There are a number of app development houses that are branching into publishing services. For example, Bottle Rocket’s Thruster is essentially a publishing agency for mobile gaming apps. Everyone knows that Rovio and Angry Birds wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without teaming with Chillingo.

The business model is crystal clear. You partner with the publisher, they take a cut of the proceeds, and in return they provide marketing and development support. In a market filled with individual developers and authors, this seems to be a natural organization with an attractive value proposition for all participants. The new market resembles the old market.

First Silver Then Gold

Silver prices are tanking. It is pretty clear the speculators ran up the price. “Investors” were drawn to the large price increases and the assurances that commodity prices were stabilizing at new highs. You can’t help but feel sorry for the people with investments in Gold, which will be pummeled next.

I love the following chart, which is borrowed from Jean-Paul Rodrigue.

About Controllers

After CES, I had the lofty ambition of writing about some of the new and cool electronic gadgets that I saw. I never did get that blog post published. There were tons of large, flat panel displays. 3D was a big topic. And there were dozens of tablets.

One meta-theme I interested me was the ever-expanding range of controllers and input methods. In the past few years, we have gone from keyboards and mice to capacitative and resistive touch screens. The popularity of the iPad is proof that touch screens are fantastic for lightweight computing.

There are two other technologies on the horizon that show a lot of promise. First, gestural controllers hold a lot of promise. Like touchscreens, gestural controllers have been around for a long time for musical applications, most notably the Theremin. Xbox Kinect has been a huge success, and already companies and hackers are using the technology to do other things.

Another technology on the upswing is speech recognition and input. Both iOS and Android, the dominant operating systems for smartphones, have rushed to embrace this technology. If you haven’t already tried the Vlingo app for Android, you should. Availability of 3G and 4G data connections makes it easier to put remote processing capacity against the uploaded commands.

Voice control is most useful in a hands-free setting, such as driving a car. It also seems crazy to use body motions to control your computer. However, both of these new technologies are quickly being adapted for laptops and other electronics. Because each controller type has advantages and disadvantages, I believe that the future lies in mixing and matching the controllers. In the same way that a keyboard is paired with a mouse, I would not be surprised to see the touchscreen paired with voice control.

Facebook to Open DC Plans

Facebook opened up its datacenter plans! It’s a really big contribution, and it is sure to change the way that Data Centers are designed. It could also prove to be disruptive for hardware manufacturers in the server space. Gigaom covers a lot of the details.

The motherboard speaker is replaced with LED indicators to save power and provide visual indicators of server health.

Some of the design details seem obvious to me. Unless you are standing in front of a server, the speaker is useless. Also, the beeps can be muffled by the fans and the hundreds of other servers in the vicinity. A visual indicator of server health is far more useful.

This reminds me of the time one of the marketing managers at Novell referred to the telecom closet in a branch office as a datacenter. Even IT geeks sometimes forget the scale at which some large corporations are running at. Minute energy savings, such as the ones found by Facebook, are a nerdy (but green) topic.

Career Advice from the Internet

The problem with taking career advice from the Internet, or any advice that relates to you or your business, is that humans suffer from many different cognitive biases. In particular, illusory superiority is a huge barrier to understanding and following the advice that is available online.

Although the biases still persist, I think it is far more helpful to talk to people/experts and get advice that is specific to the situation. Hopefully, the person giving the advice will be helpful enough to identify and correct any biases. This is why mentors, coaches and consultants are so important – to help reveal the obvious.

Analytics Software

One of my co-workers pointed me to this blog entry about the future of analytics software.