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MARK ZUCKERBERG: Silicon Valley Is Too Focused On The Quick Score
Mark Zuckerberg gave a long Q&A at Y Combinator's Startup School yesterday. TechCrunch's Leena Rao summarized some of his points. Here's one that jumped out:
Interesting email we received today (some text X’d out, typos left in). I’ve done a search and other blogs have written about this company today. I really hope they didn’t do what I think they might have done.
Hmmm….No.
If size matter, then TechCrunch Disrupt [TC Disrupt] wins the prize. With 2600 attendees, it is arguably the largest US-based tech industry conference. With 200 companies exhibiting–often for just one of three days–it often took on the characteristics of a trade show. I just love the promise and excitement in young start-ups exploding with grand visions. While many of these visions will turn out to have been hallucinations, but others will be real and will disrupt something large and institutional who will disdain them until it is too late. For companies showing the ability to disrupt this was just about the best show I’ve attended in more than 25 years in the tech industry.
Techcrunch Disrupt–The controversy & the event — Global Neighbourhoods
The price to be in SF
The price to in SF... for Prezy by Mar 11
The Problem With Silicon Valley Is Itself - TNW Entrepreneur
As a Brit who gave up cheerleading the European tech scene to make the pilgrimage to Silicon Valley to live, eat and breath the world’s leading hub for technology startup innovation, I’ve been largely unimpressed and disappointed by the quality of startups here. Living in San Francisco since January, I’ve interviewed around two hundred startups and there’s only two, out of two hundred, I think are game changers. Now, don’t get me wrong, Silicon Valley is an incredibly inspiring place to be. Everyone is doing something amazing and trying to change the world, but in reality much of the technology being built here is not changing the world at all, it’s short-sighted and designed for scalability, big exits and big profits.Leaving Silicon Valley... - SVW
I just got back from a week in London, speaking at an Omnicom conference and then a week in Warsaw (which was excellent). And I'm finding it difficult to get back into the swing of things. The problem is that every time I leave Silicon Valley for a decent length of time, I wake up and realize that there's a whole huge world out there that doesn't care a jot about the things that we care about here, such as: There's a huge universe outside of Silicon Valley that has many other questions on its mind and that's because people lead normal lives. And that's good to know.
This post is part of our ReadWriteStart channel, which is dedicated to helping savvy entrepreneurs start and grow new businesses with resources, tips, insight and analysis. The channel is sponsored by TriNet .
Startup Visa Introduced: Is it a No-Brainer? - ReadWriteStart
A lot of things about Facebook have been impressive, even by the Silicon Valley standards. Almost no other Valley company has reached so many people around the world so quickly. Few Valley companies have been considered important forces in causes as disparate as planning a party or a political uprising.
Inside the DNA of the Facebook Mafia
Thanks for the prompt reply. I’m afraid I can’t disclose my client yet. But all the information included in this email is publicly available. Any interest in pursuing this? I wanted to gauge your interest in authoring an op-ed this week for a top-tier media outlet on an important issue that I know you’re following closely.
from Mercurio, John <John.Mercurio> to Christopher Soghoian <chris@sogho - Pastebin.com
Facebook secretly hired a PR firm to plant negative stories about Google, says Dan Lyons in a jaw dropping story at the Daily Beast. For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Valley. Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post. The plot backfired when the blogger turned down Burson’s offer and posted the emails that Burson had sent him.
Facebook Loses Much Face In Secret Smear On Google
At this point, I think it’s pretty clear what Facebook’s strategy for this whole Burson-Marsteller caught-with-their-pants-down situation is going to be: say as little as possible and move on. And it will work. Like it or not, Facebook is too integrated into the fabric of the web now for everyone to just walk away.
Facebook, You’re Going To Need A Better Answer For Your Slimeball Stunt
While writing my previous pos t and looking over comments from earlier today on other posts, I started thinking about bias. For just about every story we write, it seems someone always has either a comment or an email for us ranging from suggestions that we should also write about such and such company that is a competitor to the one we wrote about, to outrage that we didn’t mention the other said company. So why don’t we? Well, for starters, it would be impossible to cover every company and each of their competitors, and give them each the same treatment. Not only are there not enough writers to do this for TechCrunch, if you put all the blogs together, there still would not be nearly enough.
Are We Kingmakers Or Prognosticators?
In doing so, they signed on with Silicon Valley’s moneyed elite to be part of CrunchFund, the new enterprise run by the famously influential and blustering Mr. Arrington. The coverage of technology has spawned many innovations in the news business, but now it seems to be the source of a particularly problematic one. At this point, it seems that AOL executives would open up a lemonade stand in front of their headquarters if they thought it would help their bottom line. But the idea of a news site that covers every aspect of nascent tech companies sharing a brand name and founder with a venture capital firm financing these same companies seems almost comically over the line. “TechCrunch is a different property and they have different standards,” Tim Armstrong, AOL’s chief executive, said Thursday afternoon when CrunchFund was announced.
Michael Arrington’s Audacious Venture - NYTimes.com
AOL: You've got a big, ugly mess on your hands. And it keeps getting bigger and uglier. A TechCrunch writer has called out AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong over his handling of Michael Arrington's new venture firm, the CrunchFund. And he did it in a blog post on TechCrunch's website, which is owned and operated by AOL. But one person is talking. In a profanity-laden post titled "The CrunchFund: Actually, Tim, We Don't All Have 'Different' Standards," Paul Carr says he's more than a little upset that Armstrong told the New York Times that TechCrunch has different journalistic standards than the rest of AOL's media properties.
TechCrunch writer takes on AOL chief Tim Armstrong - latimes.com
Michael Arrington Browbeats Entrepreneurs At Ron Conway's CEO Summit
The message, according to this source, was: "We'll make you look good. All I ask in return is that you call us first when you do any corporate development.'" "[Arrington] said that he liked them because they launched at his conference, and had written dozens of puff pieces on them, with the expectation that they would give him first tip on any important news. He actually said, 'Do you think anybody cares about whether you change your font? Well, we wrote it anyway.' He read out a long list of dates on which they had written about Groupme.How To Not Be A Douchebag At SXSW
photo by Scott BealeHow I Tweet : The World :: American Express OPEN Forum
Great interview ! Guy's twitter account is definitely a media by itself. I didn't even know there were ghosts on twitter :) by Mar 4