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I built an Airbnb ish kind of product back in the 90'ies with a friend of mine, he even wrote his thesis about it. I got the idea because some stranger on ICQ

I built an Airbnb ish kind of product back in the 90'ies with a friend of mine, he even wrote his thesis about it. I got the idea because some stranger on ICQ from Japan asked me if he and his girlfriend could live with me in Copenhagen for a couple of weeks in exchange for me being able to live with them if I ever came to Japan. The service was called IKIKI (apparently meaning visiting each other and also at the same time a palindrome) However, we ran into a lot of problems with generally getting people to trust each other. I later ended up doing design for a couple of other airbnb ish companies amongst others vacationvalley.com owned by a very young swedish entrepreneur called Martin Schaedel who unfortunately died very early in a plane accident. http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/the-internet-says-goodbye-to-a-friend-martin-schaedel http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/the-internet-says-good... So I have had my experience with the Airbnb business model and never missed that. It was a timing question not a funding question. It is not a good example as that had more to do with market adaption of social networks and mobile phones plus payment services than product innovation.

zaptheimpaler 9y ago
>that had more to do with market adaption of social networks and mobile phones plus payment services than product innovation Not parent, but this seems to be key. Many say tech will be forever as innovative as it has been in past 10-15 years, but now it seems that all of that has simply been the effect of widespread adoption of the internet & smartphones, rebuilding parts of the economy on top it, and things are reaching saturation. Until there is another major breakthrough like that at the hardware level, we will see far less growth and unicorns.
- coffeemug 9y ago
  So let's fund teams that are likely to come up with the next major breakthrough at the hardware level. "Putting finances first" is probably not the way to do it.
  - ThomPete 9y ago
    Putting finance first means making solid businesses that solve peoples problem. If you don't capitalize on the innovations happening you can't help fund the next innovation. It's not that there shouldn't be innovation done but you can't build a market only on that.
    - eldavido 9y ago
      There's a middle ground here guys. If you're talking about 2-4 million seed rounds, sure, back a great team. But when you're talking about nine-figure equity raises, you probably need a tenable financial model. Another thing: software is high-margin. A lot of dumb VC is getting thrown into low-margin reinvention of relatively old business models (food delivery, hotels, livery), evaluated through software-like metrics. Maybe finances matter in low-margin scale businesses. It's just not as important in businesses based on pure software/design/IP-driven innovation.

zaptheimpaler 9y ago

>that had more to do with market adaption of social networks and mobile phones plus payment services than product innovation Not parent, but this seems to be key. Many say tech will be forever as innovative as it has been in past 10-15 years, but now it seems that all of that has simply been the effect of widespread adoption of the internet & smartphones, rebuilding parts of the economy on top it, and things are reaching saturation. Until there is another major breakthrough like that at the hardware level, we will see far less growth and unicorns.

coffeemug 9y ago
So let's fund teams that are likely to come up with the next major breakthrough at the hardware level. "Putting finances first" is probably not the way to do it.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  Putting finance first means making solid businesses that solve peoples problem. If you don't capitalize on the innovations happening you can't help fund the next innovation. It's not that there shouldn't be innovation done but you can't build a market only on that.
  - eldavido 9y ago
    There's a middle ground here guys. If you're talking about 2-4 million seed rounds, sure, back a great team. But when you're talking about nine-figure equity raises, you probably need a tenable financial model. Another thing: software is high-margin. A lot of dumb VC is getting thrown into low-margin reinvention of relatively old business models (food delivery, hotels, livery), evaluated through software-like metrics. Maybe finances matter in low-margin scale businesses. It's just not as important in businesses based on pure software/design/IP-driven innovation.