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Troubled Startup Color Loses Cofounder Peter Pham
- mindcrime 15y agoI would love a chance to see the Color founders doing office hours with pg! Or even just pgbot. I can see it now: Color guy: We're building an app that lets you share photos with your mobile phone, with people within 100 feet of you, but it uses your social graph to make sure you see stuff you're interested in. pgbot: WTF? Color guy: I mean, it lets you share pictures that you just took, and people within 100 feet of you will see that you just shared a picture. pgbot: What problem does this solve? If they're 100 feet away, wouldn't they have seen the same thing you saw, or even taken the same picture anyway? Color guy: You don't get it, it's mobile... pictures and mobile, together. Like peanut butter and chocolate. pgbot: Who wants this? Color guy: Well, erm, I mean, erm, that is, aaahhh... um, you know... like, um, aaaghh... well... uhhrrmmmm... college kids. And hipsters. And hipster college kids. pgbot: You mean the two classes of people least likely to either A. have money, or b. spend money, unless it's on cheap beer, crappy clothes, or Apple hardware? Color guy: But, but... pgbot: Who's going to pay for this? Color guy: Aaaah, well, you see... aaah... umm.... pgbot: I worry, I worry...
- Peaker 15y agoI find strawmen to be tasteless and unimaginative. I am not sure their idea has merit, but I would like to hear the supposed merit from their mouths.
- mindcrime 15y agoI would too, and hopefully they'll post in this thread. In the meantime, or if they don't, I find it rather amusing to imagine how an interaction with the Color guy and pgbot would go. YMMV.
- Peaker 15y agoI don't see why you think that's how an interaction would go. Do you assume you have them all figured out, and they have nothing new to tell you that you haven't thought of?
- mindcrime 15y agoOf course not. I think you're taking this way too seriously. It was an imagination of how an interaction might go, with a dash of hyperbole mixed in, designed to both amuse, and make reference to pg's flair for directing people to focus on those important, fundamental questions like "Who needs this" and "what problem does this solve?" Color may yet turn out to be wildly successful, I don't know... I'm no fortune teller. <shrug />
- freshfunk 15y agoI'm with you. $41MM or no, Pham is still an entrepreneur trying to build something he believes in. In that sense, he's no different than many here. It sucks to leave something you tried so hard at, something you believed in. Some ideas work out, most don't.
- jamesaguilar 15y agoIf they had something new to tell us, you'd hope they'd have done it by now via the product. Time's 'a wastin'.
- RyanMcGreal 15y agosatire != strawman.
- ajross 15y agoWell... no. I'd say satire is strawman expressed as art.
- sawyer 15y agoSequoia should definitely hire pgbot to keep them from making blunders like this.
- mindcrime 15y agoAll joking aside, imagine if pg did try and build a real expert system combined with a chat-bot style interface, that could represent his expertise. He could probably sell access to something like that for a few bucks.
- phlux 15y agoWho wants this?
- mgkimsal 15y agoum, you know... like, um, aaaghh... well... uhhrrmmmm... college kids. And hipsters. And hipster college kids.
- nostrademons 15y agoDidn't the AI winter teach us that rules-based expert systems can only get you so far? I can just see pgbot turning down Google because its founders were too weakly committed - they wanted to sell the whole thing for <$1M and go back to their grad studies.
- true_religion 15y agoI'm going to go out on a limb here and say that no one could have predicted the success of Google simply by looking at the founders and what they had at the time. It was their 2nd invention---highly relevant advertisement that made them an explosively profitable company.
- nostrademons 15y agoBut some people did - Andy Bechtolsheim, David Sheriton, Ram Shriram, Ron Conway, Sequoia & KPCB. And given their track record on other investments, I don't think this was due to pure chance. I'd posit that people like the investors mentioned above have a highly intuitive "pattern matching" system for finding promising startups. The lack of any one quality won't disqualify a startup; rather, they can unconsciously evaluate the whole startup as a package and decide whether it's likely to be a winner. Hence, the win of probabilistic AI systems over rule-based ones.
- felipemnoa 15y agoSorry for the ignorance but could you please explain what is pgbot? I searched in google but could not find a reasonable explanation.
- mindcrime 15y agohttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598026 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598026
- felipemnoa 15y agoHilarious, thanks! Sounds like an interesting project to do just for kicks.
