Paul Kedrosky, an investor and analyst, writes about technology, markets, economics, and startups, including Google's business and search quality.
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You gave a good explanation of a major point I omitted, the common situation of Main Street businesses having a strong geographical barrier to entry.
And your point about "winner take all" on the Internet is simple but basically correct.
Okay, but still: Joe has an idea, maybe Facebook for cat owners, optimized for mobile with a special alarm when GPS says they are near a cat owner of the opposite sex, a pivot from his semi-successful MySpace for dog owners, a pivot from his quasi-successful MeetUp for gerbil lovers. To Joe, each of these is a really new, unique, no competition idea. And "romantic angle?" "Nearly all romantic angle." And, if he gets just 2% of all the ...!
Maybe Joe's ideas are terrific, and maybe they suck. If he does fail fast, then for each such pivot he will soon learn which case is true.
So, all that said, just where in there does Joe need all those special personality characteristics Suster listed? I mean, Joe has a brother Sam who started a Chicago style pizza place in LA -- that was his innovative idea for a Main Street business. Like nearly all Main Street business owners, Sam is just a regular guy, just like his brother Joe.
Net, I see Moore's law and the Internet as mostly just advantages except for the one issue you mentioned, the flip side of the great opportunity of serving the world is no geographical barrier to entry. So, if Joe's idea really is new and good and he is on the way to tens of millions of uniques a month just from…
Interesting to compare this with Paul Kedrosky's take on the Twitter funding:http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2007/07/26/the_twitter_les.htm
Another observation: if you apply this advice to a typical Web 2.0 startup, you get an employee. The "customer" of a free consumer web startup is its eventual acquirer: after all, that's who's going to pony up the cash that becomes the entrepreneur's profit. The "suppliers" are the users who donate their time, and sometimes the investors who donate the money needed to build something that makes it worth it for the users to donate their time.
You have three options for how you're going to manage time, cash, and users. You can go to your customer (the big corporation), and say "Pay me now and I will build something that hopefully users want. If they don't, you're out the cash." This is an employee. You can say "I will build something that users want, then when I have shown that users want it, you can pay me. If it flops, it's my problem." This is a bootstrapped startup. Or you can go to someone else, say "Give me cash and I will find users. Then the customer (big company) will want to buy us, and we will shared in the profits. If this doesn't happen, you're out your money and I'm out my time." This is a funded startup.
It also occurs to me that many of the misunderstandings behind Web 2.0 and doubts about the sustainability of free web startups come from this reversal of the roles of customer and supplier. Most people…
@broadstuff.com: I'll check back and delete this comment once the site is restored
For those trying to get to the page here it is from Bing's cache (Google ironically hasn't cached it yet)...
The lead up to the Christmas and New Year holidays required researching a number of consumer goods to buy, which of course meant using Google to search for them and ratings reviews thereof. But this year it really hit home just how badly Google's systems have been spammed, as typically anything on Page 1 of the search results was some form of SEO spam - most typically a site that doesn't actually sell you anything, just points to other sites (often doing the same thing) while slipping you some Ads (no doubt sold as "relevant"). The other main scamsite type is one that copies part of the relevant Wikipedia entry and throws lots of Ads at you. It wasn't just me who found this - Paul Kedrosky found the same(http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/12/dishwashers_dem.html):
Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. Identify some words that show up in profitable searches -- from appliances, to mesothelioma suits, to kayak lessons -- churn out content cheaply and regularly, and you're done. On the web, no-one knows you're a content-grinder.
The result, however, is awful. Pages and pages of Google results that are just, for practical purposes, advertisements in the loose guise of articles, original or re-purposed. It hearkens back to the dark days of 1999,…
There is a lot of parroting of talking points to unpack here. First, you assume that drawing down our nuclear program is a priori bad. This is clearly not so. Consider that the greatest threat of terrorists gaining access to nuclear weapons comes from so-called looses nukes in ex-Soviet states. If eliminating some of our weapons will induce them to do the same, this would seem to lessen the chance that apocalyptic weapons will fall into the hands of people who would use them. We could eliminate 9000 nukes and still have more than enough to kill all life on the planet several times over. If the Russians and other ex-Soviet states eliminate a commensurate number of weapons, I think that'd be a good trade.
As for $3.55 trillion for 2010 - unfortunately, I think it's probably necessary. Global manufacturing and trade are falling at rates faster than any seen during the Great Depression. Debt levels are higher now than back then. Deleveraging will take quite awhile. And while some have claimed Japan's deficit spending during its lost decade failed, since growth petered out at 1%, Richard Koo of Nomura makes a fairly convincing case that this was actually a success: they averted a full-scale depression, after all. (http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/04/richard_koo_on.html)
Saying that Obama has increased marginal tax rates to the highest level since Clinton is a cheap rhetorical trick. I don't think top rates going from 36% to 39.6% represents the tipping point between…
Raising taxes does work since the tax level in this country is quite low. It has a long way to go to catch up to France, Germany, etc. If raising taxes to the level of Germany would cause such a massive outflow of capital (which could be taxed at the exit point) then why does Germany have so much capital? Wouldn't the same thing happen to Germany?
The current tax burden as a percent of GDP in the U.S. is low by U.S. standards of the last 50 years and quite low relative to other industrialized nations.
The so called fiscal problem we have is easily fixable. Raising taxes is a viable strategy.
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2011/07/tax-burdens-around-the-world.html
Mine:
Three-Toed Sloth: data, complexity, and so forth: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/
Paul Kedrosky: economics, insight, analysis and links: http://paul.kedrosky.com/
Mind Hacks: fantastic source for everything mind/psychology related: http://www.mindhacks.com/
Ran Prieur: a unique perspective, always thought provoking:
http://www.ranprieur.com/
Kevin Kelly: various cool blogs on tech, future, society, etc.: http://www.kk.org/
Daily Meh: interesting thoughts, ideas, links and photographs: http://dailymeh.tumblr.com/
There are others I could add, but thats a good start.