DealHorizon - the faster, easier way to create and share business plans

In a post last week, Paul Kedrosky noted his frustration when looking for a new dishwasher using Google. I thought it might be interesting to do some forensics to see which sites rank highly and why. Paul started by querying Google with the phrase dishwasher reviews: Pretty much every link on this page has an interesting story to [...]

Google has created a multibillion-dollar economy based on keywords. We use keywords to find things and advertisers use keywords to find customers. As Michael Arrington points out, this is leading to increasing amounts of low quality, keyword-stuffed content. The end result is a very spammy internet. (It was depressing to see Tim Armstrong cite Demand Media, [...]

Skype and Joost are interesting companies to compare - they are about as close as you can get to one of those sociological studies that track identical twins who are raised separately. Skype was a spectacular success. Joost never got traction and was shut down. Both were started by Nicklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, [...]

Every system built by a single institution has points of failure that can bring the entire system down. Even in organizations that have tried hard for internal redundancy - for example, Google and Amazon have extremely distributed infrastructures - there will always be system-wide shared components, architectures, or assumptions that are flawed. The only way [...]

There is a widespread myth that the most important part of building a great company is coming up with a great idea. This myth is reflected in popular movies and books: someone invents the Post-it note or cocktail umbrellas and becomes an overnight millionaire. It is also perpetuated by experienced business people who, for the [...]

There is a certain well respected venture capital firm (VC) that has a program for fledgling entrepreneurs. The teams that are selected get a desk, a small stipend, and advice for a few months from experienced VCs. I could imagine back when I was starting my first company thinking this was a great opportunity - [...]

An obvious but surprisingly under-practiced design principle is to "embrace the medium." Applied to software, this means building applications that take advantage of the strengths of the platform instead of trying to mimic the strengths of another platform. iPhone and Wii games provide many stark abuses of this principle. Call of Duty is perhaps the single [...]

Generally speaking, there are two approaches to relating to other people in the business world. The first approach is transactional and legalistic: work is primarily an exchange of labor for money, and agreements are made via contracts. Enforcement is provided by organizations, especially the legal system. The second approach relies on trust, verbal agreements, reputation [...]

For most people I know who join or start companies, the primary goal is not to get rich - it is to work on something they love, with people they respect, and to not be beholden to the vagaries of the market- in other words, to be independent. The reality is being independent often means [...]

One of the hardest things to do as a startup is to create a new category. Bloggers and press have a natural tendency to "pigeonhole" - to group startups into cleanly delineated categories, and then do side-by-side comparisons, comment on the "horserace" between them, and so forth. At my last startup, SiteAdvisor, we were at first consistently pigeonholed [...]

Some startups become huge sensations without requiring any active marketing - YouTube, Skype, and Twitter come to mind. However, the vast majority of successful startups gained adoption through marketing: PR, SEO, partnerships, paid marketing, and so on. My strong suggestion would be to hope for the former but plan for the latter. Marketing is a huge [...]

There are two broad philosophical approaches to explaining the forces that drive world events. The first one is sometimes called the Great man theory, neatly summarized by the quote "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." This view was famously espoused by the philosopher Hegel and later Nietzche, who called such [...]

A commenter on my blog the other day (Tim Ogilvie) mentioned a distinction that I found really interesting between intent generation and intent harvesting. This distinction is critical for understanding how internet advertising works and why it is broken. It also helps explain why sites like the newspapers, blogs, and social networks are getting unfairly [...]

There is a widely held assumption that new business models will continue to emerge online - that statements like "how will Twitter ever make money?" will look as silly in 10 years as similar statements made 10 years ago about Google look now. There is no question that, if they wanted to, Twitter could make tens [...]

The alleged societal benefit of patent law is that it creates a financial incentive to innovate. The societal drawback is that it reduces competition, reduces the spread of innovation, and creates deadweight legal costs. Perhaps patents are necessary in the pharmaceutical industry. I know very little about that industry but it would seem that some sort [...]

I know a brilliant young kid who graduated from college a year ago and now works at a large investment bank. He has decided he hates Wall Street and wants to work at a tech startup (good!). He recently gave notice to his bosses, who responded by putting on a dog and pony show to [...]

I got my first computer (TRS-80 Model 1) in 1980 at the age of 8. I got my second computer - an Atari 800 - two years later. I was living in Springfield, Ohio. Very few people were interested in computers in that area then. The only people that seemed to be [...]

People usually think of business competition as occurring between substitutes - products that serve similar functions for the user. Famous substitutes include Coke and Pepsi, and Macs and PCs. In fact, especially in the technology sector, some of the most brutal competition has occurred between complements. Products are complements when they more valuable because of the existence [...]

First let me say I love Google. I think Google created one of the greatest inventions of the past century and continues to give back much more value to the world than they "capture" in revenue. Secondly, I think Google itself has almost nothing to do with the decline of newspapers. That is due to, among [...]