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THINK / Musings

occasional thoughts by john borthwick

Excerpts from a note to the betaworks companies last week. Some other charts, and some color added.

“By now you have all read the stories from the media and venture capital world about how larger macroeconomic issues will affect the start up world.

Last week, was one shitty week. That said a downturn has been evident for a while here in NY — and most of you have already started to make adjustments to your plan, we first talked about a downturn at the brown bag in February. But two things did change this past week. (a) The credit crisis and the crisis of confidence in our markets got way worse (b) silicon valley woke up that something had changed. The first point is the one to focus on — the second is a distraction. So on to the first point — what changed this week? The confluence of events — from housing, to energy prices, to credit to equity markets, to global coupling to domestic panic, matched with domestic political uncertainty … have created a toxic mix for the economy — a perfect storm. You need to think about things differently, things have changed and your priorities should change. I broke up our thinking at betaworks into two blocks, the first is what you sho

bit.ly v2August 29

We just pushed out the new bit.ly bookmarklet. You can still go to bit.ly and shorten your URL’s and get all the information about the URL — but we have also made all of this functionality available without you having to leave the page you are interested in.

#1. Go to bit.ly and drag the link circled below into you browser toolbar.

#2. When you are on a page, click the bit.ly link in your browser and automagically a tile comes up that shortens the URL, lets you send it to someone (email or twitter) and see information or conversations about that page.

#3. There is no third step. See the screen shot below of a post on AVC — with bit.ly showing information about where Fred’s post got shared and how often.

Summize acquired by TwitterJuly 15

As announced this am, Twitter is acquiring 100% of Summize. Deals between two private companies are easy to consider and hard to close. In this case we had both companies on a tear and the teams on both sides who were interested in a partnership — the hope here is that what makes sense today only makes more sense down the road. Search on twitter will evolve into more than search — this is starting to happen today (more below), but bringing these teams together will only accelerate the pace of that evolution. The deal started with a conversation with Fred Wilson about how conversational search can evolve into navigation, about how important navigation becomes for UGC as you go mainstream — it concluded with the deal that was announced this morning. Betaworks is now a twitter shareholder, and excited to be one.

Finding a pain point
The history of most startup’s is made up of iterations, learning and restarts — Summize was no exception. The Summize team worked hard for a little over a year developing sentiment

Summize growthJuly 13

Summize organic traffic growth, week over week. Its astounding to see the Summize business grow from 0 to 7M queries a week in over the space of two months – the hump is the week of WWDC. Testament to what a great product and UI can achieve in no time at all. This past week with the launch of bit.ly I spent much of my time on Twitter, Summize, Friend Feed and a handful of other services. Google is playing nxt to no part in the now-web that is emerging out of this ecosystem. More on that to come, for now some pictures — Summize traffic and a wonderful fireworks display from this evening in Shelter Island.

web 2.0 & making moneyMay 27

Article in today's financial times about Web 2.0 companies making, and not, making money. I think the article is right and we are likely heading for some consolidation — but the article misses the most interesting points about why and how that consolidation will take place. Its a fairly typical turn of the tide article — replete with a bonus quotation from someone who just raised a lot of money. Moving on from the drama of MSM — start with why there will be consolidation of some form.

The web 1.0 companies who survived and prospered did so mostly on the back of Google – its distribution and its monetization platform. The fact that many web 2.0 companies have yet to turn a profit is an indication that (a) Google's platform is still not optimized for this generation of web services and that (b) Facebook, the company everyone expected to provide an alternative, has thus far failed to provide a platform to build a business. A year ago this week I drafted an essay on why I believed the Facebook platform needed to offer Web 2.0 applications more than just distribution — its a year later and the data is starting to