Explosion of Facebook in Turkey

Someone told me the same thing in Israel. Almost overnight there was a Facebook explosion and everyone they knew was on Facebook. I think it just happened in Turkey too. I started finding all my old high school friends. They appeared and spread like a very efficient virus. I will probably soon have almost all in my class as friends. My college class is slower to adopt.

Cool!

I am not yet into all the other gimmicks like the wall etc. but I started to really like it.

(via This and That by Santo Politi)

Microsoft Considering a Stake in Facebook and David Sze

I am sure you have read that the new price tag for Facebook may be as high as $13B. The New York Times start their story with a comment on Mark Zuckerberg:

Microsoft Is Said to Consider a Stake in Facebook - New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 24 — Some people laughed at Mark E. Zuckerberg when he reportedly turned down a $900 million offer last year for Facebook, the social networking Web site he founded three and a half years ago….

I personally think the real genious here is David Sze from Greylock Partners. I know at least here in the east coast, when Greylock did the facebook deal at a reported $525M pre-money valuation a lot of people were snickering. I am not sure how it was in the west coast but here is Valleywag’s not so flattering coverage.

It is not over yet by any means but at the reported $13B valuation, if this were an exit, that $25M round of financing would return a whopping 23.6X on the investment. Greylock’s investment - $10M or $15M (I don’t know the exact amount) - would be worth anywhere from $230M to $340M - more money than most venture firms see come back from a single investment in their whole existense. This is still by far less than Accel may make in the end but the timing of David’s investment is what makes it special for me.

I suspect it was a very contraversial investment for the venerable Greylock partnership to get behind. Probably David had to do a lot of selling to get it through, not to mention that a public failure at that price could also be very career limiting. I am not sure what story the facebook team told then, but clearly the company was not what it is today when David had the conviction to invest.

I don’t know David personally but I hear he is a smart and friendly investor. I wish him all the luck to see this gutsy investment through to a succesful exit.

(via This and That by Santo Politi)

Update: First impressions on Voxant and Mochilla

Both Voxant and Mochilla are up in my blog. Exactly 12 hours after I first signed up to Mochilla, I did hear from a sales person: I received an automated e-mail with a user name and password. I spent a few hours playing with both web sites:

• Both sites are intuitive and easy to use.


• Mochilla seems to have a lot of text based content and much less video content. Voxent has an overall better offerring, much more video, better organized and up to date.


• The process of grabbing a piece of content or a list is exactly the same, painless.


• Search functions are poor - at least simple wild cards don’t work.


• In both cases the GUI flexibility sucks - as Henry Ford said for the Model-T: “You can have it any color you like, as long as it is Black”…

I still need to see if I can incorporate an XML feed into my own widgets! I have already earned $0.06 with Voxent but I only get a check if my total revenue exceeds $50 / month

Credit Crunch, Private Equity and Venture Capital

I was talking to a friend of mine a few weeks ago in NYC who runs a large endowment that is associated with a legendary wall street investor. Apparently the patriarch of the family, who in my friends tenor there has never showed up to the investment meetings, surprisingly attended the meeting that week to share his thoughts on all the happenings in the market. His comments apparently were that what’s looming may be the worst economic bust he has ever experienced in his long and illustrious career. When you hear that, you stop and take notice!

I caught up with another friend today who works for a bulge bracket investment bank and he explained what’s going on in LBO market in layman’s terms for me:

There are $400B of debt lined up for pending acquisitions by PE firms. The debt was underwritten by investment banks, i.e. they pledged to put the money in place from their balance sheets  - with all the poor covenants in all - assuming that they are going to be able to syndicate the debt post transaction.They can not!

Currently, deal by deal they are repricing the $400B. The first to go part of a $24B raise, was a $5B piece (I think Equity Office). It got priced at $0.96 on the $1.The overall consensus is that at $0.90 on the $1 will clear all the backlog. At that price, collectively all the banks that underwrote the $400B would loose $40B this year!

There are some think that it would even go lower which may put a number of banks with smaller balance sheets at risk of going under. Most LBO’d companies like Equity Office are blue chip companies, so banks in theory can keep the debt and be OK. But then they may not have the balance sheet to sustain the rest of their businesses, like trading for example.

In the mean time PE firms are laughing all the way to the bank (ironically), because they now control very large companies that are leveraged to the gills. They may have paid a bit too much but their exposure is limited to the equity they have put in place. Some of them are starting to buy the debt of their own transactions on the cheap! Bain, apparently, raised a $6B special situations fund in a few weeks time, so did Appollo and a few others to take advantage of this “special situation”.

My friend thinks the days of $10B+ LBO transactions are over for a long time, it is back to mid market buyouts for everyone.

