J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement
All these commencement speaches… They make me miss my friends. Here’s to you!
February 04, 2010 Comments
pheelmore's tumblr.
About
VC guy from Cologne, Germany.I love DIY, photos, books, food and things that make you feel well, like new sneakers.
This blog contains pics, reblogs, quotes, links and me. It is mostly a snapshot of little things making my day, ranging from the private to the ultimately professional.
My serious site is here
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“When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn’t like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. So if you wanted to enter a number into a spreadsheet or correct a word in an e-mail message, you had to write it in a special pop-up box, which then transferred the information to Office.”
—
Op-Ed Contributor - Microsoft’s Creative Destruction - NYTimes.com
Oh come on.
February 04, 2010 Comments
Photographs of Die Antwoord by Sean Metelrkamp. If you haven’t seen their “interweb”site, you’re missing out. Metelrkamp had this to say about the shoot:
Main dude is Ninja and his girl Yo-landi Visser.
They make zef rap rave tunes.
He kept saying ‘they is going worldwide’ and ‘Die fokken Antwoord are gonna blow’.
I just took the pictures.
He brought some friends along.
Ninja is like a commander. He knows what he wants and has a clear vision.Was good to work with.
Told me that soon they will be having the biggest rap rave jol in the world. Something about a pyramid of light. I don’t know.
He believes that with my photos and their songs, using the ‘interweb’, they are ‘gonna go worldwide’ and become ‘super famous.’
I believe it.
I will work with them again.
I am 100% certain that these guys will blow up.
I’m gonna plug my man Douster again here, as this plays well into his direction. Looking forward to a first remix.
Reblogged from Joe Martinez Photography.
February 04, 2010 Comments
inspirationehrensache: Bape x Rimowa Spring 2010 Suitcases
Holy moly. Please, someone get this for my birthday!
Reblogged from Inspiration Ehrensache.
February 04, 2010 Comments
david-noel: via backtothefuture
A smart graphical representation of the best movie of all times. Also, check out the bttf tumblr!
Reblogged from David Noël.
February 04, 2010 Comments
“So, after nearly a year in the Open Data trenches, I have some advice for those starting or involved in open data projects. First, figure out what you want the world to look like and why. It might be a lack of corruption, it might be a better society for citizens, it might be economic gain. Whatever your goal, you’ll be better able to decide what to work on and learn from your experiences if you know what you’re trying to accomplish. Second, build your project around users. In my time working with the politicians and civil servants, I’ve realised that success breeds success: the best way to convince them to open data is to show an open data project that’s useful to real people. Not a catalogue or similar tool aimed at insiders, but something that’s making citizens, voters, constituents happy. Then they’ll get it.”
— Rethinking Open Data - O’Reilly Radar
February 03, 2010 Comments
Take Advantage of Expensive Paper
We’ve recently seen a number of deals where founders/employees and in some cases early investors have taken money off the table in high priced late stage rounds. Yelp - Elevation , Zynga - DST & Facebook - DST are the highest profile recent examples.
These are great deals for the industry, as they provide liquidity and/or growth capital at very attractive equity prices for companies not quite ready for the public markets (for many valid potential reasons). We need more of this kind of liquidity in the marketplace.
Another very powerful way to take advantage of expensive equity is through acquisitions. The best time for a company to do deals is when they benefit from high priced stock.
This is effectively the opposite of taking money off the table — it’s increasing the capitalization base of a company by issuing new shares to targets that hopefully add more value to the overall enterprise than the equity given up for them.
The theory is that if you get a fair price for the assets you purchase and the value of your stock is fully priced by the market, the acquisition should be accretive and you should gain value.
Determining whether an acquisition is accretive or not is very tough to do when you’re dealing with companies that have little to no earnings. But these deals can be very strategically accretive, especially when a larger company is acquiring a much smaller one.
A great example of this is the Google - YouTube deal.
Even though the YouTube deal looked incredibly expensive at first blush, Google got enough lift in their share price on the day of the deal announcement to entirely cover the cost of the acquisition. This was the market applauding Google’s ability to use high priced stock to acquire a strategic asset by pushing that stock even higher.
Now there is always debate as to whether acquisitions are a good thing for companies or whether they are distracting, especially for earlier stage businesses without the ability to effectively integrate (hard for any company, let alone a young one).
My answer — like everything else, it depends on many factors. But if done correctly, an acquisition strategy can be very powerful.
So what kind of deals should companies do?
The most interesting potential targets are those that provide a boost to R&D and/or HR, by bringing in great technology and/or great people to the organization. Secondly are businesses that collapse the value chain, by either adding monetization capabilities to a business with a lot of user traction or adding a direct relationship with users (businesses or consumers) for companies with a proven monetization platform.
In terms of size, my general take is that businesses should look for smaller (~10% of total capitalization or less) strategic acquisitions. Otherwise, things tend to get very messy with shareholder interests and governance on both sides. Bigger deals are certainly doable, but need to be very strategic and are usually much more complicated.
We’ve seen Google being a very aggressive acquirer as a public company. Twitter and Zynga have done a handful of smart strategic acquisitions in the private markets. We’ve even seen Apple enter the fray recently, something we have not seen from them before.
I expect to see a bunch more of this.
Reblogged from mokoyfman.com.
February 02, 2010 Comments