- gacba 15y agopg = Paul Graham, pgbot = Paul Graham AI program that would answer like he would in a YC interview
- felipemnoa 15y agoThanks! I imagined it was something like that but I wasn't sure.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- abbasmehdi 15y agoI see the value prop though. At parties, weddings, events etc, where you'd likely be in a picture, you'd wanna see what everyone else shot. Haven't you been to a party where everybody took pics and you couldn't wait till they uploaded the pics on FB or something to see what they shot?
- nradov 15y agoNo I've never felt like that at a party. What's the point of being at the party if you're going to spend half the time with your smart phone in front of your face looking at pictures someone took 10ft away? It just seems completely lame and pointless.
- roel_v 15y agoTo be honest though, it seems that young people are doing just that. (I'm 31 so an old geezer and I don't know wtf these crazy kids nowadays all do exactly, it's just that when I walk back from my office to home through the bar area in my city, I see many people frolicking about with their phones, taking pictures and doing things with it that suggest it's more than just sms'ing. Also I sometimes see small groups of people standing together, each of them doing things on their phones. It's surreal to me, but if that's how they use their phones...)
- mindcrime 15y agoHonestly, I'm not a very photo oriented person, and I despise having my picture taken (I'm always blinking, or have one eye half open or am making a stupid face, or something right when the shutter clicks)... so it's not something that I personally would get much out of. That said, I think you're right... for some people it does have value. Whether or not it has enough value, and an accompanying business model, to build a successful business, is TBD.
- abbasmehdi 15y agoI think people are mistakenly equating "poor exection" with "bad idea". And come on, your pictures don't come out THAT bad: http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20071126170543/uncyclopedia/images/8/83/Frank_caliendo_weird_face.jpg http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20071126170543/uncyclo...
- byrneseyeview 15y agoIt's a safe bet that if you can't articulate the position you're arguing against, you don't understand it well. That could mean it's such a crazily dumb idea that you would never have thought of it, but it could also mean that they're much smarter than you. For what it's worth, I have no idea what their plan is, either.
- tygorius 15y agoHere's the thing, if you have no idea what their plan is, is it your fault for not understanding it or their fault for not articulating it well? I submit the pgbot scenario provides a third alternative: people can't understand their plan because it makes no freaking business sense. And whatever that original plan was, I'd bet the pitch didn't include a PowerPoint slide point along the lines of "Two months after we go public, the president leaves and sales really take off!"
- joshbert 15y agoI can't possibly be the only one that read your text in a pitch perfect Paul Graham voice, can I?
- glassx 15y agoThis fictional talk reminds me of Joey Spolsky's article on "architecture astronauts", people trying to solve a non-existant problem for pure geek pleasure. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html I admit it must be one of the coolest app to work on these days: it has geotagging, social graphs, it's mobile, but it's hard to see a real use, yes.
- angrycoder 15y agoI am reminded of the late George Carlin... "Can anyone explain to me the need for one-hour photo finishing? You just saw the fuckin' thing!"
- daimyoyo 15y agoColor will burn through it's funding and declare bankruptcy in 24 months or less. Anyone want the under?
- damoncali 15y agoI find it hard to believe that anyone will lend them money in the next 24 months, so I'll take the over. Seriously though, how is one expected to deploy that much cash so quickly with something so new and experimental? I can't help but feel there's more to the story.
- swivelmaster 15y agoThe only reasonable explanation I can come up with is that they were going to go the service -> API -> platform -> advertiser platform -> data mining -> $$$ route. Or something like that.
- Animus7 15y agoI don't know. Burning $40 million for a new venture takes a special kind of ignorance and incompetence when you're surrounded by shaking heads from all corners. Sequoia believed in them. Maybe they haven't opened the bag of tricks yet. It's too early to write them off.
- phlux 15y agoIn 1999 that was normal
- dasil003 15y agoSure, but how much did a GB of RAM, a GB of bandwidth, a Ghz of CPU, and the code to run a basic service on it cost?
- drewda 15y agoAll those dollars aren't for equipment or even for salaries, they're likely for marketing/advertising in order to do a big rollout in the already crowded world of mobile social networks.
- trotsky 15y agoIs it just me or does Arrington sound like he got snubbed by color somehow? Did they not show the proper respect through the usual startup TC story begging or deny him an investment opportunity? I know a lot of the community is unimpressed with color and I'm certainly not some big fan, but to me he sounds as petty and bitter as when they run the "yet another yahoo fuck up" gloating stories.
- joshuahays 15y agoAgreed. In fact, he's seemed a bit negatively opinionated lately in general.
- dasil003 15y agoHe's probably bored as hell, just waiting for the day when he can cash out the last pile of chips and do something else.