The silver lining to all this is the IPO market, which is still wide open. I assume, all that money that got pulled out of the debt markets because of the credit crunch has to now go somewhere else and the IPO market is seemingly one of the beneficiaries. As a result there is good liquidity for venture backed companies that weathered the big storm and the subsequent draught and still managed to survive and flourish.

A venture investor that I immensly respect used to repeadetly tell me that we as investors - like every other business - need inventory. If we help build good companies that get to sustain themselves, the good times will come (i.e. the IPO market) and we’d get lot’s of exits, which is exactly what’s happening. All you need to do is be there with inventory to sell when the time is right.

The US economy looks pretty resilliant in light of everything that has happened but it’s starting to show signs of wear and tear. All that could go wrong actually did go wrong! It stareted with the mid term elections, Greenspan is gone, oil prices are at an all time high. We are in the midst of an endless war, budget deficit is worse than ever and consumer confidence is droppping precipitiously. The dollar is at all time low against the Euro and on and on. And, oh by the way, the LBO credit crunch is paled in comparison by the sub prime debt thing.

Yet the US econony is still able to borrow money to finance its deficit. China in particular and the rest of the world still continue to finance us by buying and holding US treasury bonds. I am optimistic yet I can’t seem to shake off the gloom and doom prediction.




(via This and That)

Bling for the Blog

I often enjoy blong bling more than the blog posts themselves. I love all the sidebar, badges, maps, photo streams, everything. I love them but I usually find most useless (let me know if you do too - ironically - by voting with the polldady polling widget at the end of this post). I have a few on this blog, most notably me.dium (Spark is an investor in the company and I am the BOD member, so I am biased) and MyBlogLog widget (great idea). I occasionally may click on a flickr photo stream or do a lijit search but mostly I ignore and move on.

A click here, a click there though - if a widget company has enough distribution it may add up to a profitable business after all.

That sidebar is beach front real estate but can you make it work for you instead? OK, the blog roll, tag cloud, calendar, search bar etc. all point to your old posts and theoretically increase per user views but is that enough?  My posts are boring and they will remain boring regardless how many times I point to them. As the budding media mogul that I am, I should only care about increasing my traffic.

There is a bunch of rudimentary stuff I should do to increase my traffic - like (1) posting regularly (duh), (2) having a consistent theme that appeals to a specific audience that might actually care about what I have to say (duh) - but then what?

I bring you Video News (sort of)! If you don’t like my blog posts, you can at least view what’s going on in the world.

I signed up with Voxant (a.k.a. The News Room) - you can see a bunch of news videos in 5 different categories under the Video News heading. You can select a video player with a bunch of videos or a single video and stick it anywhere in your web site. The Voxant widgets are content rich but very VERY rudimentary. I could not reformat the widget to fit my sidebar (for size, color, text only etc.) which is really what I wanted to do.

I also signed up with Mochila which looked similar but much more flexible.  I got duped into thinking that it was good for anyone but I guess I did not qualify when I entered “less than 25,000” for my web traffic in their sign up screen and got booted to a “sales representative”. I am eagerly waiting to hear from them. After my experience wtih Mochila I did not even dare sign up with Vibrant Media (similar in concept but not in content).

I tried various combinations of google keywords but it looks like those 2 companies buy up every possible related keyword. Mochila even buys the term “TheNewsRoom” and Voxan does “Mochilla”. If you know of any other free sources like the two, please let me know. 

The presentation of videos in this blog is not exactly what I had in mind but I really like the idea of bringing real syndicated content to my blog that does not route my audience away. I suspect many web sites could use these types of features much like they are incorporating social media into the mix.

if Mochila signs me on as an affiliate or if I can figure out how to use Voxant’s XML stream directly in a KickApps widget, I am going to replace all my sidebar content with real news editorialized by me. I can’t wait to see what impact that would have on my traffic.


Free Polls - Take Our Poll

(via This and That)

Experimenting with Voxent...

Here is a movie news feed…

(via This and That)

Spark PMC Team goes biking again!

We are on for our next event, the Spark PMC Team is doing its next team ride this Sunday, the Charles River Wheelman Fall Century, Soughen River Tour this Sunday, September 16 (unless of course it rains :). The ride apparently starts at Groton, goes through Pepperell and Dunstable. There are 3 options: Full Century (100 miles), metric (62 miles) and half (50 miles) century. We are planning to do the metric century. I am really looking forward to it…

(via This and That)

From the New York Times: A Surge, and Then a Stab

I am quoting this article by Paul Krugman directly from the New York Times. I am probably breaking a bunch of copyright laws here but it is a must read. If you don’t have a user name with them, I highly recommend it.

A Surge, and Then a Stab - New York Times

By PAUL KRUGMAN  Published: September 14, 2007

To understand what’s really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money, which already knows that the surge has failed.

