Serenastyle Blog

Unlike CES, Macworld hardly ever has anything cutting-edge. In fact, there aren't even any concept prototypes or half-developed products — everything is on the market and for-sale (even at their booths). Think of Macworld as a gadget fair for Apple fanboys and fangirls who want another fancy case, stand, or mount (especially for iPads this year). 

However, I still find the Macworld expo inspirational, because tiny companies out there who had the same idea you had... actually acted on the idea, developed the simple product, and got it on the market (and beat everyone else to it or made it better). Product design isn't always about creating something super innovative, but solving a problem by improving a user experience.

Typing on an iPhone with gloves on is nearly impossible, so FreeHands developed gloves for gadget users. Reading e-books in the tub or taking pictures at the beach can be dangerous (for the electronic devices), so Dry Case developed the waterproof vacuum pouch. Even something as simple as turning your iMac can be difficult (considering how heavy the 27" ones are), so Rain Design came up with the turntable stand. Want something simpler? How about the Pad Bracket? Yeah you could've made that... but you didn't.

As for my two favorite products? I loved the iPad joystick dubbed the "fling" by Ten One Design and the pocket laser projector (for my iPhone) by MicroVision. So useful, so portable, so smart!

Due to Groupon turning down Google's $6 billion dollar offer on Friday, the internet's been going crazy with speculation, anxiety, fear... confusion. Someone on Twitter said that "Groupon turning down the money is a big red flag for irrational decision making". Another joked, "Suicides will be rampant when the bubble bursts." Uhh... I suppose when Twitter is "only" valued at $4 billion, turning down $6 billion sounds irrationally selfish, but in Groupon's defense, the company actually makes money — not just positive margins — two billion dollars in revenue each year (if TC's sources are correct). Suddenly, $6 billion doesn't sound like such a deal for Groupon (considering how much Google would benefit), and if I were running Groupon, I wouldn't want to lose control of my precious baby and let a giant corporation take over either.

Now with that said, I sort of have to agree with this New York Times article:

The chief evidence, according to industry experts and analysts, is the way venture capitalists and established companies are clamoring to give money to young companies, including those with only a shred of an idea. They are piling into me-too start-ups that imitate popular Web companies that already received financing. Companies that involve social shopping, mobile photo sharing and new social networking are finding it easy to attract investors because no one wants to miss the next big thing.

Okay, so no one wants to miss the next big thing, but do people even try out the services that they're throwing cash at to see if they even have the potential to become significant?! I installed Path on my phone the day it came out, and I haven't used it since. (Neither have my friends.) They got a $2.5 million dollar check anyway. Formspring was cool for like, three days (before Tumblr came out with Ask), and now my friends have all forgotten about it... but they still managed to raise $10 million in Series B. Seriously?! If that weren't outrageous enough, RWW just included ChatRoulette and Diaspora — one inappropriate, another non-existent — on their Top 10 Startups of 2010. I mean if you're going to be ridiculous (and don't seem to be expecting much in return), why not throw some money into say, sustainable architecture and make that a meaningful fad?

Jeff Clavier, managing partner at SoftTech VC and a well-known Silicon Valley angel investor who has financed companies like Mint and Ustream, said that over the next 12 to 18 months the real challenge for start-ups flush with venture cash would be proving they were worth the investment or risk having to fold their companies.

Other than that, I think my friends (and friends of friends) are creating some pretty neat stuff like PiCloud, SpeakerText, and BuzzLabs — so the tech fervor (bubble or not) is still a nice incubator.

1. There are more internet users in China than in the US despite the Great Firewall?

2. China's 3G mobile market is growing at 941%?!

3. Facebook isn't the largest social network?!?!

You know what this feels like? This feels like that one time in 2008 when I was in the Lafayette department store (in Paris) and a loud and abnoxious Chinese tour group passed by with each tourist carrying six Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Gucci, Prada shopping bags on each arm... and everyone stared in total silence.

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As soon as news broke last week that Google was acquiring Slide, I decided to reread Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good — from start to finish this time. Why? Because the book talks about Max Levchin, PayPal (that was luck?), and Slide (now he's good?) in detail. Let's start with Max:

• Since nearly drowning in the Black Sea at age nine, Max has been deathly afraid of water. He hates admitting this about himself since it's a sign of weakness, so in 2006, he decided to compete in the Alcatraz Triathlon to overcome his fear. 
• Before Max was a Silicon Valley sensation, he was a skinny Ukrainian immigrant dumpster diving through the streets of Chicago. By the time he made it to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he wanted to drop out and move West. His mom, who snuck a clunky IBM minicomputer out of the classified Soviet lab she worked in every weekend to satisfy Max's coding addiction, did not give him that option.
• If you're wondering where his survival instincts came from, his family escaped Kiev and the Chernobyl disaster. Right before the Levchins were hopping on a train on an acid rainy day, news of the meltdown had gotten out and Soviet guards blocked their path. Max's right foot kept setting off the Geiger counter so a guard said, "Right leg bone marrow contamination. Maybe we have to amputate." Thankfully, Max's mom told him to take off his shoes and the culprit was a rose thorn lodged in the sole.

So it probably comes as no surprise that right after he graduated in 1998, Max rented a yellow truck and drove from Illinois to California to crash in his friend's Palo Alto apartment and start afresh. 