- phlux 15y agoWhat else could he possibly do? He is the kevin rose of tech blogging. A one trick pony. He is the non-technical co-founder nobody wants or needs.
- dasil003 15y agoWhy so disparaging? He's more successful than most silicon valley engineers ever will be, he can do whatever the hell he wants. Go raise emus or whatever strikes his fancy.
- arctangent 15y agoMaybe he has just been around long enough to realise theft when he sees it... (Yes, I know they didn't get the whole $41m up front.)
- DevX101 15y ago
- joshuahays 15y agoThis was expected. I like the idea of a proximity-based social network but the problem is that they didn't do a good job presenting it that way and they were overshadowed by a very negative launch to the tune of 40+ million dollars. Set up to fail from the very beginning.
- robryan 15y agoThe thing that worried me is that the founder said they didn't launch at SXSW because he wasn't a fan of conferences. It was on within a few days of launch and seems like the perfect proof of concept for it. When you have just been funded for so much who cares about your personal preference. Either that or you need some kind of exclusivity in niches to build a critical mass of users like Facebook with colleges. Google Wave was a great case for the path color has gone down not working, people getting into the app, not seeing anyone else to interact with and forgetting about. Even having a fake persona in it that you can delete, just to give people a feel for how the app works would be better than what they have now.
- j_baker 15y agoFrom the box about Peter Pham at the bottom of the article: Currently is the Co-Founder and President of Color. I understand it can be difficult to keep these things up to date, but at least make sure it doesn't contradict the article it's posted on!
- phlux 15y agoIt's techcrunch.
- Hovertruck 15y agoColor was a nice way to relive the life and death of Cuil.
- timcederman 15y agoI noticed today Color have removed the notice on their office that they'd like fellow denizens of Palo Alto to stop by and give feedback. They've also turned off the projectors showing pictures from the app on their front windows. Very quiet at their office at the moment.
- kongqiu 15y agoMaybe this is the sort of thing Color would be good for -- monitoring what changes within a 100 foot radius of an office building, scanning faces for lawyers, accountants, M&A people, etc. This the stock market may actually pay for!
- dfield 15y agoIt's fun to bash something, but I think Color has a lot of chances left. They have a rockstar team and the money to support themselves for several years. Their current product isn't very good, but it's a mistake to write them off or call them "troubled" this early.
- dabeeeenster 15y agoThey pulled the Android app from the market and it has not returned. Odd. It was really, really terrible, but you would have thought that it could have been fixed up by now...
- slouch 15y agoI am still wondering why there is no explanation for this. It's been a couple months since it left the market.
- teyc 15y agoThe problem is not necessarily because Color didn't get traction. Entrepreneurs have a great deal of patience and will try different things. My reading is that there is some kind of disagreement over direction (either with the other founder or investors), and Peter decided he had already made enough F* money from his previous venture he's going to walk.
- jijoy 15y agoWho all want to say , I told you so ?
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoI don't take any merriment in the fact that things are not going well for another entrepreneur, so I hope they turn things around. I think it's time to pivot. Get over the mode of trying to appear to hipsters who sit around the bar looking at their phones and do something that regular people will enjoy. And this time don't take shortcuts; no more deals like they did with the british paper to have a special page of Color photos from the royal wedding. Go viral this time, win it because people genuinely enjoy what you're doing.
- flocial 15y agoSome startups manage to get on Arrington's wrong side and he goes Perez Hilton on them. This startup might have gotten too much investment at the wrong time but it is built by the same type of hard-working and brilliant people that apply to Ycombinator, only they had a good track record and contacts with more traditional venture capitalists. I'd like more in depth analysis than shallow criticism because there's as much and maybe more wealth in information that could be gained from what went wrong with their plan.
- protomyth 15y agoI'll skip how half-baked and confusing their app was, and go to an implication of the idea. Color relies on having groups of people and really works best in a crowded area. Heck, it relies on two or more people using the app at the same time in an area. I can see it working great at concerts, but it seems to fail at the night out with friends and one person taking shots. It also seems that it is the opposite of Facebook for rural users. Facebook or Twitter allows people to connect over great distances and see things far away. Me taking photos on Color during my road trip seems like a huge mismatch. It just seems like it cannot be "the goto service", and that makes it vulnerable to never being used. Lastly, let's assume there was no Twitter at the time of the US Airways Flight 1549 (Hudson plane water landing) and Color was it. Would the wave of information been different? Does that matter to Color?
- aneil 15y agoArrington is clearly enjoying this.