Back in January, announcing his plan to send more troops to Iraq, President Bush declared that “America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.”

Near the top of his list was the promise that “to give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis.”

There was a reason he placed such importance on oil: oil is pretty much the only thing Iraq has going for it. Two-thirds of Iraq’s G.D.P. and almost all its government revenue come from the oil sector. Without an agreed system for sharing oil revenues, there is no Iraq, just a collection of armed gangs fighting for control of resources.

Well, the legislation Mr. Bush promised never materialized, and on Wednesday attempts to arrive at a compromise oil law collapsed.

What’s particularly revealing is the cause of the breakdown. Last month the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central government, passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site announced that the provincial government had signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.

Now here’s the thing: Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body.

Some commentators have expressed surprise at the fact that a businessman with very close ties to the White House is undermining U.S. policy. But that isn’t all that surprising, given this administration’s history. Remember, Halliburton was still signing business deals with Iran years after Mr. Bush declared Iran a member of the “axis of evil.”

No, what’s interesting about this deal is the fact that Mr. Hunt, thanks to his policy position, is presumably as well-informed about the actual state of affairs in Iraq as anyone in the business world can be. By putting his money into a deal with the Kurds, despite Baghdad’s disapproval, he’s essentially betting that the Iraqi government — which hasn’t met a single one of the major benchmarks Mr. Bush laid out in January — won’t get its act together. Indeed, he’s effectively betting against the survival of Iraq as a nation in any meaningful sense of the term.

The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, that the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia. And I suspect that most people in the Bush administration — maybe even Mr. Bush himself — know this, too.

After all, if the administration had any real hope of retrieving the situation in Iraq, officials would be making an all-out effort to get the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to start delivering on some of those benchmarks, perhaps using the threat that Congress would cut off funds otherwise. Instead, the Bushies are making excuses, minimizing Iraqi failures, moving goal posts and, in general, giving the Maliki government no incentive to do anything differently.

And for that matter, if the administration had any real intention of turning public opinion around, as opposed to merely shoring up the base enough to keep Republican members of Congress on board, it would have sent Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, to as many news media outlets as possible — not granted an exclusive appearance to Fox News on Monday night.

All in all, Mr. Bush’s actions have not been those of a leader seriously trying to win a war. They have, however, been what you’d expect from a man whose plan is to keep up appearances for the next 16 months, never mind the cost in lives and money, then shift the blame for failure onto his successor.

In fact, that’s my interpretation of something that startled many people: Mr. Bush’s decision last month, after spending years denying that the Iraq war had anything in common with Vietnam, to suddenly embrace the parallel.

Here’s how I see it: At this point, Mr. Bush is looking forward to replaying the political aftermath of Vietnam, in which the right wing eventually achieved a rewriting of history that would have made George Orwell proud, convincing millions of Americans that our soldiers had victory in their grasp but were stabbed in the back by the peaceniks back home.

What all this means is that the next president, even as he or she tries to extricate us from Iraq — and prevent the country’s breakup from turning into a regional war — will have to deal with constant sniping from the people who lied us into an unnecessary war, then lost the war they started, but will never, ever, take responsibility for their failures.

(via This and That)

Gen. Patraeus and Voice of Peace

As a young adult, I spent the summer of 1980 in Israel. Reflecting on my experiences there later, I often thought that it was a very strange place going through a particularly difficult time. This was before the first intifada, after the Camp David Accord, before the tech boom and capitalism. It was the socialist, almost communist Israel with its citizen soldiers tired of fighting. It did not take much for people to get into arguments in a bus or a ticket line. It felt like everyone lived as if it was their last day on earth. Aside for the collective instinct of survival, really no one seemed to care much about anyone or anything.

There was one beacon of hope that one heard all over the place though - at every coffee shop, restaurant, home: Voice of Peace - a radio station broadcasting from a ship off the coast of Tel Aviv founded by a crazy peace activist  Abie Nathan determined to change the world. It was a pop/rock music station that every hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and year in year out broadcast a promo to reminded everyone what mattered:

(voices of the Egyptian President Anwar Al Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin)

    NO MORE WAR
    NO MORE BLOOD SHED

(voice of Abie Nathan)

    PEACE IS THE WORD!
    AND THE VOICE OF PEACE IS THIS STATION 24 HOURS A DAY

It was very hard to listen to Gen. Patraeus’ testimony and I felt very sad while I was laughing at John Stewart’s take. We desperately need the kind of moral leadership and clarity of thought Voice of Peace provided while still at sea, unfortunately instead we have deafening silence.



PS. You can listen to Voice of Peace tribute programs from Radius 100 - promos and everything. (via This and That)