3 ms·

1. The Google example is only relevant in 1999, when the market was nascent. Now that you have a big, established product there is--in all likelihood--no way to

1. The Google example is only relevant in 1999, when the market was nascent. Now that you have a big, established product there is--in all likelihood--no way to create a google killer at $30k a month. If there was one at that level, it probably would have been found by now. Established markets take bigger checks... nascent markets take smaller checks. 2. I actually did get Mahalo to profitability last December. :-) Of course, the Panda Update endend that brief, beautiful moment. 3. Actually, I do mean the entire industry. Now that the internet is global, fast and ubiquitous (mobile) everything good tends to get really big, really fast. Heck, bad things get big fast (Rebecca Black's Friday comes to mind), and so do super simple things (i.e. Angry Birds). the internet is biased toward big...

dennisgorelik 15y ago
1) While Google is efficient, there is no market need to create Google killer. Even if there is such a need, the goal of startup would be to create a model that at scale would overperform Google. Such model is likely to be created at less than $30K monthly burn. For example, team of two developers in couple of years may implement and fine tune some efficient social way of ranking search results. $30K/month * 24 month = $720K. 2) Jason Calacanis empirical rule: "if startup is overfunded then as soon as profitability is achieved it would be crushed by Google." :-) 3) "The internet is biased toward big..." -- I agree. But it's "big product scale", not "big organization".
- jasonmcalacanis 15y ago
  1. The problem with this assumption is that Google is standing still--they are not. When Mahalo started doing comprehensive search in 2007 google was just 10 blue links. As we added more content to our results they did the same. We were a year ahead of them... in fact we still would be. It just wasn't enough against a scale player. 2. ha 3. agreed

dennisgorelik 15y ago

1) While Google is efficient, there is no market need to create Google killer. Even if there is such a need, the goal of startup would be to create a model that at scale would overperform Google. Such model is likely to be created at less than $30K monthly burn. For example, team of two developers in couple of years may implement and fine tune some efficient social way of ranking search results. $30K/month * 24 month = $720K. 2) Jason Calacanis empirical rule: "if startup is overfunded then as soon as profitability is achieved it would be crushed by Google." :-) 3) "The internet is biased toward big..." -- I agree. But it's "big product scale", not "big organization".

jasonmcalacanis 15y ago
1. The problem with this assumption is that Google is standing still--they are not. When Mahalo started doing comprehensive search in 2007 google was just 10 blue links. As we added more content to our results they did the same. We were a year ahead of them... in fact we still would be. It just wasn't enough against a scale player. 2. ha 3. agreed