One last story (for the sake of storytelling): Fall 2007, Max finally decided to propose to his long-time girlfriend. He spent weeks learning all about diamonds (cut, color, clarity, inclusions) then graphed the beauty of the diamond against the cost and discovered at what point the beauty only increases linearly while costs go up exponentially (the point at which he should buy). He found three diamonds in the world that fit this criteria, had them brought to him in armored cars under heavy security, then examined each (knowing full well that they were scientifically all the same) — so he picked the one that weighed 3.14 carats.

Next up, PayPal:

• Max teamed up with a stanford graduate named Peter Thiel to start Confinity, a Palm Pilot payments company. Confinity turned into PayPal in 1999 then merged with Elon Musk's X.com in 2000. PayPal miraculously survived the stock market collapse of 2000 and the terrorist attacks in September 2001, then went public at the end of that crazy month. A year later, PayPal sold to eBay.
• While that may seem like incredible luck in an incredibly short time frame, PayPal wasn't easy. While PayPal depended heavily on eBay (before it was eBay's), eBay bought a rival payment system called Billpoint. Since Visa was also unhappy with PayPal's success, Visa partnered up with Billpoint as well. Not only did Max have to deal with immense competition, he also had to deal with fraud. At one point, Russian mobsters used PayPal to steal credit card numbers and launder money (which nearly eroded customer confidence). To combat fraud, he co-created the Gausebeck-Levchin test, the precursor to CAPTCHA. 
• PayPal continued to grow even after eBay bought it, ringing up $38 billion in online payments and bringing in revenues of $1.4 billion for eBay's 2006 fiscal year, a growth of 37 percent over 2005 (Lacy, 29).

Obviously, there was something about PayPal that wasn't just luck, considering all the companies that have been started by former PayPal dudes: YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, The Founder's Fund (which first funded Slide)... here are a few more. PayPal simply had very strong beliefs in the type of culture that would fuel an entreprenuerial enterprise. Thanks to that cultural spirit, PayPal survived the bubble burst, so ex-PayPal peeps weren't disillusioned, depressed folks doubting the next bright idea. If anything, PayPal was solid and Slide was luck:

• When news was out that Google acquired Slide, I said to myself, "What does Slide do again?!" Slide started out making slideshow widgets for MySpace. Just as PayPal depended too heavily on eBay, Slide depended too heavily on MySpace. With fierce competition from RockYou, Slide branched out to make widgets and games for Facebook, Bebo, hi5, and more. Ever see the top friends widget on Facebook? That's Slide's. Ever been thrown a sheep and superpoked? Blame Slide.
• At one point, Slide was pretty hot and investors were fighting one another to fund the company. However, Max's pitch then was that he would get millions of widgets and downloads on people's desktops, pushing web content onto them then selling ads on the desktop. Well, what happened? Slide came out with the downloadable desktop service that would organize your pictures... and no one wanted to download it. People no longer needed information on their desktop, they lived on the web (I use Gmail, not a mail client) — thus the shift towards web-based widgets.

Considering how much funding Slide has gotten in the past, I can't help but think that people are investing in Max because he's PayPal Max... and everyone wants in on his connections (like Peter Thiel and Facebook). Word on the street is that Google's trying to build its own social gaming platform. If that's the case, why would they pay $182 million for games like SPP Ranch and SuperPoke?! Please enlighten me.

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Shifting away from Max Levchin, Sarah Lacy writes, "Flickr came up with a new collaborative way to share photos, del.icio.us came up with tagging and bookmarking, and Blogger and LiveJournal were pioneers of blogging. Each of them sold for $40 million or less. Flickr and del.icio.us went to Yahoo!, Blogger to Google, and LiveJournal to Six Apart. Had these companies held out, they could have easily had been worth far more."

This book came out in May 2008, which wasn't that long ago... but a lot of the hype in the book is no longer credible. If LiveJournal had held out, who would have bought the outdated company? As soon as Wordpress took the blogging world by storm, Six Apart's Moveable Type started to lose traction. Lacy also praises Digg's founder, Kevin Rose, who once received lucrative offers from Rupert Murdoch and Al Gore. Now Digg is struggling to stay afloat with its new Twitter-like makeover. There's even a brief mention of Rose's "new, fun, and nimble" venture, Pownce — which got bought out by Six Apart and no longer exists in Web 2.0.

For now, if it's not cloud computing, social gaming, or location-based services... then thrice you're lucky?

A while back, my fashion-savvy friend, Daisy, told me about a new fashion startup called Polyvore. It wasn't until recently that I started creating sets after my mom had commented on my "lack of fashion, even as a designer". (In my defense, 21yo designers are poor. Against my defense, I've managed to come up with some pretty neat outfits even with Mango and Forever 21 steals.)

A few facts about Polyvore:

• Started by three ex-Yahoo dudes (and now +1 more) 
• Now led by former Google exec. (yes! a woman!)
• Boasts of 6 million uniques, 140 million pageviews/month; 30,000 new sets/day (as of February, 2010; Quantcast is still telling me 6M)

1. I would die to work here considering that it's on Castro St. in Mountain View

2. Is Polyvore making money as a CSE (think Pronto, ShopWiki) or are they still living off of Series B?